Palestinian territories

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden’s foreign policy agenda upended by Israel-Hamas war – podcast

      by

      In a TV speech on Tuesday Joe Biden pledged unwavering support for Israel after Hamas militants killed hundreds of civilians including US nationals on Saturday. More than 900 people in Gaza have been killed in retaliatory airstrikes by Israel, which has enforced a ‘blockade’ of the area, sealing off 2.3 million people from food, fuel and other supplies.
      Despite some Democrats calling for de-escalation of the situation, Biden said Israel not only had the right to defend itself, but a ‘duty’ to do so. So how else might the US be able to influence the war? As some at home use this moment to blame Biden, what can his administration do to keep his foreign policy plans on track?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland is joined by Aaron David Miller – who served for two decades as a state department analyst, negotiator and adviser on Middle East issues – to discuss what the US president should do next

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      US reportedly persuaded Qatar to halt $6bn to Iran in breach of deal

      by

      A contentious deal to unfreeze $6bn of Iranian oil revenues has been plunged into uncertainty amid reports that the Biden administration has persuaded Qatar to withhold the funds in breach of a previous agreement following the devastating attack by the Palestinian group Hamas on Israel.There has been mounting pressure from both Democrats and Republicans for the White House to deny Iran access to the revenues in the face of speculation over how big a role Iran played in the weekend’s attack by Hamas, Tehran’s close ally and proxy.CBS reported that the US had reached a “quiet understanding” with Qatar – which played a mediating role in last month’s agreement that saw the release of five Americans imprisoned by Iran – to keep the funds locked in a bank account specially set up in the Gulf kingdom.“CBS News has learned that the US reached a ‘quiet understanding’ with Qatar not to release any of the $6bn in Iranian oil money that was transferred as part of a US-Iranian prisoner swap,” the network’s chief White House correspondent, Nancy Cordes wrote on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York city criticized any move to hold up the revenues, saying in a statement: “The US cannot renege on the agreement. The money rightfully belongs to the people of Iran, earmarked for the government to facilitate the acquisition of all essential and sanctioned requisites for Iranians.”The US deputy treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, had earlier told a behind-closed-door session of congressional Democrats on Capitol Hill about a “quiet agreement” to retain the cash, saying that it “isn’t going anywhere anytime soon”.The administration’s signals appeared designed to dampen controversy surrounding the funds – frozen as a result of sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2019 – after five Democratic senators demanded they be re-frozen in the wake of the Hamas assault, which has so far left 1,300 dead in Israel.The $6bn has also become a line of attack for Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, the former president and the party’s frontrunner for next year’s presidential nomination, who has mischaracterised the money as “US taxpayer dollars” which he said was used to finance Saturday’s attack.The White House national security council spokesman, John Kirby, declined to confirm any change in its status but repeatedly stressed that it had been untouched since the release of the five imprisoned Americans on September 18. “It’s still sitting in the Qatari bank account, all of it, every dime of it. None of it has been accessed by anybody,” he told a White House press briefing on Thursday, side-stepping questions about any new agreement to withhold it.“The [Iranian] regime was never going to see a dime of that money. This account was set up by the previous administration for this exact purpose. We have done nothing different. All that we have done is just moved the money from South Korea – where it was inaccessible – to Qatar, where it’s more accessible.”Under the terms of the agreement, he added, the money would not be accessible to Iranian regime officials but to “approved vendors” who would be allowed to use it for humanitarian and medical purposes. “We have always had the ability to provide oversight over the dispersal of these funds,” Kirby said.At the core of the controversy is speculation over what hand Iran’s theocratic rulers might have played in planning the attack by Hamas, an Islamist group which Tehran has financed over many years.Amid suggestions that the assault’s unprecedented magnitude and sophistication would surely have needed an Iranian hand, US intelligence agencies have said they have discovered no evidence of this. Instead, officials have cited early indicators that Iran had no advance knowledge of the attack and was taken by surprise, a view greeted by widespread scepticism among Republicans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics of the exchange deal contend that regardless of whether the $6bn – originally earned from oil sales to South Korea – is actually touched, the money is “fungible”, meaning Iran could still exploit it by re-allocating funds originally earmarked for other purposes.Trita Parsi, of the Washington-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said re-freezing the funds would signal acceptance of this argument and warned that it could kill any future US-Iran diplomacy. “This would be the second time in five years that the US has reneged on an agreement with Iran,” said Parsi. “But the last time was the Trump administration pulling out of the JCPA nuclear accords agreed with Barack Obama. This is very different – it’s Biden’s own deal that he made four weeks ago.“Even if we accept that the JCPA is dead, it doesn’t mean that some kind of agreement down the road cannot be pursued. However, reversing after four weeks on this issue makes it very difficult to have any diplomacy going forward, because the image in Iran is that the US is a serial betrayer of any agreement it signs.”Seasoned Iran watchers have reacted doubtfully to speculation that the country’s rulers played a decisive role in Hamas’s attack.“There’s definitely a convergence of interests between Hamas and Iran,” said Vali Nasr, a Middle East specialist at Johns Hopkins school of advanced international studies. “But that doesn’t mean that Iran directed this and Hamas said, OK we are going to do it. The truth is that Hamas would be in charge.“Where Iran comes in – and I don’t know how much planning they would be involved in – is that what we saw in this attack was an upgrade to the capabilities and sophistication of Hamas as a fighting force.” More

