A new team wades into Israel-Palestine conflict, eyes open
As is the case with most new administrations, that of President Donald Trump is in the process of exploring whether there is any possibility of adding the achievement of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to the notches in his gun.
History would tell him “no.” The trouble started in 1948, under President Harry Truman, and 11 succeeding presidents have tried and eventually failed to resolve the issues that stand between the Israelis and Palestinians and a reasonably stable resolution of the problem of who gets what in the former Palestine.
The question now is, are the Trump administration’s prospects any better than those of his predecessors in the 69-year-old quest?
Two points are eminently clear. The first is the iron-clad determination of the Israeli people to maintain their essentially Jewish, democratic state. The second, almost equally clear, is the fact that the Palestinians are not going to go away and will continue to insist on having their own state, just as the Israelis do. Both the Arabs and the rest of the world probably believed in 1948 that the Palestinians, defeated, dispersed and lacking coherence as a movement, would go away. But they haven’t and may even be making some slight progress, at the U.N. and in the world, toward recognized statehood.
The Palestinians’ main advantage, perhaps their only advantage in the contest, is the fact that the Israelis who would want to absorb the West Bank into a greater Israel also do not seem prepared to accept the implications of the population numbers that would entail.
That is to say that, unless Israel wanted to try some sort of state where Palestinians would be in the former situation of blacks in South Africa, called apartheid, granting them equal rights would eventually put Jews into the minority in an expanded Israel, very hard for them ever to accept.
Thus, even though the expression has become tired over the years, the so-called two-state resolution of the problem turns up again.
It is hard to see what, apart from his relationship with his father-in-law, Jared Kushner as U.S. envoy brings to the problem. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas are leaders who constitute particularly fruitful material for a likely agreement. Netanyahu is a wily politician plagued with scandal. Abbas is old and has extended his term as PA president embarrassingly long. No one on the U.S. side is in useful contact with Hamas, which rules in the Gaza Strip. Qatar, formerly a useful intermediary to Hamas, is now threatened by the region’s new bulldog, Saudi Arabia, and its clients, Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, none of them particularly reliable partners in a deal.
Israel can probably get from the Trump administration whatever it wants in terms of weapons and other aid without yielding an inch on an agreement with the Palestinians.
In spite of its perhaps increased confidence in Trump as president, and Trump’s possibly better relations with the Saudis and some other Arab leaders, Israel’s leaders are easily savvy enough to understand the shaky situation in Washington and not want at this time to make any long-term deals based on the Trump administration’s long-term prospects. As for the Palestinians, they still have to resolve both the divisions between Abbas’ party, Fatah, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza before they can even present a unified Palestinian front in any negotiations with the Israelis, the Americans or the other Arabs.
Thus, there is probably no harm in Kushner at least testing the waters one more time, with a new team in power in Washington, to see if any progress can be made. But, given the circumstances, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, and Washington, no one should expect much. The issue remains unresolved on the world’s agenda and ever dangerous — a flame burning in the fireworks factory that the Middle East remains, to its and to America’s sorrow.