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      Joe Biden feels political ground shift as Israel-Gaza conflict rages on

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      In his staunch defence of Israel, Joe Biden is sticking to a course set decades ago as a young senator, and so far he has not given ground on the issue to the progressive wing of his party or many Jewish Democrats urging a tougher line towards Benjamin Netanyahu. Biden has even been prepared to face isolation at the UN security council, at the potential cost of his own credibility on multilateralism and human rights. But analysts say that as the death toll rises with no sign of a ceasefire, the domestic and international pressures on the president could become impossible to ignore.American Jews have grown increasingly sceptical of Netanyahu and his policies. A Pew Research Center survey published last week found that only 40% thought the prime minister was providing good leadership, falling to 32% among younger Jews. Strikingly, only 34% strongly opposed sanctions or other punitive measures against Israel.The liberal Jewish American lobby, J Street, has growing influence in the Democratic party and has urged Biden to do more to stop the bloodshed and the Israeli policies that have helped drive the conflict.“We’re also urging the administration to make clear publicly that Israeli efforts to evict and displace Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are unacceptable, as is the use of excessive force against protesters,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s president.A prominent progressive Jewish writer, Peter Beinart, wrote a commentary in the New York Times last week arguing for the right of Palestinian refugees to return as the only long-term solution to the cycle of violence. “The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself,” Beinart wrote.Donald Trump’s unquestioning embrace of Netanyahu and his policies contributed to making Israel policy a partisan issue. Facing increasing opposition from American Jews, the former Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer argued publicly last week that the Israeli government should spend more of its energy reaching out to “passionate” American evangelicals, rather than Jews who he said were “disproportionately among our critics”.US evangelicals such as Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo helped shape Trump policy on Israel. They are not a force in the Democratic party but a consideration in red and purple states Biden will have to win in next year’s midterm congressional elections to maintain a majority.However, he cannot afford to alienate the progressive wing of his own party. It was progressive enthusiasm, and the support of prominent figures such as Bernie Sanders, that helped Biden win the presidency where Hillary Clinton failed.Congressional progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been more and more outspoken in their criticism of the Biden line of emphasising Israel’s right of defence “If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to? How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights?” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter on Saturday.This is happening with the support of the United States.I don’t care how any spokesperson tries to spin this. The US vetoed the UN call for ceasefire.If the Biden admin can’t stand up to an ally, who can it stand up to?How can they credibly claim to stand for human rights? https://t.co/bXY99O3Wqp— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 15, 2021
      Biden worked hard to cultivate the progressives during the campaign and afterwards, setting up policy workshops with them, but the current crisis has brought that honeymoon in an end.Most analysts, however, say Biden set his course on the Israel long ago and will be hard to shift. He was a staunch defender in the Senate for decades, supporting the Israeli bombing of a suspected nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, for example, and labelling himself “Israel’s best Catholic friend”.His foreign policy outlook is based on the foundation of adhering to and strengthening America’s traditional alliances.“Biden has his own compass when it comes to the region, and is less susceptible to pressure from the left flank of his party,” said Carmiel Arbit, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Although there is some pressure within the Democratic party to take a less sympathetic stance towards Israel, and it is certainly starting to drive a different conversation, it is not driving policy on this issue.”Arbit added: “But a lot depends on the situation. If the conflict escalates, and casualty numbers rise significantly, Biden’s posture could change.”Daniel Levy, the head of the US/Middle East Project thinktank, agreed that the political ground is shifting under Biden’s feet. “It is premature to suggest that the special treatment Israel receives in American politics and policy, and that has previously traversed Republican and Democratic administrations, is definitively over,” Levy said. “Yet the dynamics are pushing in that direction and the signs of change are already visible – the question is how far and how fast those will move.”In the short term, he added, the key will be the views expressed in the Senate, which is split 50-50, with Biden’s agenda often dependent on Kamala Harris, the vice-president, casting the deciding vote. More

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      Biden restores $200m in US aid to Palestinians slashed by Trump

