The Peace Trap
Mideast’s lesson after Team Trump’s success
IN a week in which his administration was buffeted by legislative failure and internal dissension, President Trump could still claim one minor success. Two of his aides played a role in resolving a standoff among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians.
But it’s crucial the administration learns the right lesson here.
Whatever good Jared Kushner and US Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt may have done in securing the safe return to Israel of an embassy security guard, this shouldn’t tempt Trump to think the time is ripe for another round of major diplomacy. The last thing the region needs is another American effort to broker a final peace plan that is hopelessly out of reach.
The terms of the arrangement the Americans helped secure may have been unavoidable. Israel had erected metal detectors at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount after three terrorists killed two policemen at the shrine. Palestin- ians considered that reasonable measure an offense to Islam, leading to protests and a bloody terrorist rampage that left three Israelis dead in the West Bank and an attack on the Jewish state’s embassy in Amman, Jordan.
The embassy attack, in which the wounded security guard shot the assailant and a bystander, created a furor that was a direct result of the ginned-up outrage about Jerusalem. But when Jordan’s government demanded that the victim — the security guard — be tried for murder, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pushed into a corner. With prodding from Trump’s team, he agreed to take down the detectors in exchange for the guard’s freedom and what he hoped would be an end to the violence.
Most Israelis blasted that decision as a surrender to terrorism. But for the international community and the Trump administration, it was a wise move that demonstrated the value of diplomacy and the indispensable nature of the American role in the peace process.
That means the president may be tempted to invest political capital to do something he has said was easier than everyone thought: achieving Middle East peace. But however enticing the prospect of achieving the “ultimate deal” that eluded his predecessors may be, he should resist the impulse. The cooling of Temple Mount tempers doesn’t presage peace on the horizon.
As is always the case with appeasement, the Israeli retreat will guarantee more demands and more violence aimed at achieving the Palestinian goal of chasing the Jews away from the holy places. Friday prayers at the Temple Mount went off without another catastrophe. But Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is locked into a competition with his Hamas rivals, has promoted the lie that the Jews are attacking the Temple Mount mosques and convinced his people that the conflict is a holy war, not the real-estate transaction Trump craves.
That’s why what looks like a revival of the “stabbing intifada” Abbas helped incite may be in the offing. Recent events should remind us that the struggle has always been about delegitimizing Jewish rights — both in Jerusalem and the rest of the country — not territory or settlements, let alone security measures.
As with the Obama administration’s futile forays in Middle East diplomacy, the Palestinian Authority would expect any US intervention to produce more Israeli concessions like the magnetometer fiasco and not see it as a signal for them to finally accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state. That means more violence aimed at creating more such dilemmas for Netanyahu is a given. In response, Netanyahu will have to get tougher, since his room for political maneuvering has been limited by the move into which the US pushed him.
Rather than seeking to craft more such dubious compromises, Trump should remind Abbas about his broken promise to stop paying salaries to terrorist murderers and their families with US aid dollars. In the absence of a shift in Palestinian behavior in which their leaders will seek to halt terror rather than foment it, Trump should make it clear that he’ll do nothing to further reward them for encouraging violence.
The smartest thing he can do now is to turn his attention to the chaos in Washington, not Jerusalem.