Palestinians against your enemies, you would be exposed to a terror campaign waged by a rival band of Palestinians, sponsored by your rivals.
What Middle East watchers call the “Palestinian veto” refers to the ability of Palestinian terrorists to destabilize any given regional order that doesn’t suit the ambitions of whoever their dominant patron happens to be. For instance, the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty came about only because Egyptian President Anwar Sadat insisted on keeping the Palestinians out. Unlike Jimmy Carter, Sadat didn’t care about a comprehensive peace in the Holy Land with the Palestinians front and center—he knew that giving the Palestinians a seat would give the Soviets and their Arab allies an opening to derail an agreement he needed to advance Egyptian interests.
On whose behalf were the Palestinians acting when they destabilized the region with their gruesome Oct. 7 attack? Iran—but also the Biden administration. The two share an interest in collapsing the traditional U.S.-led order of the Middle East that Donald Trump had restored, after Barack Obama began the process of dismantling it.
Up until Obama, the pillars of America’s security architecture were the Persian Gulf’s oil-rich Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, and, in the eastern Mediterranean, Israel and Egypt. Early in his first term Obama signaled he intended to undo that order when he gave a speech in Cairo and invited officials from the Muslim Brotherhood, existential enemies of the military regime then led by Hosni Mubarak. Within two years, the White House withdrew its support for Mubarak during the Arab Spring revolutions and ushered in a Muslim Brotherhood government. Egypt became the first pillar of the old U.S. security order to fall.
Obama’s aides made it clear that his second term would be devoted to securing a nuclear deal with Iran. The purpose of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was not to prevent an Iranian bomb—in fact, the agreement legalizes the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program. Rather it was to realign U.S. interests with Tehran while stiffing traditional U.S. partners, especially Riyadh and Jerusalem, the other regional pillars of the American order. To cap off his eight years of dismantling the instruments of U.S. policy in the Middle East, Obama’s final foreign affairs initiative was to push a U.N. Security Council resolution adopting the Palestinian position that Israel was in violation of international law by occupying, among other places, historic Jewish holy sites.
Then came Donald Trump, who not only reversed Obama’s realignment but reinforced Washington’s traditional security architecture. Trump’s first official trip was to Saudi Arabia. He explained that the U.S.-Saudi alliance was good for the U.S. because it meant affordable oil, investment in America, and American jobs. Trump defended the Saudis when retired U.S. spies, The Washington Post, Obama operatives, and foreign intelligence services joined in an information operation to isolate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the murder of former Saudi intelligence official Jamal Khashoggi.
That was only the beginning, as step by step Trump erased Obama’s legacy in the Middle East, and restored the pillars of the American-led regional security order. He backed the military regime in Cairo, and moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. He acknowledged Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley, and large parts of the West Bank. The Trump-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and other regional states, known as the Abraham Accords, reaffirmed the U.S.-led regional order by binding our allies to each other—and thus to America.
Crucially, the Abraham Accords also ignored the Palestinians. After all, the Palestinians could never normalize relations without forfeiting their ability to project power and demand tribute. Like Sadat, Trump and his diplomats understood that peace could only be made by sidelining the Palestinians and whoever was sponsoring them, in this case Iran.
Naturally, the Abraham Accords were repugnant to the Obama faction. The normalization deals undid Obama’s balance of power project—i.e., strengthen U.S. adversaries at the expense of allies—and pushed the left’s longtime darlings, the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic to the margins. Accordingly, the Biden administration unfroze money to fill Iran’s war chest and undermined regional normalization under cover of expanding it to Saudi Arabia. Any direct talks between Israel and Saudi, the steward of Islam’s holy shrines, would, if only for the sake of protocol, have to involve the Palestinian cause. Thus, the Biden administration put the Palestinians at the center of the region again.
That’s how we got to Oct. 7. Contrary to the Biden administration’s talking points, the Iranians didn’t see Saudi-Israeli normalization talks as an existential threat; rather, they correctly saw it, and other Biden moves, as an invitation to disrupt and destabilize the regional order that Trump had rebuilt. Subsequently, in traditional regional fashion, the Iranians mobilized their Palestinian proxy.
And yet for many good-faith observers, it remains a mystery why Obama and then Biden sought to undo the U.S. order of the Middle East, an arrangement that has kept a volatile and strategically vital region relatively stable. Is it ego alone that requires Obama and his party must be proven right, and that Trump’s successes must be transformed into failures at America’s expense—and at the additional price of destroying the prospects of a relatively hopeful future for Middle Easterners?
The key fact is this: The regional order that Trump restored has long been part of the formula that ensures continued U.S. domestic peace and prosperity. To put it another way, the moves made by Obama and now Biden are not primarily about destabilizing the Middle East. Rather, they are designed to destabilize the United States.
The Biden team’s moves to shelter Hamas are best understood in the context of a revolutionary program of domestic initiatives that aim to reconstitute American society on a new basis, and which in turn require the outright rejection of the country’s history and culture, its existing social arrangements, and constitutional order. The current regime has weaponized the security state, labeled its opponents “domestic terrorists,” and waged a third-world-style campaign against the opposition candidate because it’s a revisionist faction. Its political and cultural manifesto is a program for remaking America, whether through social pressure, or censorship, or bureaucratic fiat, or threats of violence, or actual violence. Among other devices to transform America, the Biden administration has opened the border to at least 7 million illegal aliens (and counting), many from places in the Middle East where Hamas is revered, and for whom political violence means steady, well-paid work.
It’s not the traditional U.S.-led order in the Middle East that the revisionist faction, Obama’s faction, is most determined to dismantle but rather the existing order in the U.S. And it’s not Israel that it’s most keen to grind into dust, but America. For the party that Obama remade in his image to triumph at home, the Palestinians must win.
