Pompeo visits West Bank settlement
JERUSALEM >> T he high point of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s valedictory trip to Israel could easily have been the long, grateful recitation by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday of the gifts that the Trump administration has bestowed upon his right-wing government.
But then Pompeo unwrapped some new ones.
He announced that the United States would henceforth view the international campaign to boycott Israel as anti-Semitic. He stopped on the occupied West Bank, becoming the most senior American official to visit one of Israel’s settlements, which much of the world considers a violation of international law.
And he directed that goods imported to the United States from a large swath of the West Bank be labeled “made in Israel.” The scope of that act, experts noted, far exceeded even the large section of the West Bank that the Trump peace plan envisioned being annexed by Israel.
“The people of the book have not had a better friend,” Netanyahu said to Pompeo in Jerusalem on Thursday morning, after gushing that the classification of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as anti- Semitic was “simply wonderful.”
All told, Pompeo’s whirlwind day was scarcely a mere victory lap. It was a last chance to reinforce Israel’s hard-line approach to Palestinians and, as Democrats and other supporters of a two-state solution cried foul, to place political land mines in the path of the incoming Biden administration.
It was also a day filled with photo opportunities that could be useful for Pompeo, particularly with the evangelical Christian voters he has long courted, were he to seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
But there is also a rushed sense to the Trump administration’s diplomatic moves on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the clock runs down as if, like settlers themselves, they are frantically pouring concrete in hopes that it will set before Jan. 20. It is the same approach the lame- duck administration is taking with Iran. In both places, some of those moves will be difficult to reverse.
Others, however, like the new labeling guidelines for West Bank products, could be undone with the stroke of a pen, said Michael Koplow, an analyst and supporter of a two- state solution at the Israel Policy Forum. He called the madein-Israel rules a “fringe issue” that would resonate with Jewish Republicans, but said President- elect Joe Biden would pay little political price for reversing it.
“But it also seems to be the case that Pompeo supports a vision of greater Israel as a core belief, irrespective of whether or not he runs for president down the road,” Koplow said.