In its first few months in office, the Biden administration began to slowly roll out a new policy towards Israel and Palestine. The measured pace was itself telling, for the administration has been relentlessly focused on what is most pressing—addressing the pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis. And here, as elsewhere, former President Donald Trump’s blithe abandonment of longstanding American policy gave President Joe Biden’s skeletal staff of Middle East officials plenty of unraveling and restitching to do. In a policy memo drawn up in February and titled: “The US-Palestinian Reset and the Path Forward,” officials suggested reattaching the “connective tissue” destroyed in recent years, reaffirming a two-state solution and restoring funding to Palestinians.
