Foreign Policy: Under the Biden administration, there is hope for Palestinian-Israeli peace
The American Foreign Policy magazine published an article whose author believes that the US Congress’s approval of a spending bill aimed at strengthening the Palestinian economy and supporting peace and reconciliation programs between Palestinians and Israelis would restore some hope to the region.
Former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Carmel Arbet, says that the bill to create a Partnership for Peace fund – submitted by parliamentarian and appropriations committee chairperson Nita Lowe and approved by Congress – gives the Palestinians $ 250 million in aid over a period of 5 years.
The fund is the largest US investment in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process to date, and the first effort of its kind to be passed in Congress since the 1993 Oslo Accords.
Arbet also sees that although the size of that aid may seem insignificant to some, the Fund is giving some impetus to the peace process, which has been declining for decades.
The policy of former President Donald Trump’s administration – which halted aid to the Palestinian people, and is based on a strategy aimed at putting pressure on the Palestinian Authority – has forced many joint programs to close, reduce aid, or move out of the region over the past few years, according to the article.
The author says that the new administration has made clear that it will seek to rebuild much of what was dismantled under the Trump administration, and will work to resume relations with the Palestinian Authority, reopen the Palestine Liberation Organization mission in Washington and the US consulate in Jerusalem, and return aid to the Palestinians.
It also indicates that the Biden administration will, in the long run, search for ways to ease tensions between the two sides of the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, with the aim of bringing the leaderships of the two sides closer together.
The writer ruled out that Biden would pursue an approach to peace that would lead to a major settlement between the two parties, and suggested that the new administration would focus on small, meaningful measures that affect the daily lives of people.
And she believed that reviving popular participation and breathing life into the faltering Palestinian economy would be among the most important of those measures.