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      The US will restore more than $200m (£145m) in aid to Palestinians, reversing massive funding cuts under the Trump administration that left humanitarian groups scrambling to keep people from plunging into poverty.
      “[We] plan to restart US economic, development, and humanitarian assistance for the Palestinian people,” the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said in a statement.
      The aid includes $75m in economic and development funds for the occupied West Bank and Gaza, which will provide food and clean water to Palestinians and help small businesses. A further $150m will be provided to the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestine refugees in the near east (UNRWA), a UN body that supports more than 5 million Palestinian refugees across the region.
      After Donald Trump’s row with the Palestinian leadership, President Joe Biden has sought to restart Washington’s flailing efforts to push for a two-state resolution for the Israel-Palestinian crisis, and restoring the aid is part of that. In his statement, Blinken said US foreign assistance “serves important US interests and values”.
      “The United States is committed to advancing prosperity, security, and freedom for both Israelis and Palestinians in tangible ways in the immediate term, which is important in its own right, but also as a means to advance towards a negotiated two-state solution,” he said.
      Palestinian leaders and the UN welcomed the resumption of aid. Israel, however, criticised the decision to restore funds to UNRWA, a body it has long claimed is a bloated, flawed group.
      “We believe that this UN agency for so-called refugees should not exist in its current format,” said Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan. Pro-Israel US lawmakers joined the country in opposition to the aid and said they would scrutinise it in Congress.
      From 2018, Trump gradually cut virtually all US money to Palestinian aid projects after the Palestinian leadership accused him of being biased towards Israel and refused to talk. The US president accused Palestinians of lacking “appreciation or respect”.
      The former president cancelled more than $200m in economic aid, including $25m earmarked for underfunded East Jerusalem hospitals that have suffered during the Covid-19 crisis. Trump’s cuts to UNRWA, which also serves Palestinian refugees in war-stricken Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, was described by the agency’s then head as “the biggest and most severe” funding crisis since the body was created in 1949. The US was previously UNRWA’s biggest donor.

      To outcry from aid workers, leaked emails suggested the move may have partly been a political tactic to weaken the Palestinian leadership. Those emails alleged that Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner had argued that “ending the assistance outright could strengthen his negotiating hand” to push Palestinians to accept their blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian deal.
      The cuts were decried as catastrophic for Palestinians’ ability to provide basic healthcare, schooling and sanitation, including by prominent Israeli establishment figures.
      Last April, as the coronavirus pandemic hit, Trump’s government announced it would send money to Palestinians. The $5m one-off donation was roughly 1% of the amount Washington provided a year before Trump began slashing aid. More

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      The Guardian view on the Yemen war: US needs deeds not just words to make peace | Editorial

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      “This war has to end.” These words by President Joe Biden about the terrible conflict in Yemen are welcome. But they are easier to say than to make happen. Since 2015, fighting in Yemen has left a quarter of a million people dead and 3 million displaced. War crimes were committed on all sides, while the world looked on as a humanitarian disaster unfolded. The country is currently a battleground between regional actors and their proxies that vie for supremacy among the sandy ruins of some of the oldest civilisations on Earth.Mr Biden has promised to end arms sales and US participation in the Saudi/United Arab Emirates-led war in Yemen. This is to be welcomed. It is also what Democrats in Congress have voted for. The US president should ensure that any embargo cannot be circumvented. Britain, shamefully, has yet to follow suit with a ban. Mr Biden has also lifted the terrorist designation of the Houthis, the Iranian-backed group whose advance was the reason Riyadh and Abu Dhabi invaded. This too is good news. One can only make peace with one’s enemies. If diplomacy is back, as the US president claims, then diplomats need to be able to talk to foes as well as friends.Probably out of the loop for some time will be Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, whom US intelligence holds complicit in the gruesome murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He, along with the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed, conceived the war, played the west off against Moscow to secure UN cover for the carnage and then occupied strategically important pieces of Yemeni real estate. Boris Johnson, who courted the Saudi royal during the Trump years, will need to move quickly if Britain, without strategic allies in Europe after Brexit, is to play a constructive role in its former colony. This cannot be lightly dismissed as a pang of regret: Mr Johnson’s diplomats at the UN are “pen holders” in the security council, in charge of drafting resolutions on Yemen.The Houthis’ new offensive in Marib and their drone attacks into Saudi Arabia underline just how badly Riyadh and Abu Dhabi underestimated the group’s strength. Mr Biden’s team should put things right because, whether they like it or not, as part of the Obama administration they provided military, logistical and diplomatic cover for the Saudi/UAE-led campaign. It has been alleged that US mercenaries were hired by the UAE in 2015 to assassinate political rivals. In dealing with Yemen, US diplomats will face a familiar problem: how to placate Gulf allies peeved by Washington’s attempts to secure Iranian cooperation over its nuclear programme.The west’s interest must be now to stabilise Yemen and put in place a durable political process. The UN says Yemen faces the worst famine the world has seen for decades unless donors can find $3.85bn (£2.8bn) next week. Rich nations need to step up: Oxfam says current pledges fall short of the country’s growing need. Left unattended, the fires will burn in Yemen, scattering refugees and spreading chaos. Mr Biden should promote a new security council resolution to replace the current one that unrealistically envisages the Houthis surrendering to a transitional government that operates out of a Saudi hotel. Foreign forces ought to leave. What is required is a negotiated process that includes homegrown voices from every side of the conflict – including Houthis, southern separatists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Yemen’s diverse communities have traditionally been able to compromise. Mr Biden cannot solve Yemen’s problems. But he can, and he should, bring together Yemenis to do so. More

