Lines of communication

No sense to close office of Palestinian Authority

The Trump administration is threatening to close the Palestinian Authority representation office in Washington because the PA wants to charge Israel with war crimes in the International Criminal Court. The proposed action does not take into consideration all of the factors involved.

The principal one of these is that it is unlikely there will ever be a sustainable peace in the Middle East until the Palestinians have a state. The Palestinian office in Washington is not the only or even the main channel for communications with the Palestinians. Nonetheless, it is not only important in that regard, it also has considerable symbolic value. The Palestinians have threatened to cut off contact with the United States if the office is closed. They are unlikely to make good on that threat, but it would be unwise for the Trump administration to force the Palestinian office to close.

Neither the United States nor Israel is a member of the International Criminal Court. They don’t join because of fear of being charged in it with war crimes. At the same time, both countries would have a better chance of defending their interests in the ICC if they were members.

The U.S. effort to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian talks in quest of a settlement is sputtering badly. It is led by Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has no background in high-stakes Middle East negotiations. What he has is, presumably, the ear of the president, worth something but dependent entirely on the level of Mr. Trump’s real interest in an agreement. Mr. Trump is, instead, preoccupied at the moment with special counsel Robert Mueller’s and other congressional inquiries into his and his campaign’s contacts with the Russians, passage of the tax bill and stirrings in the Republican Party and Congress. Middle East peace appears to be low on his list as president.

In the Middle East itself, the central contest appears to be between a Sunni Islamic Saudi Arabia, led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and its chosen enemy, Shiite Iran. One battleground is Yemen, which has been pretty much leveled by the war there, suffering in addition from a cholera epidemic and impending famine for millions of Yemenis.

One Saudi objective appears to be an effort to reach agreement with Israel on an anti-Iran alliance. In that regard, some Israelis, including perhaps Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appear to believe that Saudi Arabia, pulling a train of other Persian Gulf states excluding rebel Qatar, might be willing to sign onto some sort of agreement over the fate of the Palestinians. This enterprise is relatively new, and interesting, but unlikely to succeed.

Most Palestinians won’t acquiesce in being sold down the river by the Saudis. On Israel’s borders are both the Palestinians in Gaza, more radical than those in the West Bank and supported to a degree by Iran, and Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon. Hezbollah members are well-armed and have recent combat experience from the war in Syria, where they fought alongside the forces not only of the successful President Bashar Assad but also the Russians and Iranians. The Palestinians themselves are beginning to act more as a united front, with improved communication and cooperation between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

The other aspect of the Middle East that Washington and Tel Aviv should watch carefully is cooperation among Iran, Russia, Syria and Turkey in the wake of the Syrian war. Mr. Assad just met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani are due in Moscow shortly. It isn’t clear how an alliance among those four countries would play out on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but that subject has to be on the agenda.

In any case, this is no time for America to rock the boat on that delicate issue by kicking the Palestinian Authority out of Washington. The timing is bad, and it doesn’t make sense in any case.