In Los Angeles, housing is scarce and homelessness is rising. That’s not a coincidence.
On April 20, a US District Court judge put his foot down.
“Here in Los Angeles, how did racism become embedded in the policies and structures of our new city,” he wrote. “What if there was a conscious effort, a deliberate intent, a cowardice of inaction?”
In more than 100 pages, Judge David O. Carter detailed the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles and its disparate impacts on Black residents. He was ruling on a case brought by the LA Alliance for Human Rights, a group formed in recent years for the purpose of suing the City and County of Los Angeles over the homelessness emergency.
Leaning on what some experts tell Vox are novel legal theories, Carter took homelessness policymaking into his own hands with a bold approach that seems heartening at first glance — but many of the court’s proposed reforms falter under scrutiny.
Among other things, Carter’s order requires:
- The City of Los Angeles to place $1 billion in escrow within seven days. (Carter later paused this request.)
- The City and County of Los Angeles to offer shelter to all unaccompanied women and children living in Skid Row, a neighborhood that contains thousands of homeless Angelenos, by July 19, 2021.
- The City and County of Los Angeles to offer shelter to all families living in Skid Row by August 18, 2021.
- The City and County of Los Angeles to offer shelter to the rest of the general population living in Skid Row by October 17, 2021.
The orders kicked up a firestorm among homelessness advocates, affordable housing developers, and local governments. The homelessness crisis has ballooned in Los Angeles — in a June 2020 report, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority revealed an astonishing 66,436 unhoused people, a 12.7 percent increase over the previous year.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512686/GettyImages_1208448478.jpg)
Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Few disagree that this is an emergency; in fact, Carter’s opinion makes liberal use of the defendants’ language railing against the state of homelessness several times. However, there is vast disagreement over how to fix the problem, leaving homelessness advocates divided over Carter’s decision.
It’s a dispute that highlights the difficulties of solving the growing homelessness crisis in many of America’s cities. As the issues become more visible to residents, searches for a quick fix can direct government funds toward bad policies. In reality, the crisis of homelessness is inextricable from the existing national shortage of affordable housing, which itself is the result of numerous policy choices made every day by local and state governments.
Why many homelessness experts don’t think the $1 billion solution is the answer
The legal case in question, LA Alliance for Human Rights v. City of Los Angeles, was brought by a group that some have said represents business interests in the Skid Row neighborhood. (The Alliance, which declined to share its list of members with Vox, self-describes as a “group of small business owners, residents, and social service providers.”)
Daniel Conway, a policy advisor for the Alliance, tells Vox the goal of the lawsuit was to require the government to produce “immediate housing options” and to begin restricting the ability of people to sleep outside. Conway added that the effort is not supposed to be a “law enforcement action.” Instead, he says, “This is about having outreach workers, social workers, therapists” get homeless people into temporary housing.
Of course, if someone refuses shelter, law enforcement — not social workers — is responsible for enforcing homelessness criminalization ordinances.
Carter’s order affirmed a lot of what the Alliance was looking for. It also sparked backlash.
The defendants immediately took issue with the order to set aside $1 billion in an escrow account.
LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office told me it doesn’t “just have a billion dollars sitting around in cash.” In response, Carter ended up modifying his order a few days later to require Los Angeles to draft a plan to ensure that $1 billion is spent to alleviate homelessness.
The concerns didn’t stop there. Part of the funds to be appropriated for temporary housing would be pulled from the Prop HHH Supportive Housing Loan Program (HHH), which is meant to provide long-term housing.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512656/AP_21036028643542.jpg)
Damian Dovarganes/AP
That program, which issues bonds to subsidize developing housing for homeless and at-risk Angelenos, has had its struggles. Nearly halfway through its 10-year tenure, HHH has produced only 7 percent of the housing units it was supposed to create, according to the city dashboard tracking its progress.
Still, the plan was meant to create long-term solutions, and now that money will be used on housing that, by definition, is only a temporary fix. Moreover, $976 million (or 81 percent) of the bond program’s revenue has already been committed.
Carter’s order immediately threw affordable housing developers into uncertainty, as existing projects depending on that funding may be at risk if the city is required to reallocate funds.
