Albert Einstein did not actually say “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Despite that quote’s misattribution — it may actually have first appeared in a 1983 mystery novel or in the Narcotics Anonymous guidelines — it does hold true, especially in international affairs. President Joe Biden’s Tuesday address to the United Nations suggests he may not be too familiar with the saying.
Among themes including support for Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion, artificial intelligence, and the “existential threat” of climate change (but not Taiwan, interestingly enough), the president spoke about the ongoing normalization process between Israel and Saudi Arabia and a two-state solution between Israel and an independent Palestinian state. The question of the Palestinian territories has reportedly been a sticking point in negotiations between Jerusalem and Riyadh, with Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan telling Saudi state TV network Al Ekhbariya on Monday that “there is no way to resolve the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict” without Palestinian independence. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, for his part, said “there’s enough room to discuss possibilities” vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip and West Bank in the dealmaking with the Saudis. But finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a key member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, has insisted the Knesset “will not make any concessions to the Palestinians.”
Biden, who alongside the Saudi government has demanded such concessions occur as part of any normalization deal between Netanyahu and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, said at the U.N. that the United States will “continue to work tirelessly to support a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, two states for two people.”
Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles. A U.S. president has committed to solving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But haven’t we seen this movie before? And doesn’t it always end the same way, with the two sides seeming close to a resolution and — just as the clock winds down — the negotiations being upended by a Palestinian terror campaign? This is the Marvel Cinematic Universe of geopolitics, with new installments released every couple years without saying or doing anything new.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and review how past U.S.-brokered talks between Jerusalem and Ramallah have gone down, starting with 1991’s Madrid Conference, organized by former president George H. W. Bush, the first American commander-in-chief to attempt to broker an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Though the talks, which continued through the next year, didn’t get anywhere concrete, many U.S. officials and observers across the world were heartened by the fact that Madrid was the first time representatives of both sides had met face to face. And then Palestinian militants carried out the first suicide bombing in the history of the conflict.
That period of time, the First Intifada, ended in 1993 with the Oslo Accords, which, under former president Bill Clinton’s supervision, aimed to affirm the “right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.” The process, which carried on until 1995, did see some results. Israel transferred many of the governing responsibilities within the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the newly created Palestinian Authority and the newly recognized Palestinian Liberation Organization in exchange for a recognition of Israel’s existence and of its citizens’ right to live in peace, unencumbered by the constant fear of Palestinian terror. In the period of time directly after the Oslo Accords, though, suicide bombings on buses and in crowded public spaces became par for the course.
Clinton invited then–Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to Camp David in 2000, hoping to finally put the conflict to rest. Arafat, who quite clearly aimed to extract as many concessions as possible from the Israelis without ever intending to agree to any deal — without even putting a counteroffer on the table — scuttled any possibility of peace. Of course, that’s not the most consequential event for the conflict that occurred in 2000. Soon after the Camp David Summit fell apart, the Second Intifada began. Characterized by large-scale rioting, continued suicide bombings (many even carried out by Palestinian children), and the high-profile lynching of off-duty Israeli Defense Forces reservists, the Second Intifada lasted until 2005 and marked the high point of violence within the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
Since Clinton, each U.S. president has entered office hoping to put together the puzzle that is an outcome acceptable to both sides, and each has failed. During the Obama administration, former secretary of state John Kerry sought to restart the process, hoping to coax out of Israel and the Palestinian Authority the conventional “land-for-peace” framework that emerged in each round of negotiations. The 2013–2014 talks, as they had every single time before, broke down, and at their tail end came a reconciliation between Palestinian ruling party Fatah and terrorist organization Hamas. Soon after, three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed in the West Bank, and following an Israeli operation in which IDF forces arrested nearly all the active Hamas militants in that area, the terror group began launching rockets from Gaza into Israel, starting the 2014 Gaza War. Since then, no process of rapprochement has gotten off the ground.
History tells us attempting to broker an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians is nothing short of a Sisyphean task. Every time a deal has seemed to have legs, something happens — usually terrorist violence — and potential bargains are scrapped. What, then, makes Biden think this time will be any different?
Maybe it’s ignorance. After all, as former secretary of defense Robert Gates famously wrote, Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Maybe it’s an outsized sense of historical significance of the kind historian Jon Meacham ignited within Biden by telling the president he could be a transformational leader on par with Lyndon Johnson or Franklin Roosevelt. Whatever the reason, it appears unlikely that Biden will be able to shepherd in a new era of cooperation between the Israelis and Palestinians. If he really wants to leave a legacy in the Middle East, he’d be better off dropping the issue from the docket.