Biden pushes Israel back to the 1967 lines – Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. No formal announcement of this major policy shift was made, of course. Instead, it was buried in the fine print of the U.N. Security Council’s reauthorization of UNIFIL, the force that ostensibly secures Lebanon’s border with Israel. In a reprise of Barack Obama’s passage of Security Council Resolution 2334 in the final days of his second term, Team Obama-Biden on Aug. 31 again used the route of the Security Council to abandon a formal American commitment and implement a new policy with extreme repercussions for Israel’s security.
With UNSCR 2334, Obama adopted the so-called 1967 lines as the official U.S. position on Israel and its conflict with neighboring Arabs. The resolution called upon all states “to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967,” and reaffirmed that all Israeli communities established in territory “occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, have no legal validity.” It meant that the U.S. had adopted the position of Israel’s enemies on East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, as well as on the Golan Heights.