Zaha Hassan and Daniel Levy write:

The human rights community—including Palestinians, Israelis, and global groups—is documenting Israeli practices that they argue constitute the crime of apartheid at a moment when Democrats are increasingly rallying under the banner of racial justice. That will make the notion that justice is desirable—except for Palestinians—much harder to sustain. This rhetorical acrobatic act will also be hard to pull off in the international arena. The “America is back” message has been all about a law-abiding, norm-promoting, rights-respecting nation leading a resurgence of democracies.

U.S. foreign policy has always been good at managing inconsistency and hypocrisy, but being so out on a limb and so far from these professed commitments and values when it comes to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians exposes the U.S. government to vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by others. It’s not hard to imagine the refrain in Beijing: “You say Uyghurs, we say Palestinians.”

A rights-based approach to U.S. policy in the region would be more consistent with Biden’s overall foreign-policy agenda and would require less U.S. investment, not more. It could reverse the current negative trend lines and establish a new scaffolding on which future peace efforts could be built.

To achieve this, simply reversing the egregious excesses of the Trump administration will not be enough. The status quo ante, one embraced by previous Democratic administrations, already consisted of an upside-down incentive structure that worked against peace, in particular by guaranteeing Israeli impunity, thereby encouraging the most extreme tendencies in Israeli politics and entailing a heavy investment of U.S. diplomatic effort and capital.

This is not the time for Washington to offer a new blueprint for a solution nor to refocus efforts on sustaining a peace process that has long since suffered from the law of diminishing returns and failed to deliver in any meaningful sense, placing negotiations and territorial tinkering above the rights of people on the ground.

U.S. policy has been good at making sure Israelis get the security and well-being they deserve. U.S. policy has been spectacularly bad at applying those standards to Palestinians and at challenging the separate and unequal system in place. Things are guaranteed to get worse if Washington continues down this path—even if the diplomatic destructiveness of the previous administration is replaced by the apparent good intentions of its successor. The way to reverse that is to focus on human rights, dignity, and the right to live in freedom and equality. [Continue reading…]