The administration pays lip service to a two-state solution while blocking every possible avenue toward that goal.
Recent initiatives by the Palestinian government to revive their application for UN membership are putting to the test the U.S. claim that it supports a “two-state solution” — a Palestinian state on at least some portion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside a secure Israel. In practice, however, the Biden administration and Congress have been working hard to ensure that that does not come about.
The State of Palestine was declared in 1988 and has since been recognized by 140 countries. The Palestinian Authority (PA), the recognized Palestinian government, controls most of the urban areas in the West Bank with some limited administrative control of larger areas, though Israel controls security for most of the territory it initially seized in 1967, and its armed forces routinely enter even the nominally PA-run urban areas with impunity. Unlike most governments that support a two-state solution, the United States only recognizes Israel.
A State Department official under President Barack Obama informed Truthout that they were instructed to refuse to open any correspondence with Palestinian officials which includes their national emblem or anything else referencing the “State of Palestine” and believes that remains the policy to this day.
And, while the Biden administration and the Democratic Party recognize Jerusalem as the undivided “capital of Israel,” they deny such an acknowledgement for Palestine, despite Jerusalem for many centuries serving as the center of Palestinian cultural, academic, political and religious life. President Joe Biden has even refused to reopen the U.S. Consulate in occupied East Jerusalem, which had served Palestinian interests since the 1930s until Donald Trump ordered it closed in 2019.
According to U.S. law, all assistance to the Palestinian Authority will be eliminated unless “all its ministers publicly accept Israel’s right to exist and all prior agreements and understandings with the United States and Israel.” However, despite the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s entire cabinet refuses to accept Palestine’s right to exist and does not accept many of the prior agreements and understandings with the United States and the PA, U.S. aid to Israel is at an all-time high.
Bipartisan legislation passed by Congress and signed by Biden in 2022 requires the State Department to develop “a strategy on expanding and strengthening” efforts to convince countries which have not done so already to unilaterally recognize Israel and to “leverage diplomatic lines of effort and resources to encourage normalization.” By contrast, the United States has actively discouraged countries from recognizing Palestine, even using the Foreign Assistance Act and other measures to pressure them not to. ⠀
Though Biden, in his 2024 State of the Union address, reiterated that “the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution over time,” he has given no indication that he is willing to take any steps to make that possible. As Matthew Duss of the Center for International Policy noted in a recent article in The New Republic on the Palestinian quest for statehood, the Democrats’ view is that, “Violent resistance is unacceptable. Nonviolent resistance is also unacceptable. The only acceptable path to liberation is to negotiate with an Israeli government that is fundamentally opposed to granting it and is continually protected by the U.S. Congress from any consequences for that opposition.”
Indeed, the Biden administration and Congress have long taken the position that Palestinian statehood is only acceptable on terms voluntarily agreed to by Israel in bilateral negotiations. This comes despite the fact that there have been no such negotiations since 2015 and the Israeli government categorically rules out allowing any kind of Palestinian state. ⠀
It was the United Nations that established the state of Israel through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 in 1947, a decision which has long been celebrated by Biden and other Democratic leaders. However, these same leaders categorically reject any role for the United Nations in establishing a state of Palestine.
Earlier this month, the United States was one of only two countries in the 47-member UN Human Rights Council to vote against a resolution which “reaffirmed its support for the solution of two States, Palestine and Israel, living side by side in peace and security.”
The United States is quite vehement about making sure the United Nations does not support Palestinian self-determination; it has been U.S. policy since 1990 to withdraw funding from any United Nations agency which grants Palestine full member status. When Palestine was admitted to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2011, the Obama administration suspended funding. This 22 percent reduction greatly harmed UNESCO’s important work to improve literacy, protect women’s rights, provide technical training and education, preserve regional and cultural history, encourage scientific research, protect independent media and press freedom, promote cultural diversity, and set international standards for artificial intelligence and technology education. The U.S. position was that opposing Palestinian membership in that body was more important than supporting UNESCO’s work.
In 2018, President Trump withdrew from the organization altogether, making the United States the only UN member to not be part of UNESCO.
In 2023, Biden announced that the United States would be rejoining UNESCO and begin paying its dues, enacting a waiver to the congressional ban but including a proviso that the United States would cut all funding to the United Nations if Palestine was admitted as a full member state. ⠀
In light of all this, why do Biden and Democratic congressional leaders still claim to support a two-state solution when they are going to such great lengths to prevent one? They recognize that the vast majority of their constituents believe that Palestinian Arabs, like Israeli Jews, have a right to statehood. Constituent pressure is likely the major reason that Biden, who strongly opposed Palestinian statehood for most of his long Senate career, at least claims to support it now.
While Republicans’ strident opposition to Palestinian statehood is clearly rooted in bigotry, the Democratic leadership’s role is more like that of the “white moderate” described in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” who professes to support the goals but not the methods, who insists on endless negotiations with oppressors who refuse to compromise, and who “believes he can set the timetable for [someone else]’s freedom.”