Trump’s reckless provocation
The Trump administration has exported its politics of provocation to the last place that needs it, the Middle East. The all too predictable immediate result has been carnage. The long-term consequences are likely to be worse.
Like President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement last week, his relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on Monday stoked tensions and emboldened hardliners on all sides. They include those who urged protesters to storm a border fence in Hamas-ruled Gaza, about 40 miles from the willfully oblivious celebration of the new embassy. Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas and gunfire, leaving at least 60 dead and 2,000 wounded.
The disputed status of Jerusalem, in light of its religious and political importance to Jews and Palestinians alike, has long been regarded as one of a few key controversies to be resolved by peace talks. Trump’s recognition of the holy city as Israel’s capital would be a monumental concession to one side if anything had been gained or even asked in return. As effected, it was just a gift Trump bestowed on his evangelical political base, and by extension himself, at the expense of lives, American standing and prospects for peace.
Whether Trump takes the need for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations seriously might be guessed from his decision to entrust the job to his callow son-in-law, Jared Kushner, along with a laughable litany of other assignments for which he has no obvious qualifications. Back in March, the New York Times reported that a peace plan being devised by Kushner and David Friedman, a Trump bankruptcy lawyer turned ambassador to Israel, was “nearly finished.” Now the same can be said about the formerly U.S.-mediated peace process itself.
Trump at one time suggested that further talks were needed before he would declare Jerusalem Israel’s capital, a recognition long withheld by presidents from both parties, but the temptation to score easy political points while distracting from less favorable events ultimately proved too great. He announced the move in December, five days after the revelation that his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had pleaded guilty to lying to federal authorities.
That none of this springs from Trump’s deeply felt devotion to the Jewish homeland was evident from the embassy opening’s honored guests. The ceremony began and ended with prayers by evangelical pastors who see Israel as a means of ushering in the apocalypse along with Jews’ eternal damnation. One, Robert Jeffress, has said that “religions like Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism ... lead people away from the true God” and “to an eternity of separation from God in hell.” The other, John Hagee, has discerned divine providence in Hitler and the Holocaust “because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel.”
Kushner and others defending the president argued that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital simply acknowledges the truth. But the truth is that ignoring the much more complicated reality of the city and Israel — as well as the need for two states, a Jewish and a Palestinian one — will only ensure that the conflict endures.