“Nonprofit developers are trying to figure out how [the reallocation of the HHH funds] affects their developments,” says Jet Doye, vice president of development and advancement at Skid Row Housing Trust, which provides and manages permanent supportive housing to at-risk Angelenos. Doye explained that requiring all HHH funding to go toward temporary housing solutions could undermine many of these projects.
“Certainty is a really important concept [in residential development],” Alan Greenlee, executive director of the Southern California Association of Non-Profit Housing, tells Vox. “So when the court steps in and says, ‘I’m going to change the rules in pretty significant ways,’ it really creates a lot of confusion and anxiety. … I think that the injunction has been really disruptive to the work that we’re doing.”
But perhaps the most worrying part of Carter’s order is this sentence, buried at the end: “After adequate shelter is offered, the Court will let stand any constitutional ordinance consistent with the holdings of Boise and Mitchell.”
Martin v. City of Boise and Mitchell v. City of Los Angeles are cases that explore the limits of criminalizing homelessness. The Martin case questioned the constitutionality of two city ordinances restricting people from sleeping or camping on public property. The Mitchell ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed against Los Angeles by four homeless residents who accused police of “confiscating and then destroying” their personal property without a warrant. The specific principles each case established are complicated, but by invoking their names, experts say Carter is indicating that once an offer of temporary shelter has been made, Los Angeles would be free to forcibly clear homeless folks who refuse to accept it.
“One of the concerns is that this injunction will allow for the criminalization of homelessness and then resulting action to move homeless people along with no regard to actually where they’re going to go,” Greenlee explained.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512691/GettyImages_1147031674.jpg)
Frederick J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images
There are many reasons why individuals might reject offers of temporary shelter and thus could be vulnerable to forced removal. As the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board writes: “It can take outreach workers weeks if not months to persuade homeless people to accept a shelter bed; this is a population inured to the hardships of the streets, many suffering from addiction or mental illness, and suspicious of other outreach workers who made promises they didn’t keep.”
Eric Tars, legal director at the National Homelessness Law Center, got more literal. It’s not just suspicion of help, he says — it’s that the help offered might actually come at too high a cost: “We often talk about the three P’s: pets, partners, and possessions.”
Many shelters bar people from bringing their pets, which some unhoused residents are unwilling to do. That’s hard for some people to understand, Tars noted. “You’re refusing shelter because of a pet? But that doesn’t credit the emotional importance that these animals may serve for people in their times of crisis and trauma,” he says.
Because many shelters are single-sex or sex-segregated facilities, often people are asked to separate from their significant others, which can be a deal breaker.
And, finally, Tars tells Vox that shelters frequently don’t allow homeless people to bring their possessions with them, even though they’re often the only items people have been able to keep safe since becoming homeless.
Shelters often present other barriers, too. They can have strict rules about when you can come and go, they can be located far from your work or family, and they may not have nearby transportation options, making it impossible for residents there to build a life.
With all of these barriers (and more), it’s not hard to understand why some refuse temporary shelters. Even when they do go, the experience can be undesirable.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512251/GettyImages_1231946669.jpg)
Wally Skalij/Getty Images
Erika D. Smith, a columnist for the LA Times, spoke to several people who were recently removed from another homeless encampment in Los Angeles:
Those who accepted hotel and motel rooms said they felt jerked around and unfairly put upon by the strict Project Roomkey rules. Some were ready to leave, calling into question whether we can really call the clearing of Echo Park a “success” if homeless people are so unhappy with what happened that they refuse to stay in the housing that’s offered.
Rev. Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission and a well-known advocate for homeless Angelenos, strongly supports the push for temporary shelters, one of the few people Vox spoke with to have that view. He cited the need for urgency: “No more straw-man arguments against shelters. … 5,700 people have died on the street. The status quo can’t continue.”
But do shelters work?
The limits of shelters
With thousands on the streets during a pandemic, it can feel like the obvious solution is whatever gets them to a safe home immediately. So, for many, temporary shelters seem like the answer. But beyond the reasons why many homeless people refuse to go to shelters, there are even more reasons why allocating energy and time to them won’t actually solve the problem.
