President Joe Biden’s administration is “actively pursuing the establishment” of a Palestinian state, a State Department spokesman said following a report that U.S. officials are mulling options for its recognition.
“Yes, we support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, and we do a lot of work inside the government to think about how to bring that about,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday. “Obviously, we look at any number of options. That’s part of the normal planning process. The vast majority of options never usually get implemented.”
Israel’s fraught relationship with the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank has rocketed to the top of international diplomatic agendas in the months since Hamas rampaged across southern Israel on a daylong massacre of civilians. The last 117 days of conflict in the Gaza Strip have renewed international interest in a two-state solution, with some leading Western officials open even to the idea of imposing a state over Israel’s objections.
“We should be starting to set out what a Palestinian state would look like — what it would comprise, how it would work,” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told a panel at the House of Commons on Monday. “As that happens, we, with allies, will look at the issue of recognizing a Palestinian state, including at the United Nations.”
Those allies reportedly include the United States. American diplomats have begun “to conduct a review and present policy options on possible U.S. and international recognition of a Palestinian state after the war in Gaza,” according to a new Axios report. Additionally, the European Union’s top diplomat has proposed that world leaders develop a plan for a Palestinian state and use “leverage” to impose it if Israel refuses to consider the idea — but Miller was non-committal on Wednesday.
“We … put things on the drawing board and figure out what will work, what will be effective, and how best to sequence it,” the State Department spokesman said. “So, I won’t get into that underlying policy planning process that we go about.”
The Iranian-backed terrorist attack that ignited the war was carried out with, among other things, a stated intent to disrupt the American-backed negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Saudi officials began the normalization talks in recognition that Israel and the Gulf Arab states face a shared threat from Iran, but Riyadh has signaled more recently that a normalization deal must be linked to a Palestinian state.
“That’s the only way we’re going to get the benefit,” Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, told a World Economic Forum audience earlier in January. “So, yes, because we need stability, and only stability will come through the resolving the Palestinian issue.”
Israeli officials have been cool at best in response to the idea. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that, after the destruction of Hamas, “Israel will control [Gaza] militarily but won’t control it in a civilian sense.” Another senior Israeli official, Ron Dermer, showed even more aversion to the subject in December 2023.
“We want the Palestinians to have all the powers to govern themselves, but none of the powers that they can use to threaten Israel,” Dermer, the minister for strategic communications, told ABC. “I know that everybody is racing forward right now to try to establish a Palestinian state … the last thing you want to do is send a message to any terror group that the way you’re going to achieve some sort of aim is to perpetrate a massive terror attack.”
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Miller scoffed at that criticism on Wednesday when invited to respond to it — in the form of a question that made no reference to Dermer.
“Sometimes I struggle even to know how to answer those types of questions … But the idea that all Palestinians are terrorists is obviously just flat wrong,” Miller said. “It is a ridiculous argument.”
