The Wall Street Journal on Monday published an exit interview with President Joe Biden’s outgoing ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, in which he called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to slow the extremist Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plan and trumpeted efforts to improve conditions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Nides said that the US role in Israel remains indispensable. “I think most Israelis want the United States to be in their business,” he told the Journal.
But, with the ambassador’s planned departure coming just after the Israeli military’s siege of the West Bank city of Jenin, the comments revealed something more candid about the Biden administration’s emphasis there. The focus: relatively minor economic development initiatives for Palestinians without a bigger plan, or even a stronger stance on how to protect Palestinian rights.
“No, I’m not getting a Nobel Peace Prize in the next seven days,” Nides said in the interview. “But I do think I can look back and say that I’ve done things that have made life just a little bit easier and better for the average Palestinian.” His only mention of Jenin appeared to be about a power plant he had worked on getting for the city.
The interview shows how unambitious Biden’s approach is to a conflict that previous US administrations have invested significant diplomatic capital in resolving.
Nides, who is active on social media and has a big personality in media encounters, offers a remarkable snapshot of how the Biden administration sees Israel and Palestine. As he put it, “I think the important thing for the security state of Israel is to keep things calm in the West Bank.”
Absent a political horizon for Palestinians, what Nides and the Biden administration envision is not possible. The US would need to articulate the consequences that its close partner Israel would face for the ongoing occupation, or else there will be more sieges of cities like Jenin, there…
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