    • 225 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Hamas attack on Israel might be setback for Palestinian cause in US just as progress was in view

      by

      If Hamas intended to remind the world that the Palestinians are still there after years of marginalisation and international indifference to occupation and deepening oppression, then its bloody assault on Israel certainly achieved that.At the same time, the attack that Joe Biden called “pure unadulterated evil” might represent a huge setback for the Palestinian cause in the US just as the political debate and public opinion was gradually shifting away from decades of often lockstep support for Israel in Washington.Pictures of slaughtered children among the 1,000 dead, and traumatised Israeli survivors filling US television screens begging for the return of abducted relatives, prompted an outpouring of revulsion across the US political spectrum and among ordinary Americans.Yet, Palestinian and more dovish pro-Israel groups who have worked for years to push a more open debate about the Israel-Palestinian conflict said there were signs of it paying off in the reaction to the Hamas attack.Hadar Susskind, president of Americans for Peace Now, sister organisation of the Israeli peace movement, said that where once there would have been only unequivocal denunciations, some politicians and others wanted to give a more nuanced take that took account of the Palestinian reality.“Right now, it’s very difficult. Over the last years we are having better, more reasonable conversations in our political sphere. Not perfect by any means but we’ve been moving in the right direction. This is a very, very difficult moment. Everybody who’s talking about it needs to deal with this. But I think we are dealing with it from a different baseline,” he said.“I spoke to a number of members of Congress and congressional staff and others this week who were trying to figure out how to say things that are hopefully helpful and positive but also true and not simply trying to score points for your side.”Several politicians strongly denounced the “horrific acts” by Hamas but said the attack did not happen in a vacuum and that the way to end such violence was to “end Israeli military occupation and apartheid”.Before the Hamas attack, Americans for Peace now and likeminded groups had been hoping to build on shifts in US public opinion seen in a Gallup poll earlier this year that found for the first time more Democrats were sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis by a margin of 11%, a significant shift from a decade ago.Two years ago, a Jewish Electorate Institute poll found that 58% of American Jewish voters support restrictions on US military aid to prevent Israel using it to expand West Bank settlements. One-third agreed that “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States” and one-quarter said that “Israel is an apartheid state”, numbers that shocked some Jewish community leaders.Once unswerving US political support for Israeli governments has also eroded as they move ever further to the right. In August Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator, called on Biden to “get more personally engaged” in stopping “racists” in the Israeli government from a land grab in the occupied territories and committing “gross violations” of Palestinian rights or risk damage to the US’s credibility.Yousef Munayyer, former executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, said it is too early to predict the lasting impact but that the attack has forced the Palestinian issue back onto the agenda.“Moments of this scale tend to have longer developing impacts on everybody. I would emphasise that it’s hard to walk away from this moment over time and continue to ignore this issue. People around the world, including here in the United States, have dropped the issue of Palestine and peace. The urgency of addressing this issue and resolving it should be clear to everyone,” he said.For years, Israel has worked to marginalise the Palestinians abroad as well as at home, and to curb even non-violent means of protest and action, including pushing laws in the US to punish boycotts as antisemitic.The Biden administration paid lip-service to a two state solution that appeared to amount to little more than cover for inaction and an unwillingness to confront the reality of the Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated statements that he would never permit a Palestinian state.Susskind said that the recent attack forces the Palestinians back onto the agenda “in a bloody, murderous, horrific way”.“The world is paying attention to the Palestinians, and specifically to Hamas, which is not accidental. That’s a fact. There are many moments in history and people in different countries forcing attention by committing horrible acts,” he said.“Obviously the Biden administration is being forced to pay attention right now. Nobody in this moment is talking about what I would call the positive agenda, how to make things better, a peace process kind of agenda. When this immediate fighting comes to an end, we’ll see what happens. I think there is going to be an Israeli reckoning for Netanyahu and his government, and then we’ll see what comes out of that.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe direction of that debate in the US is also likely to be influenced by Israel’s military response over the coming days and weeks. While the focus for now is on the Israeli casualties, the rising toll among Palestinian civilians in Gaza who cannot flee the enclave is likely to demand growing attention.Munayyer is concerned that Israeli rhetoric is being turned into action.“Now we are likely to see mass atrocities being committed as the Israeli military is out for vengeance in the words of the Israeli prime minister. So a lot of people’s reactions to understanding all of this are going to be impacted by what is still to come in the days ahead of us,” he said.Large-scale Israeli military assaults on Gaza in 2008 and 2014 were instrumental in shifting public opinion in the US, especially on university campuses.The response to the Hamas attack has also divided the US Jewish community which is largely united in its condemnation, but has differences over whether to acknowledge the occupation and Israeli government actions as a cause of continuing conflict.Susskind said Americans for Peace Now declined to sign a statement by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations denouncing the assault by “Iran-backed Hamas terrorists”.“We didn’t sign it because although I agree with most of what it said, it also called the Hamas attacks unprovoked and that’s not true. The Hamas attacks were horrific. They are war crimes. They are inexcusable. I condemn them, unequivocally 100 times over. But unprovoked is not true,” he said.“This attack does demand a military response. I am not a pacifist. But there is a difference between the military response and some of the language that you’ve seen from Israeli political leaders and others who are calling for war crimes in return. The response to that, is not to go in and indiscriminately kill Palestinian people. That’s not an acceptable answer. War crimes are never okay, by anyone.”The “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J-Street was strident in its denunciation of Hamas and support for military action to defeat it.But Debra Shushan, J-Street’s policy director, said the attack obliges US politicians to recognise that things cannot go on as before. She said it is right, for now, for Washington to focus on Israel’s “legitimate right of self-defence in accordance with international law” and securing the release of Israelis abducted to Gaza.“In the longer term, there are many questions that must be asked about flawed policies and narratives. I expect fertile ground for a recognition that a return to the status quo ante of “managing the conflict” is unacceptable. The vision for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a negotiated end to the occupation of Palestinian Territory, and a future of genuine security, self-determination and equality for Israelis and Palestinians must prevail.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      AOC decries ‘bigotry and callousness’ at pro-Palestinian rally in New York

