Biden Must Manage the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Jun 1, 2021
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Also published in National Interest
President Joe Biden speaks on the phone in the Oval Office of the White House
About the Authors
Ambassador Dennis Ross
Dennis Ross

Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama, is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute.

Articles & Testimony

The administration should take a three-track approach: provide a formula of reconstruction with no rearmament, bolster the PA through assistance conditioned on reform, and broker Arab outreach to open the horizon.

The Middle East has a way of imposing itself on American presidents and their administrations. Just ask President Joe Biden. With six phone calls to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and calls with President Mahmoud Abbas and President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, he understood, whatever his hopes, that his personal involvement was necessary to help produce the ceasefire. And, while a trip to the Middle East had not been on his agenda at this time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken felt the need to go to the region to try to bolster the ceasefire, address humanitarian and reconstruction needs in Gaza, and establish a diplomatic track for managing Israeli-Palestinian relations and recommitting to a two-state for two peoples’ outcome. As someone who negotiated with the parties for decades, I know that each of these tasks contains its own challenges. Ironically, the least difficult one is bolstering the ceasefire...

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