How will the US election results affect Israel? – opinion
The most striking feature of the results is that the president’s party succeeded, even while individually he did not.
By WILLIAM S. COMANORJOE BIDEN, his wife Jill, his son Hunter Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris celebrate after media announced that Biden has won the 2020 US presidential election on November 7.(photo credit: JIM BOURG / REUTERS)
It has been nearly two weeks since US Election Day, when President-elect Joe Biden won the narrowest of victories. In four of the five states that eventually determined the outcome, the margin was less than a single percentage point. It will take a few more days for opposition leaders to acknowledge this result, but soon they will, and the issue will be settled. So it is now time to ask what it all means.The most striking feature of the results is that the president’s party succeeded, even while individually he did not. In most countries, the leader and the party are so closely joined that such a result could not happen. But in the US, being at the top of the ticket does not mean that voters can’t reject the leader while supporting other candidates of the same party, and that apparently is what occurred. The Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives, and, as of now, have 50 seats in the Senate with 48 for the Democrats, with two still to be decided.Despite the widespread expectation that the Democrats would gain control of the Senate, that will not happen unless they win both outstanding seats in January runoff elections, which is possible but not likely. As various commentators have suggested, voters supported Republican policies but not this Republican president.That subtlety, however, is hardly acknowledged by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. An acquaintance of that persuasion remarked the other day that “Biden has done his job [i.e., defeating President Donald Trump], and it was now time for him to get out of the way.” The progressive agenda is now on order, which includes both foreign and domestic policy objectives. Indeed, since presidential authority is less restrained by congressional constraints on foreign than domestic affairs, that arena may be where progressives are more likely to have their way.The progressive foreign policy agenda appeared recently in the form of a New York Times op-ed column written by two “informal advisers to the Biden-Harris campaign” who both had served in the prior Obama administration. Their statement included the following passage:“On Israel, Mr. Biden could [i.e., should] state early on that the Trump plan is no longer US policy and restore American assistance to and dialogue with Palestinians, reiterating long-standing... views on a viable two-state solution, and make plain that his administration would oppose an outcome in which Palestinians were denied equal rights” (November 12, 2020, p. A27). Or in other words, the statement implied, Palestinians should regain their veto power over any outcome that does not meet their full satisfaction.There was, of course, no mention of the Abraham Accords, which promise a new peaceful and productive environment for the region. But that represented a significant accomplishment of the Trump presidency, and so could not be countenanced.Increasingly, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has adopted an anti-Israel posture in which Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are spoken of in the same breath. That reaching peaceful solutions to Middle East issues might require putting an end to a Palestinian veto has not occurred to them.The forthcoming American political conflict is not between the major parties but instead among Democrats. Although Biden hails from the more moderate wing of his party, he will invariably be forced to make concessions to the progressive wing, in order to maintain party unity; and these concessions could well occur in regard to foreign affairs.The major point of uncertainty is how the Abraham Accords will change the discussion. Simply returning to the old principles is probably a nonstarter, despite the effort made in the Times article to do so. Israel has a much stronger posture throughout the region today than it had four years ago, and it won’t be easy for the Biden administration to simply return to the earlier positions of the Obama years. The world has moved on.How this will play out, of course, is still to be determined.The writer is a distinguished professor, Fielding UCLA School of Public Health; and professor of economics, emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara.
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