Rejoining the JCPOA (Iran Deal)

“It’s clear that Biden and Harris intend to go back to the disastrous Iran deal,” Klein Halevi said. “From my perspective, there is no greater existential threat to Israel than that deal.”

Dov Waxman, a professor and the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert foundation chair in Israel studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), agreed that “the issue of Iran, particularly its nuclear program, is likely to be the greatest source of tension and potentially, conflict, between the Biden administration and the Israeli government.”

The 2015 Iran deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — was widely unpopular in Israel. In a controversial speech to Congress about the threat of the deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned the agreement “doesn’t block Iran’s path to the bomb; it paves Iran’s path to the bomb.”
The U.S. left the Iran deal in May 2018 under President Trump. Biden has said he would rejoin if Iran returns to strict compliance and would “work with our allies to strengthen and extend it, while more effectively pushing back against Iran’s other destabilizing activities.” Netanyahu has already expressed his opposition to the U.S. rejoining the agreement.

Historian Itamar Rabinovich, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said a major sticking point is how the Biden administration will approach the negotiations with Iran.

“They want to come back into the agreement and then negotiate Iranian concessions,” Rabinovich said, adding that anyone with experience “knows that you actually do not begin by granting and then asking for concessions, but you negotiate the concessions and then you add in what you’re willing to grant.”

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Peace Efforts

Mohammed Dajani Daoudi, a former Weston fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a prominent peace activist, said in an email that when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “although Biden’s policy will not ignore the Palestinian side as Trump did,” it will still “give more weight to Israeli concerns than to Palestinian interests.”

Dajani said that the U.S. relationship with both Israel and the Palestinians under President Biden will depend more on Israeli and Palestinian leaders than on American-led initiatives. As Israel prepares for a national election in March 2021, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announced parliamentary and presidential elections set for May and July, the first Palestinian elections in 15 years.

“New leadership with courage and vision would steer the two nations towards peace,” Dajani said, citing a quote from Martin Indyk, a former U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, “As long as Netanyahu leads Israel and Abbas leads the PA, the chances that the gap between them could somehow close aren’t very likely.”

UCLA professor Waxman said he did not expect the Biden administration to push for a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the near term, given that “the prospects for peace talks to be successful are practically nil under the current circumstances, at least with the current leadership in Jerusalem and in Ramallah.”
Instead,

Waxman predicted, the Biden administration will focus on “trying to maintain at least the possibility for a two-state solution to the conflict down the line.” This would include preventing Israel from annexing large parts of the West Bank and building new settlements, which many view as undercutting the prospects for a two-state solution.
Troy said he hoped the Biden administration would look beyond old paradigms for resolving the conflict.

“It will be a sad day, for the U.S., the world, the Palestinan people and Israel, if Biden’s people go back to the stale, disproven Oslo assumptions that the road to Mideast peace runs through the dictators in Ramallah (and now in Gaza too),” he said.
“Biden needs the newly-updated post-Trump-Kushner GPS showing that there are many routes to take to Middle East peace and progress. The more ties with Israel proliferate, the more Palestinian extremists will be isolated,” Troy added.