Israel
Biden admin sending envoy to Israel who has a major anti-Israel problem
The Biden administration’s effort to promote “deescalation” between Israel and Hamas will now include sending Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr to the region on Wednesday. Amr, however, has taken a stance against U.S.-ally Israel on the conflict even before he stepped foot in the administration and before he is to land in Israel for his latest trip.
Amr, who was born in Beirut, has also been actively working on the Biden administration’s plan to restore U.S. funding to the Palestinians. In a March 1 memo, “The US Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” he wrote that “State and USAID are working towards a restart of US assistance to the Palestinians in late March or early April.”
He also indicated that the U.S. would restore contact with the Palestinian Authority, which ceased under former President Donald Trump over continued payments to terrorists and their families.
As the national coordinator of the anti-Israel Middle East Justice Network, Amr once reportedly wrote a year after the September 11 terror attacks that he “was inspired by the Palestinian intifada.” Moreover, Amr previously accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing.”
In 2002, after the head of Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades was killed in an Israeli airstrike, Amr reportedly wrote in a column that has since been scrubbed from the internet, “I have news for every Israeli,” warning that Arabs “now have televisions, and they will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.”
Amr also worked with the Brookings Institution to found their Doha Center. Qatar funded the think tank to the tune of $14.8 million and its Prime Minister and members of its royal family sit on the Brookings advisory board. Qatar is one of the largest sponsors of global terrorism and one of its beneficiaries is Hamas.
In Doha, while working for Brookings, Amr once urged, “Muslim Brotherhood organizations across the Muslim World should be engaged.”
The State Department and the White House didn’t respond to this reporter’s requests for comment. The story will be updated if and when a response is given.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Wednesday that Amr will be the U.S. official to advocate for the Biden administration’s position on the issue as Hamas continues firing hundreds of rockets into Israel.
“I’ve asked Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Hady Amr to go to the region immediately to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders,” Blinken said. “He will bring to bear his decades of experience and in particular he will urge on my behalf and on behalf of President Biden deescalation of violence. We are very focused on this.”
He continued, “The United States remains committed to a two-state solution. This violence takes us further away from that goal. We fully support Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself. We’ve condemned and I condemn again the rocket attacks in the strongest possible terms. We believe Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live with safety and security and we’ll continue to engage with Israelis, Palestinians, and. other regional partners to urge deescalation and to bring calm.”
You can follow Jennie Taer on Twitter @JennieSTaer
Iran kicked out one-third of its nuclear inspectors. The Biden administration is on the verge of getting Iran to release five hostages in exchange for unfreezing $6 billion of Iranian cash, and potentially five Iranian prisoners held in US custody. As Iran is on the march, a breakthrough in Middle East peace can’t come fast enough.
The best way to check Iranian ambitions in the region would be the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. While such a deal would be “tectonic,” the Biden administration is destroying the prospects for normalization because it continues to be obsessed with linking the deal to Palestinian nationalism.
More than any of the known Palestinian demands to date, the Biden administration is fixated on Palestinian statehood. And the administration continues to browbeat Israel on that point. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has recently claimed that both Saudi Arabia and the Biden administration view a two-state solution an important piece to any deal. Previously, Blinken told Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, that Israel would be “misreading the situation” if it doesn’t think that significant concessions to the Palestinians would be required to broker a Saudi-Israel deal. White House National Security Council spokesman Jake Sullivan also told Dermer that that Israel will need to give significant concessions to the Palestinians so that the Biden administration can sell the deal to Democrats in Congress.
One unconfirmed Saudi press report stated that the Saudis have walked away from talks, due to concerns that Israel wouldn’t agree to placate the Palestinians. However, both an American and an Israeli official have asserted that that report is false.
What is more likely is that the Saudis are taking a pragmatic, not absolutist, approach to a Palestinian track. According to an unnamed Arab official who is familiar with recent talks between Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority (PA) earlier this month, Saudi Arabia is now communicating to the PA that it is willing to abandon the two-state solution as a pre-condition for normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and that the PA needs to acclimate its demands to that fact. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has proposed to re-start aid to the PA, halted since 2016, in efforts to get the PA to at least tacitly support normalization.
The Israeli response to Palestinian nationalism is much more publicly opposed. Israeli National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi has rejected the idea of Palestinian statehood as part of the deal. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the concept of Israeli concessions to the Palestinians as a part of normalization is “a fiction” as such a deal “has nothing to do with Judea and Samaria [commonly referred to in the West as the ‘West Bank’].”
Israel’s hostility to Palestinian nationalism is well founded. As the Oslo Accords turn 30 years old, the so called “peace process” has failed to bring peace to Israel, as Israel has had to defend itself against at least five warsand countless smaller violent conflicts against the Palestinians since 1993. PA President Mahmoud Abbas continued to show his true bigoted face with a recent anti-Semitic diatribe, part and parcel of the systemic anti-Semitism and incitement to violence of the PA.
The Biden administration continues to stand in the way of Saudi Arabia’s normalization of relations with Israel, as it continues to pursue maximalist demands on Palestinian statehood. This is a non-starter for Israel, and not a top concern for Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, like Israel, is primarily focused on using the deal to leverage its strength against Iran – as Saudi Arabia is looking to secure US support for advanced weapons, a NATO-like alliance, and civilian nuclear energy. In order to make a sustainable counterweight against Iranian aggression, the Biden administration must jettison its demands for Palestinian statehood, and at the very least answer Saudi concerns with a serious counter-offer. Failure to buttress Israel, Saudi Arabia and our Gulf allies will likely result in a resurgent Iran.
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