Trump puts fact ahead of fiction in Middle East

recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Before you can debate whether this was a good move, you must acknowledge one glaring fact that the chatterers want to ignore or downplay: It’s true. Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, convenes there. Israelis call it their capital for the same reason they claim two plus two equals four. It’s just true.

What makes the decision controversial is that everyone had agreed to pretend it wasn’t the capital in order to protect “the peace process.”

That’s another term that doesn’t quite correspond with reality. There is no peace process. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president finishing the 12th year of his four-year term, has refused to meet with the Israelis to discuss anything since early in the Obama administration.

Part of the blame for that belongs with Obama, who built an entire foreign policy around what he wanted to be true rather than what was actually going on. Obama sought to distance the U.S. from Israel on the assumption that Israel was the unreasonably stubborn party in the “peace process.”

But denying reality is how this game has long been played. In his speech after Trump’s announcement, Abbas talked about Jerusalem’s history as a Muslim and Christian city. He made no mention of the fact that it’s also a famously Jewish city, established as the capital of ancient Israel 1,000 years before Jesus was born.

It’s been this way for decades. The Palestinians and their Arab patrons insisted to gullible Westerners that the Israel-Palestinian conflict was the source of all the region’s problems. Was the IranIraq war, a fight over Palestinian statehood? What about the Lebanese civil war? Turkey’s campaign against the Kurds?

The only people who bought the idea that the Middle East conflict began and ended with Israel were those guys in the control booth describing the wrong game — i.e., Western experts and activists deeply invested in the “peace process.”

But these fictions are losing their hold, ironically thanks in large part to the Obama administration. By working on fantasy rather than facts, Obama threw the balance of power in the region heavily in Iran’s favor. He thought the Iranians would join the community of nations or some such twaddle. Instead, they pocketed the money and are now on a surer path to a nuclear bomb.

As a result of this new reality, the old fictions are a luxury that Iran’s regional adversaries can no longer afford. That’s why Saudi Arabia, a longtime Palestinian patron, has been moving closer to Israel: because Israel is a more valuable friend in the new Middle East conflict than the Palestinians are — or Obama was.