RICHARD BAEHR: TRUMP THE PEACE PROCESSOR
At the end of last week came news that U.S. President Donald Trump had phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and invited him to visit the White House. This followed a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as well as other lower level communications between administration officials and the PA, including with Palestinian business leaders.
When Barack Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, his first call to any foreign leader was made that same day to Abbas. It took seven weeks for Trump to match Obama’s outreach. The difference undoubtedly reflects an overall shift in orientation and emphasis, but also a reflection of how a president can communicate a level of interest and support in a cause or a country even if little of substance has changed.
For eight years, Israelis fretted with good reason that their ties with the United States were threatened by the hostility of the Obama administration, particularly on the issue of settlement construction. Pretty much every Israeli announcement of any phase of a settlement construction project was met with a nasty public rebuke, even if the construction involved work in settlements that have always been assumed by all the American peace processors, Democrat or Republican, to be in communities that would remain part of Israel in a final status deal with the Palestinians. This understanding had been put in writing by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, but Obama never paid it any heed. The final rebuke was the American acquiescence through its abstention on the noxious Security Council resolution passed just after the 2016 election, which labeled all Israeli activity beyond the Green Line as that of an occupier.
The cold shoulder carried over into American pressure during the last Gaza war in 2014, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert about the safety of Ben-Gurion Airport, when a rocket fired by Hamas landed a mile away, thereby shutting down U.S. air traffic to Israel for 36 hours. There were also repeated criticisms of Israeli actions that caused any Gazan civilian casualties, though Hamas seemed to be acting to ensure these would occur by storing and then firing rockets from the grounds of hospitals, mosques, schools and densely populated civilian areas.
And of course there was the American obsession with concluding a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, which effectively traded a short-term reduction in the level of Iranian centrifuge activity for a windfall of $100 billion in cash, sanctions relief, and America looking away as Iran violated other Security Council resolutions on missile development and arms sales, and as Iran stepped up its aggressive activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other countries.
Trump harshly attacked the Iran nuclear deal and the administration’s treatment of Israel in his campaign for the White House. Moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem was one prominent campaign promise, as it has been for previous presidential candidates, both successful and unsuccessful. Consistent with his history of deal making as a businessman, Trump also spoke of his interest in concluding an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, one he called perhaps the most difficult of all unresolved impasses.
Since taking office, Trump has hosted Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, an event that was suffused with the warmth one would expect in discussions between strong allies, something missing for the previous eight years, when Obama made little effort to hide his contempt for Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition government. Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer has close relations with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trump has hinted that Kushner may play a key negotiating role between Israel and the Palestinians. Kushner has a history of close ties to Israel and support for certain settlement projects, as does the recently appointed U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who awaits full Senate confirmation, after his nomination was successfully voted out of committee.
And in a significant turn, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley has now on two occasions blasted the organization for its bias against Israel, and the enormous attention various U.N. bodies pay to Israel to the exclusion of real human rights violators around the world, particularly in the Middle East. This followed years in which U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, the former genocide critic, bit her tongue for the most part as Syria’s President Bashar Assad, with the full support of Obama’s new ally Iran, laid waste to much of the country and its population. Power had no problem, of course, defending the Security Council action directed at Israel.
Those looking for reasons to be concerned about Trump on the Israel front have noted his comments about settlements at his joint press conference with Netanyahu, and comments made by Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman after his visit to Washington about the administration’s reluctance to back any annexation of West Bank lands at this point. Naturally, the fact that Trump picked up the phone to talk to Abbas will also be seized upon, though this followed lobbying by Jordan’s King Abdullah for Trump to make contact with the PA.
It is certainly possible that in the current intense political environment in Washington — perhaps best described as “kill or be killed” — a foreign policy diversion, such as a meeting between Trump and Abbas, with talk of peace and solutions to long-standing conflicts will for a few minutes warm the hearts of all the conventional foreign policy establishment thinkers in Washington who think that things are back to normal at least on one front. The reality may be different. Trump could be looking beyond Abbas, who is now serving a second term beyond the one to which he was elected, and instead could be raising the profiles of potential future Palestinian leaders who might be more interested in economic improvement in the lives of the Palestinians than in waging constant war through rockets, stabbings, and more delegitimization efforts directed at Israel at the U.N. and through the international boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. In fact, Trump might use the opportunity of a meeting with Abbas to express his displeasure with the PA using the U.N. or criminal courts or the BDS movement to fight its battles with Israel, and make clear that the Americans will not play their traditional role of pressuring Israel for concessions to the Palestinians, including concessions designed just to get the parties to begin talking, such as prisoner releases.
While Trump and his team have gone back and forth on their commitment to a two-state solution, one thing on which they have not wavered is that the parties have to talk to each other, and not through others.
Journalist Avi Issacharoff wrote that according to officials, the new administration “is taking a particular interest in the Palestinian economy, and has been meeting with prominent Palestinian businessmen, including pharma billionaire Adnan Mjalli. Mjalli has apparently operated a back channel between the White House and Abbas’ Muqataa headquarters, and is seen as a possible new PA prime minister.”
Given the stale reality of Abbas’ supposed moderate leadership of the PA, Trump would be performing a real service if he would assist the PA to transition away from its battle-scarred geriatric leadership to people less obsessed with demands to reverse the 1948 war results and achieve a right of return for millions of people misidentified as refugees. If anyone can make an effort to sell the Palestinians to fight for a better economy rather than symbolic but meaningless political victories, it is Donald Trump.
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