“It’s a doctor who gets the diagnosis right but the prescription completely wrong,” Tars says in response to Carter’s 110-page decision.
The root cause of ballooning homelessness seen in high-cost cities over the past few decades is rising housing prices. Housing insecurity is a fact of life, but tent cities springing up in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington, DC, are a modern phenomenon caused primarily by the burdensome costs of renting. Before the 1980s, “There were people with mental illness, lots of people with substance abuse disorders, lots of poor people, all the same issues, but there was not widespread homelessness,” National Alliance to End Homelessness CEO Nan Roman told Bloomberg CityLab in 2020. “What changed was the housing.”
A 2018 Zillow report tracking the relationship between rent affordability and homelessness concluded that “communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.”
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512911/Screen_Shot_2021_05_13_at_4.42.48_PM.png)
Zillow
A US Government Accountability Office report in 2017 found that nearly half of all renter households were “rent burdened” (that is, paying more than 30 percent of their household income on rent). For extremely low-income Americans, the picture was even worse — 72 percent of them were spending more than half their income on rent. The situation in Los Angeles is especially stark: A USC Sol Price Center for Social Innovation survey conducted from January to October 2019 found that 75 percent of LA households spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.
What’s more, rents in LA increased 28 percent between 2000 and 2010 while median household incomes rose just 1.2 percent, according to the LA Department of City Planning. All of these numbers mean the same thing: The number of people at risk of homelessness has risen sharply.
This precarious position means that even if every person who is currently homeless were offered a residence today, more people will continue to experience homelessness as minor financial emergencies push their families into economic despair. Stopping this flow requires permanent and affordable housing solutions. As the LA Times editorial board writes: “The order treats skid row’s homeless population as an identifiable group, when in fact the population fluctuates. … In addition to the people who come and go on the street, there are those who move into and out of interim shelters in the neighborhood.”
Heidi Marston, executive director of the Los Angeles Homelessness Services Authority, noted to NBC that while LA County rehouses an average of 207 people every day, 227 people fall into homelessness at the same time.
In his opinion, Carter calls prioritizing long-term housing a “deadly decision” because the slow pace of affordable housing development ignores the tens of thousands of people left in the streets. But the problem is not that LA has prioritized long-term housing over temporary shelters — the problem is that LA’s solution for long-term housing is insufficient.
In a document disseminated five days following his original ruling, Carter clarified that “the Court’s preliminary injunction calls for both interim shelter and long-term housing,” but added that his order to clear Skid Row by mid-October remained in effect. So if Los Angeles were to comply, the solution would have to be temporary shelters.
Just give people money — and ensure abundant housing
The most direct way Los Angeles currently perpetuates racial and economic segregation is through exclusionary zoning laws, which restrict the type and supply of housing and often place limits on more affordable options like apartment buildings and multiplexes in favor of single-family homes that are out of reach for lower-income residents.
Los Angeles has refused to respond to its massive housing shortage by liberalizing its zoning laws. Carter touches on this in his opinion: “Without major rezoning initiatives, Los Angeles will continue to lack the infrastructure to meet the homelessness crisis and stem growing housing insecurity.”
One key example of this happened in March, when the LA City Council voted to oppose a bill that would “allow small-to-medium-sized apartment buildings to be built” near highly used transit stops. This type of legislation would help increase the housing supply — making it legal to build more than one home on one lot means more people can find a place to live. This isn’t a quick fix, but smaller units are generally more affordable than single-family homes due to both their size and the ability of developers to collect rents from multiple families on a single lot. Policies such as these can start to alleviate the pressure on hot housing markets and bring down rents.
But the city’s leadership — not only City Council members but also the mayor, Garcetti, who has said he wants to tackle homelessness — were against the measure. Council members alleged the bill would start “blowing up” and “chainsawing” neighborhoods, and Garcetti said he thought apartments just “wouldn’t ‘look right,’” according to an LA Times opinion article written by LAplus director Mark Vallianatos.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512274/GettyImages_1161641056.jpg)
Paul Chesne/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
LA’s leadership is still committed to the very policies that are putting so many people on the brink of homelessness. The reason for this is clear: Many of LA’s own residents are unwilling to see affordable housing built in their communities. Though 77 percent of voters approved a 2016 bond measure that created the Prop HHH Supportive Housing Loan Program, Greenlee said neighbors often oppose the developments in practice.
