Published: 6 November 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
US PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem. He recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. He turned a blind eye to Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and went so far as to appoint a well-known advocate of the settlement movement as his ambassador to Israel.
He cut off US aid to the Palestinians and broke off ties with the Palestinian leadership. And as if to rub even more salt in their wounds, he brokered several peace accords between Israel and other countries in the region.
During Trump’s four years in office, U.S. Mideast policy underwent a radical transformation.
Joe Biden served as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama and before that, as a leading Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If he is elected, will America’s relationship with Israel go back to what it was during the Obama administration – or will he continue where Trump left off?
Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington, predicts that Biden would revert to the more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that characterized the Obama administration and others before it.
“There will definitely be changes from the way Trump did things and more of a move back to the direction of the Obama days,” says Rabinovich, a professor emeritus in Middle East history at Tel Aviv University and former president of that institution.
FULL STORY What a Biden win would mean for US ties with Israel(Haaretz)
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