During a press conference in Israel, President Biden said he would bring up human rights issues during his trip to Saudi Arabia.

RELATED: Biden reaffirms alliance with Israel | USA TODAY https://bit.ly/3APEtmL

A warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be a foreign policy win for Biden. But it could undercut the push for a two-state solution – the creation of an independent Palestinian nation alongside Israel – which has been the North Star of a negotiated settlement to the decades-old conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Before the Abraham Accords, Arab nations had been withholding normalization as leverage to push for a Palestinian state and improve Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

But while the Trump administration considered the accords a substitute for progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, the Biden administration hopes to leverage normalization as a bridge toward progress on the issue, according to Nimrod Novik, a onetime foreign policy adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and now a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum, an organization that supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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