      by

      Criticising a pro-Palestinian rally held in Times Square in New York City in the aftermath of Hamas attacks on Israel which left hundreds dead, the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: “It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it.”The attacks, including the killing of at least 260 concertgoers and the taking of hostages, sparked a new war between Israel and Hamas. In Gaza, Israeli airstrikes killed hundreds. By Tuesday, the Israeli death toll approached 1,000.The Sunday rally in New York, endorsed by members of the Democratic Socialists of America and promoted by the group’s New York chapter, attracted a crowd of more than 1,000. Some chanted “resistance is justified when people are occupied” and there were reports of a Nazi emblem being shown and Israeli flags burned and trodden on.Amid attacks from Republicans, Ocasio-Cortez, a New York representative popularly known as AOC, was among Democrats to condemn the rally.Speaking to Politico, she said shutting down hatred and antisemitism was “a core tenet of solidarity”.“The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment,” she said.“It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting Hamas’s horrifying attacks against innocent civilians as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation.”Earlier, Ocasio-Cortez was among leading congressional progressives to call for a ceasefire. In a statement, she said: “I condemn Hamas’s attack in the strongest possible terms.“No child and family should ever endure this kind of violence and fear, and this violence will not solve the ongoing oppression and occupation in the region. An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives.”Cori Bush, a progressive congresswoman from Missouri, said that while she “condemn[ed] the targeting of civilians”, to “achieve a just and lasting peace” in the Middle East, “US government support for Israeli military occupations and apartheid” should be ended. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Sports reporter in Philadelphia loses job over pro-Palestinian comments