“If you look at what’s happened in places like Venice or even Hollywood, the communities have turned out in force to protest the sighting of permanent supportive housing in their communities,” he added. “They’re classist, homelessness-ist. … People just don’t want that in their communities.”
Carter’s remedy does require the LA City Council Homelessness and Poverty Committee to report back with specific actions to address the crisis, including “the possibility of rezoning to accommodate more R3 (multi-family) zoning.” But in comparison to the bold changes he demands for temporary housing, it’s clear his heart really isn’t in it.
“If [Carter] had ordered the city to rezone, we would have applauded it,” Doye told Vox.
For many, this solution can seem too far off. How long can people wait until rents start becoming more affordable? That’s why many advocates for the unhoused favor combining zoning reform with a dramatic expansion and liberalization of the housing voucher program to ensure low-income Americans can get help paying rent as cities attempt to undo the damage caused by decades of classist zoning laws.
It’s one way a bias toward immediate action undermines the impetus for reform. There is no way to fix the homelessness crisis without also addressing the housing shortage. These are not discrete problems, and the desire to see them as separate reflects an unwillingness to address hard political realities in favor of a “quick fix” that is anything but.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22512732/GettyImages_1215182349.jpg)
Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images
Even Apple can’t avoid employee conflict over issues like sexism.
It’s not every day that a new hire at a major tech company unleashes employee outrage, a public departure, and debates around sexism in the workplace. That’s particularly true at Apple — a secretive company that stands apart from its largest tech rival Google, which has a history of workplace activism and a culture of employee dissent.
But that’s what happened on Wednesday, when Apple abruptly parted ways with a new advertising product technology employee, Antonio García Martínez, after thousands of employees questioned his hiring.
The situation shows how tensions over gender parity in tech have persisted since exploding in November 2018 during the Google Walkout and the Me Too movement. Even a company like Apple can’t entirely avoid being swept up in internal conflicts over fraught issues like sexism and political views that have caused rifts and PR crises across the tech industry.
Nearly 2,000 Apple employees signed an internal petition by Wednesday evening that criticized Apple’s decision to hire García Martínez, citing passages from his 2016 memoir, including one in which he described “most women” in the San Francisco Bay Area as “soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit.” Silicon Valley has long been plagued by gender bias issues and inequality, and Apple employees opposed to his hiring said it was unfair to expect women at the company to work with someone who’d expressed and never apologized for misogynistic views.
García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager and writer, has previously said that passage has been quoted out of context, because he was making a positive comparison to his former romantic partner, not making a statement about women in isolation. Some people in the tech industry supporting García Martínez argued that he’s being unfairly punished for his personal writing, which they say is tongue-in-cheek and not a serious reflection of his professional treatment of women.
Ultimately, Apple sided with the protesting employees when it announced that García Martínez was no longer working at the company, just hours after the employee petition was sent to Apple executive Eddy Cue, and soon after the petition — which one organizer told Recode was not intended to become public — was reported on by The Verge.
“At Apple, we have always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace where everyone is respected and accepted,” an Apple spokesman sent in a statement. “Behavior that demeans or discriminates against people for who they are has no place here.”
The García Martínez petition marks one of the first known times that a sizable group of rank-and-file employees at Apple — a corporation known for a heads-down work culture — pushed back on a management decision with a petition, and actually succeeded in getting that decision reversed.
The whole thing also unfolded rapidly. The controversy began earlier this week when it became public that Apple had hired García Martínez to help build out Apple’s competing ads department.
When old passages from García Martínez’s book started going viral on Twitter, some Apple employees noticed and began organizing a petition internally at the company.
“We are profoundly distraught by what this hire means for Apple’s commitment to its inclusion goals, as well as its real and immediate impact on those working near Mr. García Martínez,” stated the letter, which goes on to demand an investigation into how García Martínez “published views on women and people of color were missed or ignored” in Apple’s hiring process. The letter called for Apple to take steps to prevent a similar situation from happening again.
