Biden’s approach to Israel-Palestine was a continuation of his predecessor’s policies. Will the second Trump administration be different?
With Donald Trump returning to the White House for a second term, little is certain about how his unpredictable leadership style will play out when it comes to Israel-Palestine and the wider region. The brokering of a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas in January, under pressure from Trump, suggests his presidency might lead to some constructive outcomes.
Trump has made the US relationship with Israel more unapologetic than ever with his proposal to “take over” Gaza and forcibly displace its 2.3 million Palestinians to neighbouring Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan – a plan that caused the UN Secretary General to warn of ethnic cleansing. Though US officials partially rowed back Trump’s comments, the president has since doubled down on his position, to the glee of Israel’s far-right government.
Trump’s recent comments were not made in a vacuum. During last year’s election campaign, he insisted that, had he still been president, he would have let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza, and he used the term ‘Palestinian’ as a slur against his political opponents. For these reasons, many viewed President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party as the ‘lesser evil’ for Palestine.
But this reasoning overlooked the deep similarities in the interests and actions of the two major US parties. While it is easy to predict the dangers Trump portends for Palestinians, it is important to consider how Israel-Palestine policy has been consistent across administrations – and how US and international actors can use the Trump presidency to challenge Washington’s increasingly transparent complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
From ‘honest broker’ to ‘bear hug’
When Biden took office in 2021, he promised to re-establish the United States’ role as an ‘honest broker’ in pursuit of a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine. But in practice, he largely upheld Trump’s earlier pro-Israel policies, from moving the US embassy to Jerusalem to recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights and advancing normalization between Israel and its Arab neighbours without any commitments to establishing a Palestinian state.
Biden even took US support for Israel a step further. As part of his ‘bear hug’ strategy since the start of the Gaza assault in October 2023 – one predicated on the assumption that a full embrace of Israel would enable Washington to moderate its actions – his administration earmarked over $22 billion in military aid to the country, on top of the $3.8 billion it already receives annually, more than any previous administration had done. Biden also dismissed the opinion of the State Department’s legal experts when they found that exports of arms to Israel had flouted US laws that prohibit military assistance to countries that obstruct the delivery of US humanitarian aid and use US weapons in suspected war crimes.
The only substantive policy differences with the first Trump administration were seen in Biden’s last year in office, and even then they were too little, too late.
First, his administration issued targeted sanctions against violent Israeli settlers and settler groups in the West Bank. While a necessary step, this was largely symbolic and ineffective, predominantly targeting individuals and small groups while ignoring the direct role Israel’s government plays in fuelling the settlement enterprise. These sanctions, which seemed more like a fleeting gesture than a serious policy move, have already been reversed by Trump.
Second, Biden paid lip service to the need to protect Palestinian civilians and to abide by international law. But this largely distracted from the reality of his unconditional support to Israel and covered the United States’ complicity in a war that a growing number of experts describe as a genocide – a charge the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found plausible. Trump’s brute honesty, in contrast, makes the extent of that complicity undeniable.
Because of all this, the ‘lesser evil’ debate can often come across as absurd to Palestinians. Following Biden’s ‘bear hug’ approach emboldened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right governing coalition, which are now confident that the United States under the new Trump administration will have their back no matter what they do. Moreover, as Democrats and Republicans continue vying for the title of ‘Israel’s best friend’, Palestinians will be right to brace for the worst regardless of the outcome of US elections. They see that the two parties share a vision for the Middle East that is centred on maintaining Israeli and US hegemony. The difference is just in tactics: while the Democrats seek to disguise US complicity behind old-fashioned diplomacy and multilateralism, the Republicans will likely abandon the pretence altogether.
Cautious counterintuitive hope
Still, some Palestinians express cautious hope that Trump’s leadership style and self-serving incentives could, counterintuitively, present opportunities to stem the tide of death, destruction and dispossession on the ground. This view was partly vindicated when Israel and Hamas agreed to the first phase of their ceasefire agreement. Pressure from Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, played a critical role in brokering the deal, suggesting his transactional approach to diplomacy could succeed where Biden’s failed.
While Biden’s ideological commitment to Zionism blinded him to how Israel’s conduct threatened US interests, Trump may not be willing to make such sacrifices. Rather, his America First approach could make him less inclined to involve the United States in shouldering the cost of Israel’s assault on Gaza and regional escalations – unless, as his Gaza ‘takeover’ plan suggests, there is a way for his administration to profit from it. Trump’s obsession with deal-making, some argue, could also lead him to pressure Israel to abide by the ceasefire to enable the United States to pursue wider regional objectives, such as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which Riyadh insists should be contingent on a pathway toward a Palestinian state.
But Trump will not be acting alone. His appointees – pro-Israel and right-wing evangelical figures such as Special Advisor Jared Kushner, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Ambassador to the UN Elise Stefanik and Secretary of State Marco Rubio – will undoubtedly keep US policy aligned with Netanyahu’s far-right agenda, building on the parameters of Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’, his first administration’s proposal for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The administration can be expected to take troubling measures such as sanctioning the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC) for attempts to hold Israel accountable, and empowering Israel’s efforts to destroy the UN Relief and Works Agency. It will also back Israel’s expansion of settlements and attempts to formalize the long-standing de facto reality of the ongoing annexation of the West Bank. Yet, ultimately, this will veer little from the fundamentals of a decades-long ‘special’ US-Israel relationship characterized by endless Israeli impunity.
The question now is how Palestinian, American and other actors will react to Trump’s more blatant participation in that Israeli impunity. As it stands, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have little leverage over their occupier and rely on the international community to pressure Israel to bring the onslaught and occupation to an end.
The hope of some is that Trump’s return to the White House could offer an opportunity to mobilize a broader challenge to the United States’ unconditional backing of Israel, now that it will no longer be hidden behind empty human rights rhetoric. Americans who were once lulled by Biden’s diplomatic language and constrained by party loyalty must now build a national coalition that demands an end to the blank-check support for what UN bodies, human rights groups and legal experts increasingly describe as apartheid and genocide.
Internationally, Trump’s return should galvanize other countries to take a more assertive role in multilateral efforts to apply international law with regard to Israel-Palestine. This includes supporting the ICC and ICJ as well as enabling boycotts and sanctions, including arms embargoes, in response to Israel’s actions. With the United States no longer claiming to act as a fair mediator, other countries – especially those from the Global South – have a clearer path to lead efforts on behalf of Palestinian rights and to promote a rules-based order that is not captive to US interests at everyone else’s expense.
Little will change for Palestinians in the near term. But the second Trump administration may yet be pivotal in challenging Washington’s historic role as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ and ensuring that Israel’s strategy of erasure of Palestinians cannot be sustained forever.