      by

      A sports reporter in Philadelphia has lost his job after tweeting his “solidarity” with Palestine in the wake of Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel.Jackson Frank, a writer who covered the Philadelphia 76ers professional basketball team, is “no longer employed by PhillyVoice.com” after he expressed support for the Palestinian cause on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, PhillyVoice.com chief executive Hal Donnelly told the New York Post.Frank’s departure stemmed from his response to a tweet by the 76ers about the escalating violence in Israel and Gaza, where hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian civilians have died, first from a deadly incursion by Hamas militants over the weekend and then from retaliatory airstrikes from the Israeli military.The 76ers tweeted: “We stand with the people of Israel and join them in mourning the hundreds of innocent lives lost to terrorism at the hands of Hamas,” along with the hashtag #StandWithIsrael.Frank responded by quoting the tweet while adding: “This post sucks! Solidarity with Palestine always.” Frank, who had only recently joined PhillyVoice.com as a sports reporter, has since deleted the tweet.The deteriorating situation in the Middle East has exposed schisms in the US, which has traditionally been a staunch ally of Israel. A pro-Palestine rally has been held for two days in New York City while dueling protests supporting the Palestinians and Israelis have faced off in Boston.Joe Biden has condemned what he called the “appalling terrorist assault” against Israel, which involved the killing of hundreds of people, including those attending a music festival, and the kidnapping of dozens of others. Biden has added that the “American people stand shoulder to shoulder with Israelis”.Republicans have, however, accused the Biden administration of being “complicit” in the attacks by claiming, misleadingly, that a deal to partly lift sanctions on Iran helped fund the attacks by Hamas.According to polling taken prior to the latest surge in violence, Americans’ sympathies are still mostly with Israel but the picture is changing. More Democrats are now sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than they are of Israel, according to a Gallup poll in March, even as Republican voters remain overwhelmingly more aligned with Israel’s view of the conflict.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFrank was not the only media figure to lose his job after expressing support for Palestine. As the Daily Beast reported, the adult magazine Playboy terminated a partnership with the Lebanese American social media influencer and former porn actor Mia Khalifa after she expressed solidarity with Palestine after the Hamas attacks in Israel.Playboy reportedly said it had spiked its deal with Khalifa because she had made “disgusting and reprehensible comments”. More

    • 200 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      The political ripples of the Israel-Palestine crisis are already hitting both US parties | Lloyd Green

      by

      Once again, the Middle East looms large in US politics. Hamas’s attack on southern Israel will reverberate in the weeks and months to come. On Monday, Joe Biden announced that 11 Americans were killed. Already, the political fallout is being felt in the White House and Capitol Hill, in California and in New York.The strains between the Biden administration and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have subsided. As a result, the Republicans can no longer try to lay sole claim to the pro-Israel card heading into the 2024 elections.On Sunday, the US president and Netanyahu spoke by phone. The White House readout of the call was unambiguous, referring to Hamas as “terrorists” and adding that: “The two leaders committed to stay in regular contact over the coming days.”Then, on Monday, Biden took things further. “The ties between Israel and the United States run deep … the American people stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israelis,” he announced in a statement. “The US and the State of Israel are inseparable partners.”This is all a big deal. Until recently, Netanyahu and Biden had not been the closest of friends. The prime minister’s ongoing gambit to curb the independence of Israel’s judiciary coupled with the presence of hardline Jewish supremacists in his cabinet complicated things.Team Biden has not generally been keen to roll out a red carpet to Israel’s longest serving prime minister. Unlike Benny Gantz, Israel’s former defense minister and the head of an opposition party, Netanyahu has not yet been to the White House. The nearest he came to Biden was at the sidelines of the opening of the UN general assembly. Netanyahu is expected to officially visit the US by year’s end.Responding to Israel’s request, the US is poised to arm the Jewish state. On Sunday, Lloyd Austin, the US secretary of defense, ordered the Ford carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean in a show of support. For the record, the USS Gerald R Ford is the navy’s latest and most advanced carrier.How exactly the uptick in relations between the US and Israel plays out remains to be seen. Right now, the Senate is in recess and the Republican-led House lacks a speaker. Until the House elects a permanent successor to Kevin McCarthy, doubt surrounds the ability of Congress to appropriate supplemental funds to Israel. Likewise, Ukraine and the Mexico border wall may complicate things, too.Beyond that, abortion politics may hinder administration attempts to replenish Israel’s stockpiles. Right now, Alabama’s Republican senator Tommy Tuberville, the ex-Auburn football coach, is holding up confirmation of hundreds of Pentagon officials over abortion policy. Some of them stand to be involved in weapons transfers.Apparently, the freshman senator forgot that the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs gutting abortion rights cost the Republican party control of the Senate and turned a much-anticipated “red wave” in the House into a trickle, leaving McCarthy to suffer at the hands of Matt Gaetz and his fellow arsonists.In addition, the Senate has yet to act on the nomination of Jack Lew as US ambassador to Israel. An Orthodox Jew and Harvard graduate, Lew served as treasury secretary under Obama. In August, the rightwing and Republican-aligned Zionist Organization of America announced its opposition to his nomination.Then there is also the issue of normalization of Israeli-Saudi relations. Right now, normalization no longer appears to be on the front burner.The Hamas attack also shook internal Democratic politics. In California’s Senate race, Congressman Adam Schiff is the only one of the three leading Democratic candidates to voice unambiguous support for Israel. By contrast, Representative Katie Porter condemned the loss of lives on both sides. Representative Barbara Lee called for a ceasefire and offered her prayers for Israelis and Palestinians alike.Yet it was in New York City where the left’s not-so-subterranean skirmishes over Israel burst into the open. On Sunday, several hundred pro-Palestinian demonstrators chanted “Globalize the intifada”, and “Smash the settler Zionist state”. They also taunted Israel over the number of people killed. The Democratic Socialists of America was an event sponsor. Expect middle-America to be turned off by these antics.Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, blasted the rally as “abhorrent and morally repugnant”. Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, wrote: “There is a special place in hell for those who glorify the cold-blooded murder of civilians and children.”Joe Biden may yet be the last unalloyed pro-Israel Democratic president. But right now, it is he who sets the tone of US policy.
      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992 More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Blinken: Republicans ‘playing politics’ by attacking Biden over Israeli crisis