The petition pointed to other passages in García Martínez’s memoir, including one in which he describes the physique of a former female colleague at Facebook (“composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of”), refers to an economically disadvantaged city in Silicon Valley as a “slum,” and compares a former Indian colleague to “bored auto-rickshaw drivers” in New Delhi who would “overcharge you” for a ride.
The petition didn’t specifically call for García Martínez to be fired, but it quickly gained traction and created pressure on the company to take action.
Even though many may find these passages from García Martínez’s book to be controversial, it should be noted that Chaos Monkeys was generally well-received by the tech press after it debuted in 2016 (including Recode, which interviewed him in an onstage panel at its 2019 Code Conference) — some criticism of sexism withstanding. Until recently, García Martínez was a regular freelance contributor to Wired. He has worked at at least one other tech company since publishing his memoir, other than Apple, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Which is all to say that, García Martínez’s writing, even if distasteful to some, has not obviously impacted his career until now. And some argue that in an earlier era at Apple — especially given the so-called “brilliant jerk” leadership style of former CEO and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — that García Martínez’s writing might not have been such a major issue.
But in a post Me Too world, gender and racial equality is no longer seen as an afterthought in corporate life, especially not for rank-and-file employees. And women at the company raise an important question: Should they work with someone who has said he views most women in Silicon Valley as “weak”? And if those comments were truly made in jest, should Apple and/or García Martínez have publicly clarified that more explicitly?
An Apple employee involved in writing the petition, who spoke to Recode on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, described their reaction to the news of Apple parting ways with García Martínez as “very celebratory but firm that this is only the first step,” and that organizers intend to continue pressing the company to investigate the circumstances around García Martínez’s hiring.
There are still many open questions around the situation — like if Apple was aware of García Martínez’s writing, if he was terminated or willingly resigned, and if he was given a chance to recant his earlier stated views before leaving.
Apple did not respond to Recode’s follow-up questions, and García Martínez declined to respond to a request for comment.
What we do know is Apple is just one example of how major companies across corporate America are having to grapple with the consequences of employing people who espouse views that seem to be at odds with their own stated goals on inclusivity in the workplace. On Wednesday, Apple found itself in the position of being publicly pressured by its own usually quiet workforce to stay accountable to that promise.
The Abraham Accords didn’t resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thursday’s deadly violence makes that clear.
First-term Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), who stocked his office with 13 former Trump administration staffers, thinks the eruption of violence between Israel and Hamas this week is partly President Joe Biden’s fault.
“Last fall we saw a watershed shift toward peace w/the Abraham Accords,” Haggerty tweeted on Wednesday. “The entire region was eager for more. Biden had 4 months to build on this … Instead, Biden squandered those 4 months.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee member’s case is one that other Republicans and allies of former President Trump have been making in recent days.
They note Trump brokered normalization-of-relations deals between Israel and four Arab nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. Those pacts, known as the Abraham Accords, served two main purposes.
The first was straightforward: They allowed Israel to engage openly and officially with countries that refused to recognize its existence for years. That historic development received bipartisan support in the US, and many today want Biden to build upon the foundation Trump left him.
The second was more nuanced. Many of those and other Arab nations, like Saudi Arabia, are key backers of Palestinians in their decades-long dispute with Israel. But by getting them to interact with Israel, the idea was that they might let their support for the Palestinians slip and side a little closer with the Israelis.
If that happened, the theory went, Palestinian leaders would have no choice but to negotiate a peace deal with Israel. Jared Kushner, the main architect of the accords during the Trump years, has remained confident this might happen. “We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known as the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal two months ago.
It’s hard to overstate how bold this play was. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, now Biden’s top climate envoy, told a Washington, DC, audience in 2016 that there was no chance of striking normalization pacts before signing a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians. “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world,” he said. “That is a hard reality.”
So are Hagerty and his fellow conservatives right? Are we witnessing violence that’s seen over 80 people in Gaza and seven others in Israel killed because Biden “squandered” the momentum of Trump’s Abraham Accords? Experts I spoke to are unanimous in their answer: absolutely not.
