An article on the “Intersept” news website described the battles between Palestinian resistance and Israel in the early hours of last Saturday within the Aqsa Storm operation as a “miserable failure” of President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy.
Journalist Murtada Hussein, in an article published on the site, explained that the American administration had been focused on expanding the “Abraham Accords” to normalize relations between Israel and Arab countries, considering that Biden had invested a significant amount of resources and political capital in this direction.
He argued that the underlying premise of these agreements, an initiative started by former President Donald Trump and led by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was an attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict simply by ignoring the Palestinians and treating them as if they had no stake in the matter.
The events of Saturday revealed that this approach of “neglecting” the Palestinian issue has now collapsed, and the expectations that Palestinians would surrender to a slow death, an assumption that Biden seemed to continue to embrace, were entirely unrealistic, according to the article.
The author referred to a statement by Yusuf Munir, a non-resident researcher at the Arab Center in Washington, who said, “If you pay attention to the public statements of all the governments in the Middle East, they have consistently emphasized the importance of addressing the Palestinian issue because it cannot be ignored.”
Munir criticized Biden’s administration, stating that it was deliberately ignoring the dire situation on the ground, perhaps more than any other American administration, describing it as “willful ignorance with extremely destructive consequences.”
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had praised the administration’s policy in the region on September 29, describing the situation as “much quieter today than it was two decades ago.” However, Munir mocked Sullivan, pointing out that the “ignorance and arrogance” that led him to make such a statement were shocking.
The article also noted that while there were warnings that the situation in Gaza was a ticking time bomb, the people of Gaza had been suffering under a constant blockade for over a decade and a half, with no glimmer of hope for a diplomatic solution or a path to resolution. This despair had been accumulating for years leading up to the “Aqsa Storm” war.
Hussein continued to say that the United States chose to remain on the sidelines, while an alternative diplomatic process was proposed but failed to materialize.
He revealed that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had sent a message in Hebrew to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018, in which he asked him to take a “calculated risk” by agreeing to a long-term ceasefire. This ceasefire would have stopped rocket launches from Gaza into Israel, in exchange for rebuilding the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure. However, Netanyahu rejected the idea, and Washington did not exert any significant pressure on him.
In conclusion, the Aqsa Storm operation has exposed the failure of Biden’s Middle East policy, which was overly focused on normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries and neglected the pressing issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This failure highlights the need for a more comprehensive and balanced approach to achieve lasting peace and stability in the region.
