Politico: The Real Goal of Trump’s Middle East Plan
By ROBERT MALLEY and AARON DAVID MILLER
The Trump administration’s long-awaited and ill-named peace plan has many objectives, but making peace isn’t among them.
Neither is jump-starting negotiations, or nudging the parties toward compromise, or even enshrining implicit, private understandings in the hope Israelis and Palestinians might eventually publicly espouse them—each one of which, as we know from successful and unsuccessful experience, has been featured as the goal of past American plans.
The motives behind a document conceived without any Palestinian
input, unveiled on the same day as an important vote in the Israeli parliament
on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immunity, and less than a year before
Americans vote for their next president, are at once more mundane and more grandiose.
The
mundane reasons, first. It’s hard not to see in the timing an effort by Trump
to help Netanyahu in Israel’s elections six weeks from now, and, more than
that, an effort by Trump to help Trump—to shore up support from evangelicals
and conservative Republicans as he heads into his reelection campaign.
Critics
argue that the administration ought to have waited for the outcome of the March
Israeli elections and the formation of a new government, but that misses the
point. To wait that long would mean waiting until May, if not longer should
elections once again end inconclusively, which means taking the risk of not
releasing it at all. Besides, the rollout provides a welcome distraction from
the impeachment trial, allowing the president to claim he is dedicated to
important matters of state as Democrats fiddle with crass politics.
Whether
this ends up really helping either Netanyahu or Trump is unclear, although that
too is beside the point. The Trump team believes the plan will help both its
campaign and Netanyahu’s, whether they are right in that regard or not. Some
right-wing constituencies may balk at the suggestion that this could lead to a
Palestinian state—although that would occur well into the future and only if
and when the Palestinians meet a series of unrealistic conditions. And even
then, any putative state would be so fragmented, disjointed, surrounded by
Israel and subject to Israeli security control that it would be at best a state
in name only. Those critics likewise may be angry at the suggestion that the
Palestinians could have a capital in East Jerusalem—although the parts of the
city that the U.S. plan contemplates forming this capital are of such minor
significance that most people would hardly equate them with Jerusalem itself.
In theory, hard-line Israelis could also protest the notion that there will be
no new settlements for years—but even that constraint is essentially
meaningless, since the plan already munificently grants to Israel all the West
Bank territory in which it has wished to build settlements.
In short,
this is a plan that gives Israel everything it wants, concedes to Palestinians
everything Israel does not care for, tries to buy off the Palestinians with the
promise of $50 billion in assistance that will never see the light of day, and
then calls it peace.
So a
politically expedient move intended to boost Trump and Netanyahu’s election
chances, yes. But without any broader implication? Not so fast.
The ideas
put forward by the administration may not tell us anything much about the
future of Middle East peace, other than to make more plain what was already
manifest—that the notion of a viable two-state solution increasingly is a thing
of the past, and that the de facto annexation of West Bank territory may soon
become de jure. Israelis for the most part will accept the proposal,
Palestinians of all stripes will reject it and Arab states will utter bland
pronouncements designed to neither upset a U.S. president whose reprisals they
dread nor outrage their public opinions whose moods they fear. But those ideas
tell us quite a bit about the unfolding nature of Trump’s foreign policy as an
ever-expanding and ever-more aggressive attempt to erase traditional rules and
impose new ones.
A line
can be drawn from the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, to
the killing of Qassem Soleimani, to this attempt to fundamentally rewrite the
parameters of an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement at the Palestinians’
expense. Each reflects an administration increasingly confident in its way,
indifferent to the views of others, enamored with the exercise of its own
power, certain that it can change reality by the mere fact of enforcing its
will. Each decision feeds on the prior ones, as the administration is
emboldened by the absence of serious, immediate backlash to any of its
precedent-shattering steps.
It was
warned that transferring the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem could prompt massive
anti-American protests in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The move was greeted with
the equivalent of a diplomatic shrug. The administration was then cautioned
that killing Soleimani would trigger dangerous Iranian retaliation, potentially
leading to yet another costly U.S. war. Thirty Iranian ballistic missiles but
no American deaths later, Trump’s team can yet again depict its critics as
unduly alarmist.
There is
a countervailing view, of course. Moving the embassy undermined any remaining
pretense that the U.S. administration could play a mediating role in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As for Iran’s reaction to Soleimani’s killing, it
may have been containable, but when is the last time a state launched a salvo
of missiles on an American military base, and when is the last time the U.S.
failed to respond? It is likely that neither Tehran nor its myriad militant
nonstate allies have said their last word; rockets aimed at the U.S. Embassy in
Baghdad remind us of that. But much of that is conjecture, and for the most
part the more serious costs that are mentioned lie in the future. For the Trump
administration, speculation on what might lie ahead tomorrow is immaterial, for
it discounts the transformational effect of what it has done now. The
administration traffics in what is palpable; it deals exclusively with the here
and now.
So, when
Palestinian indignation at a plan that runs roughshod over their aspirations is
not matched by any concrete action, when Arab states react in muted tones to a
proposal that negates any Muslim claim to Jerusalem’s holy sites, when European
governments at best mouth well-worn support for an increasingly illusory
two-state solution, the lesson the Trump administration will learn is that it
can get away with what it does as long as it has the boldness to do it.
Impunity will breed an encore.
It is
easy to condemn the Trump administration for lacking a strategy. Easy, but
wrong.
The Trump
administration’s strategy is unfolding before our eyes, the sum total of every
new step it takes. It reflects the Trump team’s conviction that power
unexercised is power wasted, that power ought to be used to break up the ways
of the past, and that past presidents spent far too much time fretting about
how America’s rivals would react to our actions when America’s rivals ought to
worry about how America will react to theirs. The collective bill at some point
will come due, and it could be steep. Until then, the world will be dealing
with an increasingly unshackled administration. Prospects for a fair and viable
Israeli-Palestinian peace will be just one of its many casualties.
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