Joe Biden arrived in Israel this Wednesday to express his solidarity with the country attacked on Saturday October 7 by Hamas, but also to try to defuse the crisis. After meeting his Israeli counterpart, the American president was also due to visit the heads of state of Egypt and Jordan, and the head of the Palestinian Authority during a quadripartite forum in Amman. This was, however, canceled by the Jordanian authorities, due to the explosion of a hospital in Gaza which caused hundreds of deaths. On Tuesday, the Pentagon also announced that 2,000 American troops were standing by for deployment to the region.
Since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, the United States has always maintained a special relationship with Israel, and played an essential role in the various stages of the “peace process” between Israel and Palestine, including the multiple attempts at over the years have so far always failed. The tenant of the White House was himself confronted for the first time with the conflict during a trip to Israel in 1973, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, a visit which he often mentioned as founding.
However, if certain principles of the bilateral relationship remain immutable, particularly in terms of security cooperation, American policy has evolved according to the different administrations.
Between the two world wars, the period of the British mandate in Palestine, the United States supported English policy in favor of the creation of a Jewish state. This support turned into real commitment during the Second World War: in 1944, President Roosevelt (1933-1945) confirmed his party’s wish to see the Zionist project succeed at the conference of American Zionists.
In 1947, the Americans supported the vote at the UN on Resolution 181, the plan for the partition of Palestine which would form the basis of the new borders. This plan was accepted by the leaders of the Yishuv, but rejected by those of the Arab community: the day after its proclamation, a civil war broke out between the two communities, while the British forces gradually withdrew from the territory. Six months later, the State of Israel was proclaimed on the basis of the plan of Resolution 181, and the first Arab-Israeli war began.
If the United States then affirmed the need to grant humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees, the country’s support for the new Jewish state was unequivocal: President Harry Truman (1945-1953) was the first leader to recognize the State of Israel. Israel.
But the budding relationship between the two states suffered a significant setback in 1956, after the attack on the Suez Canal in Egypt by France, the United Kingdom and Israel, which the United States strongly condemned.
President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) pushed for troop withdrawal. This did not prevent him from emphasizing, on February 20, 1957, that “the people of Israel, like those of the United States, are imbued with a religious faith and a sense of moral values.”
Paradoxically, the bilateral relationship emerges from the crisis strengthened: the void left by the French and English withdrawal from the region and the context of the Cold War which extends to the Middle East makes Israel an ally of choice for the United States, supported by an American Jewish community favorable to the Zionist cause.
Shortly before his election, John F. Kennedy (1961-1963) declared on August 16, 1960 that “Israel was not created to disappear. Israel was created to endure and prosper.” During his mandate, a program of arms sales to the Jewish state was established, marking the beginning of military cooperation which would only continue to grow. The threat posed by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who rallied to the Soviet camp, and his support in the region made Israel an essential strategic counterweight in the eyes of the Americans.
In 1967, the Six-Day War and the Israeli occupation of territories in Syria and Egypt definitively placed the United States on Israel’s side, and allowed the Americans to adopt a new role within the region: that of mediator of the conflict around the occupied territories.
President Lyndon Johnson (1963-1969) supported the vote on UN Resolution 242. In principle, the resolution obliges Israel to leave the 70,000 km² occupied at the end of the war, which includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Egyptian Sinai, the Syrian Golan and the Gaza Strip (under the aegis of the Egypt since 1949), but it will then be widely criticized for its ambiguities.
Ahead of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, United States financial and military aid to Israel increased. While supporting its ally against Egypt and Syria, the United States encourages the negotiation of a ceasefire under the aegis of the United Nations. American power will pay dearly for this support for the Jewish state when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) responds by imposing an embargo on the delivery of oil to the United States, a crisis at the origin of the first oil shock.
It was also during this period that Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under President Richard Nixon (1969-1974), implemented his “small steps strategy”, which consisted of favoring multiple bilateral exchanges between the different Arab states and Israel. If this policy made it possible to achieve certain short-term objectives, such as the reopening of the Suez Canal after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Geneva conference of 1977 saw the attempts at agreements fail.
Also read September 17, 1978: the Camp David agreements, a visa for Israeli-Egyptian peace
But Kissinger’s “small-step diplomacy” made it possible to reach several peace negotiations between Egypt and Israel, which culminated in the agreements concluded at Camp David between Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin, welcomed for the occasion by the President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981). Since his election, the latter has not hidden the special attention given to the Jewish State, as evidenced by a declaration of May 12, 1977: “We have a special relationship with Israel (…). Our primary commitment in the Middle East is to protect Israel’s right to exist.”
