Two years ago, I watched with dismay as Joe Biden unveiled his foreign policy agenda for the Middle East. Speaking in Saudi Arabia in July of 2022, he outlined a generic vision involving a continued US presence in the region to protect American interests, such as combatting the influence of Russia, China and Iran to ensure the US remained the sole hegemon. He also made a vague commitment to furthering human rights while speaking in a country notorious for its human rights violations.
What could have been a chance for Biden to bring a fresh foreign policy to a region which desperately needs it ended up being an evasive disappointment. Rather than addressing the root causes of turmoil in the Middle East, namely foreign imperial intervention, he chose to continue implementing the same failed status quo, and showed he had absolutely nothing original or creative to offer in the realm of diplomacy. To top it all off, Biden commemorated the occasion by giving the Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman a fist bump to show his camaraderie. Yes, Joe Biden actually greeted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia by fist-bumping him.
I knew the trip was an early sign that Biden's Middle East policy would prove to be impotent, and he by no means let me down. Biden’s record in the Middle East since has been about as impressive as the trip itself, which is most apparent in his utter failure to competently address Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
Israel’s policy of warfare has created a humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions in Gaza. We’ve watched over the last year as Israel has pulverized the infrastructure of the beleaguered district, decimating the hospital, school, and sanitation systems and continue to starve its populace through a siege which has blocked a majority of international aid from being administered.
In addition to the 40,000 Gazans who have lost their lives in the brutal occupation, 90% of Gaza’s 2 million people have been displaced, half are at risk of imminent starvation and an entire generation of Gazan children have been traumatized by the immense scale of death and destruction. As a result, these children will grow up violently embittered towards Israel and thus likely to turn to the same ugly ideology which drove Hamas’ attack on October 7th.
To all of this, President Biden has willingly provided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a steady supply of arms, regardless of how those arms are used to violate international law. Biden’s weak calls for military restraint and greater safety for civilians have been easily brushed aside by Netanyahu, who has danced circles around Biden for the last year. Despite this, Israel continues to enjoy unwavering arms shipments from the US and impunity for the disgraceful ways in which it uses them, making apparent the sobering fact that Israel is now essentially dictating US foreign policy.
The Biden administration’s tremendous bungling on Gaza has rightly been scorned by many factions of the Democratic party, translating into trouble for Kamala Harris as she battles to win critical swing states, most crucially the state of Michigan. Arab Americans, who constitute a sizable portion of Michigan’s population, are a vital voting bloc for the Democrats, and helped give Biden the edge in 2020 which won him the state. Many of these same voters, though, have considerably cooled towards Biden, and Harris by extension, over the Gaza crisis, and consequently have even begun turning to Trump as an alternative.
Figures such as Amer Ghalib, the Democrat mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, the only Muslim-majority city in America, endorsed Trump, signaling a backlash against the complicity of the Biden-Harris administration regarding Gaza. Like Ghalib, many Arab Americans, and Americans in general, believe Trump will offer something better for the Palestinians, critically endangering Harris’ chances of winning in Michigan, and therefore perhaps the entire election itself.
This belief that Donald Trump presents a viable solution to the failings of Biden and Harris over Israel, which is driving the decisions of many voters in places like Michigan, is a dangerous mistake. Despite the current administration’s deeply problematic response to the crisis, Trump is not the logical answer to Biden’s mishandling of Gaza that many think he is. His record on Israel was one of gleeful deference to Netanyahu and of grave peril to the Palestinian cause, and would be again.
In 2017, Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moved the US embassy there, upending decades of US policy and rebuking the goal of keeping the city a neutral area over which no religious or political faction could exercise more of a claim than another. The move completely delegitimized the Palestinian right to East Jerusalem and sent the implicit message that the famously multicultural and multi-religious city was to be the sole property of Israel.
Trump went on to recognize the illegal Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights in Syria, a legacy of the 1967 war, again spurning international consensus and indicating that the US would recognize any land grab which Israel was able to pull off. This is, of course, what you get with an administration like Trump’s, which was filled with pro-Zionist financiers like Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt.
The 2020 Abraham Accords, negotiated by Trump, was another slap in the face to the Palestinian cause. Through the Accords, the countries of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and later Morocco and Sudan, agreed to recognize Israel’s full sovereignty and normalize relations in exchange for essentially dropping the issue of Palestinian statehood. In addition to further isolating Palestine by removing even more of its Arab allies, the Accords followed the same depressing pattern which has defined Israel-Palestine diplomacy since the passage of UN Resolution 242. Once again, relations between Israel and the Arab world were treated as nothing more than a national security issue between individual, already-recognized states, eschewing any recognition or even acknowledgement of the Palestinians themselves.
Trump’s first term was defined by cozying up to Israel’s most far-right government in the country’s history and rebuffing decades of international precedent to grant Netanyahu whatever he wanted, invariably at the expense of the Palestinian cause. While the Biden-Harris position on Israel is certainly bleak, we must not be deluded into believing that Donald Trump would offer the Palestinians anything like a better solution.
Furthermore, unlike Trump, Harris now has a significant constituency of deeply passionate pro-Palestine voters to whom she will have to answer as president, a powerful source of political pressure that could lead to real outcomes. Trump has no such group to whom he must answer, and, with the little hope we may still have for progress in Palestine, it would be a shame to squander it on a man who wouldn’t even acknowledge the Palestinian question.
As Duke students and Americans alike prepare to head to the polls, Gaza remains a key issue for many, myself included. I deeply sympathize with the frustrations of millions of Americans who are rightly outraged at what they see occurring in Gaza everyday. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that Trump will rectify Biden’s blunders in Palestine. A second Trump presidency will only lead to worse outcomes for the cause we care so deeply about, and we should remember that as we cast our votes for the next president of the United States.
Leo Goldberg is a Trinity first-year.
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