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      The Guardian view on the Iranian nuclear deal: hopes grow for the JCPOA, but time is tight | Editorial

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      Good news does not always arrive in obvious forms. Six years ago, the Iran nuclear deal was a diplomatic triumph earned by a long and painful process. This weekend saw a much more modest but equally necessary victory. Though Iran has reduced the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access for ensuring compliance with the deal, a three-month agreement reached on Sunday will allow continued monitoring. As the director general of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, observed, it “salvages the situation for now”. The fear has been that though Tehran’s non-compliance has been carefully calibrated to date, its next steps might be irreversible.After four years of havoc wrought by the Trump administration, which abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and did its best – or worst – to kill the deal, this is welcome news. It indicates new political will and flexibility on the part of Iran as well as the US. There is now a real prospect of informal talks, brokered by the EU. Tehran appears reassured that the Biden administration does not plan to leverage Donald Trump’s sanctions to gain more concessions, as it had suspected. So there is more time on the clock – but not much. The supreme leader’s speech on Monday, saying that Iran could enrich uranium up to 60% if needed is a reassurance to hardliners internally as well as a reminder to the US. A short-term fix must pave the way for a longer-term solution. On the US side, the Biden administration’s rhetoric and appointments, alongside its coordination with the “E3” – Germany, France and the UK – indicate an eagerness to make progress. Both governments face formidable domestic opposition. Joe Biden has a huge agenda and limited political capital. In Iran, the short term IAEA deal was bitterly attacked in parliament. Elections in June are likely to see hardliners more hostile to the US prosper, though a more unified political establishment might in some ways simplify matters. In moving before President Hassan Rouhani leaves office in August, the two sides will be dealing with familiar faces and the US can draw on his attachment to the deal. The longer diplomacy takes, the more progress Iran will make on its nuclear programme.Credit is due to the E3 for shoring up the JCPOA against the odds, despite intense pressure from the Trump administration and its inability to find an effective economic mechanism for support. That commitment has paid off. But much more still needs to be done to save the deal. The US does not want to look like it is going easy on Tehran. But it could quietly end its obstruction of Iran’s $5bn (£3.5bn) IMF request for Covid relief, or give the nod to the release of frozen funds in other countries under arrangements ensuring they are used for humanitarian purposes.The ultimate obstacle is the credibility deficit left by Mr Trump. Iran is all too aware that a new administration may not only discard but trample on its existing commitments. That means that a “more for more” process to go beyond the deal and resolve outstanding issues regarding missiles and regional relations will be ultimately be more necessary than ever. The Trump years have shown that a narrow deal like the JCPOA cannot be stable in the current environment. But there can be no progress without a return to it. More

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      Biden's announcement on Yemen is a hopeful sign – now the UK must follow suit | Anna Stavrianakis

