RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump ran for president pledging to throw off political correctness and tell bold truths. That’s something to keep in mind this week. On Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit the White House. Thursday will bring Senate confirmation hearings for David Friedman, Mr. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the Jewish state. Both events offer an opportunity for the fearless truth-telling that Mr. Trump promised.

The U.S. has long favored Israel, even during the relative chill of the Obama administration. Washington has nevertheless parroted or passively accepted the conventional falsehoods about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Mr. Trump wants to advance the possibility of peace, he should begin by challenging the five big untruths that sustain the anti-Israel consensus:

• Israel occupies “Palestinian territory.” This is nonsensical: There never has been a Palestinian government that could hold any territory, meaning Israel could not have taken “Palestinian land.” Quite possibly large parts of the West Bank should become Palestinian territory, but that is a different claim.

The Trump administration should always describe the West Bank as “disputed” land and speak against the phrase “Palestinian territory”—except when used in the future tense. It should also recognize that Israel came to the territory it holds not only during a defensive war but also through historical and legal claims, including the 1922 League of Nations mandate to establish a Jewish homeland.

• Millions of Palestinian “refugees” have a “right of return” to Israel. The standard international view is that Israel has prevented five million Palestinians, many living in “refugee camps,” from returning to their homes. But practically none of these people are refugees as normally defined; rather they are the descendants of refugees. The Arab world has kept them in misery for three generations to preserve their plight as a weapon against Israel.
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Washington Institute Distinguished Fellow David Makovsky on how to repair U.S.-Israeli relations. Photo credit: Getty Images.

The U.S. has failed to challenge this false narrative. It is the principal financial supporter of Unrwa—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—whose sole purpose is to provide for the basic needs of these perpetual “refugees.”

Privately, American diplomats understand that the normal description of Palestinian “refugees” is a fraud and that these descendants have no legal “right of return.” A first step to peace, then, would be to end the charade and begin to dismantle Unrwa. The Trump administration might also mention the estimated 800,000 Jewish refugees who, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, were thrown out of the Arab countries where they had been living for millennia. Most of them settled in an impoverished, newborn Israel without international assistance.

• Israelis and Palestinians have comparable claims to Jerusalem. This is the best example of the false “evenhandedness” that has long characterized American policy—saying, for instance, that “Jerusalem is sacred to both religions.” Although the city’s Al Aqsa mosque is significant in Islam, Jerusalem itself has essentially no religious importance. It is not mentioned in the Quran or in Muslim prayers. It was never the capital of any Islamic empire.

Peace requires recognizing three things: that Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel; that the city’s religious sites must be protected and free, as they have been only under the Jewish state; and that any provision for a Palestinian capital must not threaten the city’s peaceful unity. A bold truth-teller would also move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, despite the threats of a violent response, and would allow the passports of American citizens born in the capital to record that they were born in Israel.

• There was no ancient Jewish presence in Israel. Palestinian leaders insist that this is true, and that the historical Jewish temples were not actually located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This feeds their claim that the Jews came to Israel as foreign colonialists imposed by the Europeans after the Holocaust.

This falsehood can be sustained only because it is politely tolerated by the U.S. and Europe—and sometimes supported by U.N. agencies like Unesco. It works against the possibility of peace by denying the Palestinians a moral basis for negotiating with Israel. The Trump administration should contradict these absurd denials of history so often that Palestinian leaders begin to look foolish to their own people.

• The Palestinians are ready to accept a “two-state solution” to end the conflict. The U.S. has a tendency to assume that Palestinian leaders are ready to accept Israel if suitable concessions are offered. The Trump administration ought to ask: What is the evidence for this? When did the Palestinians give up their long-term commitment to destroy Israel, and which leaders backed such a dramatic change? Undoubtedly, many Palestinians are willing and even eager for peace. Yet it is still taboo in Palestinian debate to publicly suggest accepting Israel’s legitimacy or renouncing the claims of the “refugees.”

