Biden’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan is our best hope. Here’s why
An AI-generated image shows the acronym needed to sell the Biden Doctrine: “No one’s going anywhere.” Illustration by Pixlr.com
Senior Columnist Rob Eshman February 5, 2024
If President Joe Biden’s Middle East peace plan is to work, he needs to find a simple way to win over the hearts and minds of Palestinians, Israelis, their supporters and opponents abroad.
I think I can offer that in just one, hashtag-ready word: #noga.
OK, #noga is actually an acronym for four words: “No one’s going anywhere.”
This is the fundamental logic behind the plan that Biden soft-launched in a New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, who has close ties to the administration. “We are about to see a new Biden administration strategy unfold to address this multifront war involving Gaza, Iran, Israel and the region,” Friedman wrote.
As he outlined it, the three-track “Biden Doctrine” would involve:
- Confronting Iran, which has worked for decades as a spoiler in any Middle East peace efforts, particularly through funding of terror groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis;
- Creating a Palestinian state NOW — the all-caps are Friedman’s — in the West Bank and Gaza Strip;
- Strengthening the U.S. security alliance with Saudi Arabia and normalizing Saudi relations with Israel.
The success of any one of these is inextricably linked to the others. No Palestinian state, no Saudi and regional acceptance. No confronting Iran, no regional stability. There are 1,000 ways the Biden Doctrine could fail, but if it succeeds the plan would provide the Palestinians and the Israelis with something neither can figure out how to achieve: a future.
I understand that Israelis are in no mood to hear about peace talks, and neither are Palestinians. A poll last December showed 82% of West Bank Palestinians approve of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Among Israelis, according to a January poll, 75% said Israel should not bow to U.S. pressure to lessen the severity of its bombing.
But at some point the fighting will end. Unless Israelis and Palestinians want the result of unbearable tragedy to be nothing but a hiatus before the next tragedy, there has to be a different path forward.
#Noga is the message Biden needs to take directly to the Israeli and Palestinian people, because their leaders are either too afraid or too deluded themselves to hear it. There are about 15 million humans between the river and the sea. Draw the lines any way you want. Make any arrangement you need to. But no one’s going anywhere.
For 75 years, Palestinians have tried to change that reality through war and terror. How did that work out? The population of Israel is 12 times larger than it was at the state’s founding in 1948, when Arabs armies first tried to destroy it. Arab citizens are more deeply integrated in the country than ever before. The economy doesn’t seem to flinch. Since Oct. 7, the Tel Aviv stock market has rallied and the shekel is higher against the dollar than it was before Hamas attacked.
“We, as Palestinians, will only survive if we decide that the narrative we told ourselves no longer works,” Rajaa Natour, a Palestinian Israeli journalist, wrote in Haaretz last December. “We will only survive if we embark on the painful journey to create an alternative story, so all violence will be a red line.” Using immoral means to fight a moral cause is a dead end, she wrote, one that your enemy can use as readily as you.
“‘At any cost,’” Natour wrote, referring to the rallying cry of Palestinian militant movements, “is the equivalent of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself.’”
I want to send that sentence to every American college kid chanting “By any means necessary!” — the tone-deaf corollary of “at any cost.” It’s the people closest to the conflict who pay the highest price for such words. If these protesters really want to see an end to Palestinian suffering, I have a new chant for them: N-O-G-A.
Israeli Jews need to hear it too.
For nearly two decades, especially under the governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has chosen to manage, not solve, the conflict. Management entails its own kind of violence. Not only the intermittent bombings and incursions on Gaza, but also, “arbitrary killings; torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by Israeli officials; arbitrary arrest or detention,” and “credible reports of arbitrary killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli civilians.”
Those quotes, by the way, are not from Amnesty International; they’re from a 2022 U.S. State Department report.
How’s that working out?
Support for the Palestinian cause, internationally and among Americans, has grown. The U.K. is on the verge of recognizing Palestinian statehood. No one’s going anywhere.
If he hopes to hammer out an agreement, Biden has to hammer that point, again and again. Even the horrors of Oct. 7 and the widespread destruction and massive death toll in Gaza that followed have not changed that fundamental truth.
Israeli Jews aren’t going “back” to Europe or the U.S. — 70% of them were born in Israel, and 50% of them have roots in the Middle East, anyway. The Palestinians aren’t going to Jordan or the Sinai. Why? Because they are Palestinians.
It has always struck me that there are not two sides to this conflict, but three: People who fight only for Israel, people who fight only for Palestinians, and people who fight for Israelis and Palestinians to live peacefully and fairly in the same land.
I know there are many Jews and Muslims in that third group. But what’s frustrating is that the third group doesn’t hold marches. It doesn’t scream memes on social media. Its organizations are miniscule compared to the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups that dominate the discourse, condemning the region to more bloodshed with their self-righteous certitudes.
But we the people of the third group, often dismissed as dreamers, see reality for what it is. And now we may have in Joe Biden a U.S. president with a plan, willing to deliver our message: Two people have to share one land — because no one’s going anywhere.
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