Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president brings back a sliver of hope for the Palestinian Authority which governs West Bank Palestinians. President Trump had been very partisan about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He highly favored Israel and ignored the Palestinians and their aspirations for attaining their own independent state. Christians who adopt this viewpoint are called Zionist Christians, and I believe they are quite deceived about this matter.
Because Joe Biden takes an even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Palestinian Authority indicated this week its exuberance that Biden won the presidential election and thus announced that it will soon resume contact with Israeli officials, which it had cut off something like six months ago.
When Donald Trump became president, like so many of his predecessors, he had a strong desire to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The TV reality star, with a book entitled The Art of the Dead, had said that such an achievement would be “the mother of all deals.” But he made his efforts DOA–“dead on arrival”–when he put his very biased, Jewish, Orthodox son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of that endeavor.
Because of it, the Palestinian Authority refused to negotiate with Kushner or Trump. Thus, Trump accomplished some of his wishes in his Mid-East plan, including moving the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and helping bring about renewed relations between Israel and two Arab states: Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. But were these moves pluses for peace in the Middle East? I don’t think so.
Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was not a good decision. Evangelical Christians who supported Trump’s presidency thought it was, but I don’t. As I stated in my now thirty-year old book, Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia, that was a bargaining chip that should have been played on in a comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian. And that has always been the view of leading European nations and Arab nations as well.
As for Israel achieving relations with Bahrain and the UAE, that increases the growing Mid-East divide between the Shite nations in the north and the Sunni nations in the south. It adds to Trump’s contribution to alienation, which he first did by pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear agreement with Iran. I believe this increasing disjunct between north and south is not good for the Mid-East. I’m writing about this in my next book.
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