Washington is practiced at superficial evenhandedness, always issuing parallel-seeming statements about both sides. What the Trump administration can bring is genuine evenhandedness: respecting each side’s truths and rejecting each side’s falsehoods, even when this leads to a position that seems “unbalanced.” CONTINUE AT SITE

In the summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a one-and-a-half year stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt about it. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.
Boy was he right.
Before I moved to Jerusalem, I was very pro-Palestinian. Almost everyone I knew was. I grew up Protestant in a quaint, politically-correct New England town; almost everyone around me was liberal. And being liberal in America comes with a pantheon of beliefs: You support pluralism, tolerance and diversity. You support gay rights, access to abortion and gun control.
The belief that Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians is an inextricable part of this pantheon. Most progressives in the US view Israel as an aggressor, oppressing the poor noble Arabs who are being so brutally denied their freedom. “I believe Israel should relinquish control of all of the Gaza Strip and most of the West Bank,” I wrote on July 11, 2015 from a park near my new apartment in Baka. “The occupation is an act of colonialism that only creates suffering, frustration and despair for millions of Palestinians.”
Perhaps predictably, this view didn’t play well among the people I met during my first few weeks in Jerusalem, which even by Israeli standards is a conservative city. My wife and I had moved to the Jewish side of town, more or less by chance —the first Airbnb host who accepted our request to rent a room happened to be in the Nachlaot neighborhood, where even the hipsters are religious. As a result, almost everyone we interacted with was Jewish Israeli and very supportive of Israel. I didn’t announce my pro-Palestinian views to them —I was too afraid. But they must have sensed my antipathy. (I later learned this is a sixth sense Israelis have.)
Because my first few weeks in Jerusalem I found myself constantly getting into arguments about the conflict with my roommates and in social settings. Unlike waspy New England, Israel does not afford the privilege of politely avoiding unpleasant political conversations. Outside of the Tel Aviv bubble, the conflict is omnipresent; it affects almost every aspect of life. Avoiding it simply isn’t an option.
During one such argument, one of my roommates —an easy-going American-Jewish guy in his mid-30s —seemed to be suggesting that all Palestinians were terrorists. I became annoyed and said to him that it was wrong to call all Palestinians terrorists, that only a small minority supported terror attacks. My roommate promptly pulled out his laptop, called up a 2013 Pew Research poll and showed me the screen. I saw that Pew’s researchers had done a survey of thousands of people across the Muslim world, asking them if they supported suicide bombings against civilians in order to “defend Islam from its enemies.” The survey found that 62 percent of Palestinians believed such terror acts against civilians were justified in these circumstances. And not only that, the Palestinian Territories were the only place in the Muslim World where a majority of citizens supported terrorism; everywhere else it was a minority, from Lebanon and Egypt to Pakistan and Malaysia.

MK Tzipi Livni is apparently well regarded at the UN. According to media reports, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called Livni and offered her the position of under-secretary-general.

Guterres’s offer to Livni is supposed to be a trade-off. Livni will receive the appointment in exchange for the US canceling its veto of his plan to appoint former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salaam Fayyad to serve as his envoy to Libya.

There are three basic problems with this proposed trade. First there is the problem with Fayyad.Leaving aside the question of the actual duties of a UN envoy to Libya, the question is why would Fayyad be a good candidate for anything?

Before Fayyad joined the PLO-controlled PA in 2002, he served for six years as the International Monetary Fund’s representative to the PA. In that position, Fayyad turned a blind eye to the embezzlement of the donor-financed PA budget to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Year in and year out, Fayyad did nothing to warn donors that the funds that they were providing the PA were being transferred to Swiss bank accounts or otherwise disappearing. In 1997 for instance, Fayyad said nothing as Arafat and his cronies caused $323 million, or 40% of the PA budget, to simply disappear.

Perhaps if he had piped up back then the international community might have rethought its support for PLO chief Yasser Arafat as he built the PA into a terrorism-financing kleptocracy.

Arafat appointed Fayyad to serve as PA finance minister in 2002. In that position, Fayyad went from apologist to enabler. He presided over the PA budget and kept the international donations flowing knowing full well that Arafat and his cronies were embezzling the funds to enrich themselves and finance terrorism while the Palestinian people got record unemployment and were indoctrinated to despise Israel and the West.

Fayyad’s facilitation of the PLO bosses’ grand larceny continued after Arafat’s death in 2004. He happily enabled Mahmoud Abbas’s theft as well.

For instance, in 2004 Fayyad did nothing to stop the theft of revenues from oil products by his bosses as they emptied the coffers of the PA’s Petroleum Authority.

When PA lawmakers asked him that year for an accounting of where revenues from oil products disappeared to, according to Issam Abu Issa, the founder of the Palestinian International Bank, Fayyad declared nonchalantly, “Unfortunately the documents related to the revenues from oil products – or how the money was used – cannot be found. They have disappeared from the ministry.”

According to a 2013 report from the European Court of Auditors, between 2008 and 2012, $2.7 billion in EU aid to the PA disappeared. Fayyad presided over the PA treasury and government as finance minister and prime minister during those years.