      by

      US party leaders in Washington have wasted no time in turning the Middle East conflict into a domestic political dispute, with senior Republicans accusing both the Biden administration and each other of having triggered the violence.The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, charged top Republicans with exploiting the crisis for their own political ends after several Republican presidential hopefuls accused the Biden administration of effectively causing the conflagration. “It’s deeply unfortunate that some are playing politics when so many lives have been lost and Israel remains under attack,” Blinken told CNN’s State of the Union.The reported presence of US citizens among the dead and captured from the Hamas attack on Israel is likely to inflame the partisan mud-slinging between Republican leaders and the White House. Several presidential candidates accused Joe Biden of being partly responsible for the crisis, blaming him for appeasing Iran through the recent deal involving the return of five detained Americans in exchange for the release of $6bn in frozen Iranian funds for humanitarian use.Blinken insisted on Sunday that none of the $6bn had yet been liquidated. “Not a single dollar has been spent from that account. The account is closely regulated by the US treasury department, so it can only be used for things like food, medicine, medical equipment – that’s what this is about,” he told CNN.Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina who is vying for his party’s presidential nomination, went so far as to accuse Biden personally of being “complicit” in the Hamas attack. “Biden’s weakness invited the attack, Biden’s negotiation funded the attack,” he said on social media.Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s former UN ambassador and another 2024 White House hopeful, also turned on the US president, saying that Blinken’s assurance that the $6bn had not yet been released was duplicitous. “Hamas knows, and Iran knows, they’re moving money around as we speak, because they know $6bn is going to be released. That’s the reality,” she said.The sniping was not limited to cross-party wrangling. Top Republicans also attacked each other over the Israeli crisis.The former vice-president and presidential hopeful Mike Pence seized the opportunity to take a pot shot at his former running mate Trump as well as two other rivals in the Republican presidential contest.Pence told CNN’s State of the Union that the Middle East violence was partly catalysed by their calls for America to withdraw from the world stage. He pointed his finger specifically at the former US president, the entrepreneur, and the Florida governor respectively who have raised doubts about US funding to support Ukraine.“This is what happens when we have leading voices like Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis signaling retreat from America’s role as leader of the free world. What happened in Ukraine was an unprovoked invasion by Russia, what happened this weekend was an unprovoked invasion by Hamas into Israel,” he said.Top Republicans also lambasted their party peers for the vacuum in leadership in the House of Representatives at such a critical moment. Last week Kevin McCarthy was ousted as speaker of the House by the hard-right flank of the party, and a replacement has yet to be found.Another presidential hopeful, the former governor of New Jersey Chris Christie, said that the outbreak of fighting in the Middle East had made a bad business on Capitol Hill worse. “The actions taken by some members of my party were wholly irresponsible without this going on, they’re now putting an even brighter light on the irresponsibility of not having someone in place,” he told ABC’s This Week.Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House foreign affairs committee, also lamented the absence of leadership. “It wasn’t my idea to oust the speaker,” he told CNN.“I thought it was dangerous. What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t even have a speaker of the House. That’s a terrible message.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US-Saudi talks amid reports of far-reaching diplomatic plan for Middle East