“That’s nonsense on multiple levels, to be honest,” said H.A. Hellyer, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in DC. “I just don’t really buy that argument at all,” Guy Ziv, an assistant professor at American University, also in the capital, said of the growing conservative argument.
The reason, they and others say, is that the Abraham Accords weren’t struck to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They were designed, well, to help Israel normalize relations with Arab nations.
The plight of the Palestinians was an afterthought, if even that. Along with the US, “the Abraham Accords gave Israel the impression they could proceed without anything significant with the Palestinians,” Hellyer said.
And that was a problem, because instead of trying to strike some sort of deal with the Palestinians, the Israelis realized they could push for whatever they wanted with America’s full support. In effect, the Abraham Accords emboldened the Israelis while allowing them to disregard Palestinian demands or rights.
That, simply put, doesn’t resolve a conflict. It fuels it.
The current crisis is over issues the Abraham Accords ignored
Hagerty and his ilk have a point. The Biden administration purposely aimed to stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to focus on other priorities like the coronavirus pandemic, the rise of China, and bolstering America’s democracy. To this day, the president has yet to name an ambassador to Israel or a special envoy for the crisis, and now his team is scrambling to push regional players to deescalate tensions.
That on its own would lend credence to the squandered-opportunity narrative. Such a case would ring truer, though, if the Abraham Accords had had any positive effect on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they didn’t, which means Biden’s hands-off approach and failure so far to strike another normalization deal isn’t why Israel and Gaza are warring.
What does explain the troubling fight is more local to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22513093/1232817989.jpg)
Laurent Van Der Stockt/Getty Images
Last week, Israeli police in Jerusalem blocked off the Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place for Arabs during Ramadan, sparking protests. An attempt by Jewish settlers to evict longtime Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, inflamed tensions, leading to violent clashes with Israeli police. Arab youth attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city, and Jewish extremists assailed Arab residents.
All of this culminated in a violent Israeli police raid on the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem’s holiest site for Muslims, located on the Temple Mount (the holiest site in the world for Jews).
Then Hamas, the Islamist militant group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, fired rockets at Jerusalem. Ostensibly, this was a display of solidarity with the protesters on the ground. But it appears to have been a political calculation — Hamas attempting to capitalize on Palestinian anger over the violence in Jerusalem to expand its own influence, especially in the wake of recently canceled Palestinian elections that likely would have strengthened its political position.
Israel retaliated strongly, and now rockets from Gaza rip through civilians homes in Israel, and Israeli warplanes bomb Hamas and civilian targets in Gaza.
Little of that has anything to do with the Abraham Accords, at least not directly. In fact, the pacts deliberately sidelined the Palestinian issue in favor of other priorities.
“The Emiratis had their own impetus, the Bahrainis their own impetus. And then the Moroccans wanted their sovereignty over Western Sahara recognized in exchanged for very limited recognition of Israel. And the Sudanese were put in a terribly awful position due to the continuation of sanctions,” said Carnegie’s Hellyer. “But across the board, Palestinians were absent from the impetus.”
On the one hand, that’s understandable: Trump’s team certainly didn’t want to wait for progress on the peace process before helping Israel normalize relations with four former adversaries. But on the other hand, that decision was deeply problematic because it left the crisis to fester just as Biden was coming into office.
The eruption after Israeli police and Palestinian protesters clashed at the mosque is case in point. “You can’t just wish this issue away,” said American University’s Ziv. “The situation is getting out of control.”
It’s so out of control now that Kushner’s hope for closer Israeli-Arab ties to revive the peace process likely won’t come true anytime soon. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine any Palestinians would want to negotiate for peace imminently.
There’s still a role for Biden to play. After helping to calm tensions, Ziv said, the president should present his own vision for a peace plan and put pressure on the Israelis and Palestinians to start talking. “There’s no adult in the room, and that’s where the US could step in,” he told me.
What won’t work, though, is believing more side accords that don’t involve the Palestinians will somehow lead to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It hasn’t worked yet, and it likely won’t work in the future, either.