The Camp David Accords provide for a bilateral peace agreement between Israel and Egypt on the one hand, and a peace project in the Middle East on the other. However, the latter is then criticized, both for its ambiguity in the text and for the absence of the Palestinians at the negotiating table. Rather than following the example of the Egyptian president, other Arab states are distancing themselves from him. Three years later, Anwar el-Sadat will pay with his life for this reconciliation with the Hebrew State.
The coming to power of the new administration of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989), which declared that it did not support either the annexation by Israel of the occupied territories, nor the creation of a Palestinian state, marked a step backwards.
Also read September 13, 1993: a historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat
“We stood with Israel in its beginnings, 41 years ago. We stand with Israel today. And we will be by his side in the future. No one should doubt this fundamental commitment,” declared the new president George H. W. Bush (1989-1993) upon his election. On March 6, 1991, in a new global geopolitical context after the fall of the Soviet Union, Bush senior called for the organization of an international conference. It took place in Madrid on October 30, 1991, and was intended to initiate a peace process through two parallel paths, one between Israel and the Arab States, the other between Israel and Palestine. If the negotiations do not succeed in Madrid, they open diplomatic channels between the United States, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
This multiplication of exchanges culminated with the signing of the Oslo Accords between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a victory for American President Bill Clinton (1993-2001), because if the United States did not participate to the agreement, the latter is signed at the White House.
The agreements allow the formation of the Palestinian Authority and provide, in the longer term, for the organization of Palestinian elections, and the conditions for Israel’s disengagement from the occupied territories, among others. But the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli ultra-nationalist, unfavorable to peace, cast a chill on the process underway. The barely restored climate of trust is once again under attack.
Far from achieving the expected effects, the peace process remains at an impasse. In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state or the division of Jerusalem, became prime minister.
“America and Israel share a special bond. Our relations are unique among all nations,” recalled Bill Clinton on September 10, 1998. That same year, the “Clinton Parameters” were proposed in an attempt to breathe new life into the negotiations. They define the broad outlines of the creation of a Palestinian state, and provide for a two-state solution.
In 2000, the American president organized a new conference at Camp David with Ehud Barak, the new Israeli prime minister, and the leader of the PLO, which ended in failure: considering that the conditions proposed to the Palestinians were not satisfactory, Yasser Arafat refuses to sign the agreement.
After the attacks of September 11, 2001 and during the mandate of George W. Bush (2001-2009), a strategic change took place. The United States focuses on the “war on terror” with the invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Israel establishes itself as an essential ally in this strategy of fighting international terrorism and ” double containment” of Iran and Iraq.
In 2003, President Bush proposed a “road map” for peace, aiming to create an independent Palestinian state. In 2005, he acknowledged in an official letter to Ariel Sharon the existence of settlements in the West Bank.
In order to promote the two-state solution, supposed to restore peace, Bush junior organized the Annapolis peace conference in 2007, in which 52 countries participated, including 16 Arab states. Although President Bush, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas initially agreed to continue negotiations, no official agreement was signed.
Barack Obama (2009 – 2017) becomes the first American president to describe Israel’s presence in the West Bank as an occupation. Under his presidency also saw the first official UN condemnation of Israeli settlement construction in 2016.
His successor Donald Trump (2017-2021) breaks with decades of American policy aimed at maintaining a certain neutrality in the conflict. In 2017, his decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state and to move the American embassy there caused a diplomatic outcry.
In 2019, the American president recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Then, in January 2020, Donald Trump published his draft reconciliation plan, dubbed “peace for prosperity”, which envisages the creation of a Palestinian state while granting Israel sovereignty over an essentially undivided Jerusalem, relegating the Palestinian capital to a small part of East Jerusalem, and authorizing a 70% reduction of Palestinian territories in the West Bank. The plan is rejected by the Palestinian Authority.
In August 2020, the Trump administration mediated the normalization deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, known as the Abraham Accords. The agreement involves Israel temporarily suspending its plans to annex the West Bank. Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan then announced their own agreements to normalize relations with Israel, again encouraged by American power.
Since his election, Joe Biden has encouraged the processes of normalization of relations between Arab countries and Israel, while condemning the settlements in the West Bank more firmly than his predecessor, and supporting a two-state solution. During a conflict between Israel and Hamas in 2021, the United States again played a leading role in brokering a ceasefire.
