For President Joe Biden, the eruption of violence between Israel and the Palestinians is a crisis he not only did not expect, but was not prepared to confront.

Despite being one of the most experienced foreign policy experts among recent presidents, Biden had made it clear he wanted to focus his foreign policy on China primarily, as well as on restarting talks with Iran to re-enter and strengthen the nuclear accord negotiated under former President Barack Obama, and toughen but normalize the post-Trump U.S. stance toward Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has bedeviled generations of American presidents, was, according to White House officials, a much less urgent matter. Notably, any effort to rebalance U.S. policy and include Palestinian equities in negotiations was going to be challenging after former President Donald Trump departed from decades of bipartisan U.S. commitment to a two-state solution and excluded the Palestinians from diplomatic talks, while cutting them off from U.S. contributions to U.N. relief funds.