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      In a speech at the US state department last week, President Biden turned the war in Yemen from a forgotten crisis to front-page news. Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition, militarily and diplomatically backed by the US and UK in particular, has been involved in the conflict, which grew out of a failed political transition following the 2011 revolution.The war has killed more than 100,000 people, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, subjected large swathes of the population to famine and generated the worst cholera outbreak since modern records began. All parties to the war have likely committed violations of international law.Biden’s announcement of an end to “all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales” has been widely welcomed as part of a US return to multilateralism and an active step to end the conflict. The news should be greeted with cautious optimism: the sense of relief that the US administration seems to be taking the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seriously is tempered by concerns about the policy detail and the memory that Joe Biden was vice-president under Barack Obama, who initiated US involvement in the war.Changes in US policy will have significant ramifications for the UK, not least in the area of arms sales, which is one of the main ways the UK is involved in the war. First, the UK risks being isolated diplomatically as US policy becomes more focused on preventing the Saudi-led coalition from violating international law and as EU states continue to operate more restrictive arms export policies, most recently in Italy.For a country so invested in its reputation as a leader in the rule of law, this is dangerous territory. The UK can continue on the path of supplying weapons, be castigated as an outlier and risk even greater criticism for putting the arms industry and relationships with the Saudi royal family above human rights and humanitarian law; or change course, restrict or halt arms transfers, and face further censure about the integrity of its policy up to this point.Second, the US decision indicates that the sale of precision-guided munitions will be halted, which will have implications for UK industry. The CEO of Raytheon, one of the world’s largest arms producers, has stated that the company has removed a $500m deal from its books – widely understood to refer to the planned sale of Paveway bombs. Paveway IV bombs are produced in the UK by the British subsidiary of Raytheon, so any cancellation of US deals would probably mean a halt to UK exports. Ministers are no doubt involved in frantic attempts to figure out the implications of this for the UK arms industry.Third, the US developments may well affect the course of justice in the UK. The Campaign Against Arms Trade has launched a second judicial review of UK arms export policy, challenging the government’s position that violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen are only “isolated incidents” and do not constitute a pattern. Depending on the reasoning behind and scope of changes to US policy, the UK government’s position may become even harder to sustain.For these reasons, I think there are grounds to be somewhat hopeful that something will have to change in UK arms export policy, to restrict, suspend or halt transfers – including actual deliveries, not just licences – to the Saudi-led coalition. However, there are no guarantees in terms of the details and practical implementation of Biden’s announcement, and there is room for manoeuvre afforded by the qualifiers around what constitutes “offensive” operations and what the “relevant” arms sales are that will be cancelled.The UK has its own record of playing with words while Yemen burns: take the corrections to the parliamentary record to amend what the government says it knew about the Saudis’ conduct in the war; the narrowing down of all potential breaches of international law in Yemen to only a “small number” and the implausible claim that they are only “isolated incidents”; or the endless repetition of the mantra that the UK operates a “robust” control regime. What we can expect is the government to come out robustly in defence of its own actions.This behaviour is part of what has allowed the war in Yemen to continue for so long and so horrifically. UK policy is to assess whether there is a clear risk that arms transfers might be used in violations of human rights and humanitarian law: risk assessment is supposed to prevent the use of UK-supplied weapons in such violations. But the UK has applied its risk assessment in such a way as to facilitate rather than restrict arms exports. The government also points to the very fact that it conducts risk assessments as a way of legitimising and justifying further arms sales.An end to US/UK arms sales to the Saudi-led coalition won’t end the war in Yemen by itself. But it could force a change by pushing the warring parties back to the negotiating table. As Radhya Almutawakel, the chair of the Yemeni organisation Mwatana for Human Rights, put it, all the parties to the conflict are weak in different ways such that none can “win” outright. In this context, the Biden announcement could be a catalyst for change.The current strategy of the Saudi-led coalition and its western backers has not been working for a long time: the war has not made the Houthi rebel movement any weaker. The conflict won’t end overnight, but the principles of justice and accountability demand an end to arms sales now. More

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      George Shultz obituary

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      Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
      When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
      Shultz seldom let his frustration with anti-Soviet colleagues in the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the administration show in public. But he let his guard down in a terse response to a reporter who asked whether he was enjoying the job: “I did not come here to be happy.”