      by

      The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has held talks with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in Jeddah, in what was reported to be part of a bid for an ambitious and far-reaching diplomatic breakthrough in the region.The White House said Sullivan and the prince discussed on Thursday “initiatives to advance a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous and stable Middle East region interconnected with the world”.A New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, said that based on an interview with Joe Biden last week, he believed Sullivan went to Jeddah to “explore the possibility of some kind of US-Saudi-Israeli-Palestinian understanding”.The deal would amount to a grand bargain involving a US-Saudi security pact and the normalisation of Saudi-Israel diplomatic relations, in which recognition of Israel would be exchanged, on Washington’s insistence, on some improvement in the plight of Palestinians in the occupied territories, such as a halt to Jewish settlement building, and a promise never to annex the West Bank.Friedman said Biden had yet to make up his mind whether to proceed and the talks in Jeddah were exploratory. Any such deal, he said, would be “time-consuming, difficult and complex”.Bruce Riedel, a former CIA Middle East analyst and White House adviser, said the idea of such a multifaceted agreement was politically far-fetched.“The Saudis don’t want to see Joe Biden re-elected. They strongly prefer Donald Trump being back in the White House. He never questioned them on human rights issues, he supported the Yemen war 100%, he did nothing to them after [Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident] Jamal Khashoggi was murdered,” Riedel said.“So there is a big question mark about why would the Saudis do something which would be so beneficial to Joe Biden. I don’t see that in the works, and I would assume the Biden people are smart enough to recognise this.”Getting the Senate to approve a security pact with Saudi Arabia would also be extremely difficult. Republicans would not want to help Biden achieve diplomatic progress and most Democrats would resist US commitments to a Saudi monarchy with such a bad human rights record, and demand substantial gains for the Palestinians, which Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-rightwing Israeli government would not accept.Khaled Elgindy, a Palestinian expert at the Middle East Institute, said that the extremists in Netanyahu’s cabinet would “shoot down” proposals of a settlement freeze and territorial transfers within the West Bank to Palestinian Authority control, “never mind taking substantive steps toward a two-state solution, which is simply not on the table”.“The other aspect of this that I find unsettling is the way it totally sidesteps Palestinian interests and even Palestinian agency,” Elgindy said. “It’s like we’ve gone back to the days when the US, Israel and Arab states could decide the fate of Palestinians without any Palestinian involvement. This alone should disqualify it from being taken seriously – but of course it won’t.”Friedman said Saudi demands would include guarantees that the US would come to the kingdom’s defence if attacked, that Washington would allow a US-monitored Saudi civil nuclear programme, and that the kingdom could buy an advanced US air defence system, Thaad.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMatt Duss, former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, called the first demand a “non-starter” and the second and third “very bad ideas”.“Biden is weighing a world historical sucker’s bet,” Duss said on social media.Kirsten Fontenrose, a former senior director for the Gulf at the national security council during the Donald Trump administration, was also pessimistic about the chances for success.“I expect the Palestinian Authority to refuse to recognise a Saudi-Israel peace deal … the Israeli government to refuse a promise never to annex; the US Congress to refuse a collective defense pact with Saudi Arabia; the Saudi leadership to refuse to agree publicly never to weaponise their nuclear programme as long as Iran is close to doing so,” Fontenrose said. Riedel said there were more modest diplomatic gains to be won from engagement with the Saudi leadership, such as a further winding down of the conflict in Yemen, and Saudi aid to the occupied territories in the effort to forestall a third intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the expansion of settlements and other measures from an extreme Israeli government.The White House said that in his Jeddah talks, Sullivan had “reviewed significant progress to build on the benefits of the truce in Yemen that have endured over the past 16 months and welcomed ongoing UN-led efforts to bring the war to a close”. More