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      He persevered, opening up a secret channel to the Soviet Union and gradually winning over Reagan, with whom he established a close bond. Relations with the Soviet Union began to improve. Four years after taking office, Shultz was in the room at one of the most extraordinary diplomatic encounters of the 20th century, the 1986 Reykjavik summit at which Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came briefly and tantalisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
      When Shultz left office in January 1989, he said Americans were unable or unwilling to recognise that the cold war was over. “But to me it was all over bar the shouting,” he wrote. Ten months later the Berlin Wall came down and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.
      Shultz looked stuffy and conventional, and for the most part he was, but he liked to persuade people he was not as conservative as he appeared. A regular ploy when being interviewed was to direct journalists to a signed photograph of him dancing at a White House dinner with Ginger Rogers. She had written: “Dear George, For a moment I thought I was dancing with Fred. Love, Ginger.”

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      Born in New York, George was the son of Margaret (nee Pratt) and Birl Shultz, who in 1922 helped found the New York Institute of Finance to train those working on Wall Street. When he was three the family moved to New Jersey.
      He studied economics at Princeton and after graduating in 1942 joined the Marines. Service in the Pacific included the taking of the Palau islands in 1944, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.
      During a rest and recreation break in Hawaii Captain Shultz met a lieutenant in the army nursing corps, Helena “Obie” O’Brien. They married in 1946 and had five children.
      Although an average student at Princeton, he completed a PhD in labour relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and stayed on to teach.
      Throughout the rest of his life, he combined academia – MIT was followed in 1957 by the University of Chicago, and in 1968 by Stanford University – with long spells in business and in government. He was a Republican, but more pragmatic than ideological. He became one of the ultimate Washington insiders, serving under three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan – and worked on various federal task forces at the request of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was an informal but influential adviser on foreign policy to George W Bush. More

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      Biden presidency 'may herald new start for Saudi-Iranian relations'

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      An opportunity for a new beginning between Saudi Arabia and Iran has been presented by Joe Biden’s presidency, two leading Saudi and Iranians close to their diplomatic leaderships are proposing in an article in the Guardian today.The article is co-written by Abdulaziz Sager, the Saudi Arabian chairman and founder of the Gulf Research Center, and Hossein Mousavian, a former senior Iranian diplomat and now a nuclear specialist based at Princeton University.Their proposals are the fruit of a track 2, or backchannel initiative that has been under way privately for months.Their discussions are one of the few forms of private dialogue under way between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and to the extent that their discussions have been approved by serving diplomats in both capitals the initiative may signal a new willingness on both sides to the use the advent of the Biden presidency to explore an end to the years long enmity between the two countries.In an interview with the reformist Iranian newspaper Etemaad last week, the Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, hinted at a new approach. He also accepted that opportunities for dialogue with Riyadh had been missed, adding that it was imperative that Iran was the pioneer in this enterprise.He said that “we have no territorial claim or interest in accessing the natural resources of other regional countries; therefore, it is Iran that can initiate this effort from a position of wealth. We shouldn’t wait for others.”Sager and Mousavian warn of the consequences if Saudi Arabia and Iran remain in conflict, writing that “we remain at the mercy of a single miscalculation that could turn the protracted cold war between our states hot, potentially ushering in disastrous consequences for the entire region”.They claim that both countries perceive the other as seeking to dominate in the region, with Riyadh convinced that Iran is trying to encircle the kingdom with its allied proxy supporters while Tehran views Saudi Arabia as in alliance with the US to undermine the Islamic Republic.“Riyadh charges Iran with interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Iraq; Tehran sees Saudi Arabia doing the same in these very countries.”They urge both sides to agree – perhaps with the help of the UN – a set of principles around non-interference, the inviolability of national boundaries, rejection of violence, respecting the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, respect for religious minorities and abandonment of the use of proxy forces to advance national interests. The principles also support the free flow of oil and navigation, and rejection of the procurement of weapons of mass destruction.The authors stress: “Postponing de-escalation would be a grave mistake, as the region has proved time and again that on the rare occasion that opportunities for constructive dialogue present themselves, they must be grasped swiftly before they vanish.”They admit that the task may seem impossible, but claim that both sides have taken steps to show they are willing to avoid an inescapable zero-sum confrontation, for instance by quiet cooperation over facilitating Iranian Muslim participation in the hajj pilgrimage.
On Thursday the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was reported as saying Saudi Arabia may need to be involved in any follow on to the Iran nuclear deal signed by Iran, the US, three European powers, China and Russia. There is a widespread expectation that if the US and Iran could get back into mutual compliance with the deal discussions about Iran’s relations with its regional neighbours would have to follow. More