TRUMP’S TIMING
THE MIDDLE EAST IS ON EDGE. TENSIONS ARE HIGH. IT’S NOT A GREAT TIME FOR A VISIT.
As if the Israelis and the Palestinians didn’t have enough headaches already, U. S. President Donald Trump is set to arrive in Jerusalem next Monday, and he’s already throwing his weight around and creeping people out. He’s not exactly arriving at the most auspicious time, either.
The week began with Nakba (“Catastrophe”) Day, the annual Palestinian ritual of anger and melancholy marking the Israeli war of independence in 1948, when roughly 700,000 Arabs lost their homes while Israel was repelling an invasion by Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria. There were the usual ceremonies this year — marches, bloodcurdling speeches, stone throwings, arrests and injuries.
A shell was fired into Israel from Gaza. Nobody was hurt, but Israeli intelligence officials were warning of a terrorist attack that Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants were planning in order to avenge the killing of one of its former commanders last month. Hamas says it was a Mossad operation. Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman says it was an “internal assassination.”
The year 2017 also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War, when Israel fought off Egypt, Jordan and Syria in June of that year and Israeli paratroopers captured the Old City of Jerusalem, with its ancient Western Wall and the Temple Mount, bringing the holiest site in Judaism under Jewish sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years.
This is where Trump comes into it. Trump had declared his intention to be the first sitting American president to visit the Western Wall, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had in- vited him to visit Jerusalem in June, for the solemn 50th anniversary commemorations. But Trump wanted to come this month, during a succession of pit stops he’s making in Riyadh, then Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and then the Vatican, in a kind of weird whirlwind tour of the world’s major monotheisms, all in aid of cobbling together some undefined super deal for the entire region.
So things were already awkward, without counting the 10,000 Israeli police being called up to handle Trump’s security. And then the White House announced that, no, like it or lump it, Netanyahu would not even be welcome to join Trump’s entourage at the Western Wall. An official with Netanyahu’s team told Israel’s Channel 2 News on Monday that a senior U.S. yahoo dealing with Trump’s logistics had responded to Netanyahu’s request this way: “No way. Why is this your business? This is an area that is in dispute, the Western Wall is not Israeli territory and is located in the West Bank ... This is Trump’s show, all the rest are extras, including Prime Minister Netanyahu.”
What followed was the by- now- f a mili a r White House rigmarole of a statement amounting to a denial, followed by a statement disavowing the denial and amounting to a confirmation.
A White House official told the liberal Ha’aretz newspaper: “These comments, if true, were not authorized by the White House. They do not reflect the U. S. position, and certainly not the President’s position.” Then on Tuesday, in a briefing with reporters, Trump’s National Security Adviser, H. R. McMaster said “no Israeli leaders” will be permitted to accompany Trump to the Western Wall. “He’s going to the Western Wall mainly in connection with the theme to connect three of the world’s great re- ligions ... and to highlight the theme that we all have to be united against the enemies of all civilized people.”
This is the sort of subject that you could say Palestinians and Israelis across the political spectrum tend to consider a bit “touchy.”
Palestinians are routinely harangued by deranged i mams with conspiracy theories to the effect that there is no ancient Jewish connection whatsoever to the Temple Mount, which also happens to be the site where the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven on a winged horse. The Temple Mount’s Al-Aqsa mosque and the f amous Dome of the Rock are administered by the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, under the authority of the Kingdom of Jordan.
The touchiness of the subject was not exactly eased in the final days of Barack Obama’s administration, when the White House decided to withhold the American veto and abstain from a UN Security Council resolution demanding a halt to “all Israeli settlement activities” in the West Bank. This might have been fair enough, but the resolution also declared that Israel could not claim any “legal validity” to its hold on the Old City of Jerusalem, either.
The UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has adopted three similar resolutions in recent months — the latest came on May 1, Israel’s Independence Day — declaring that Israel can claim no historical or legal right to Jerusalem, as though the ancient city was some sort of figment of the Jewish imagination.
The most recent UNESCO resolution was at least tempered by an acknowledgment that Jerusalem is sacred to Islam, Judaism and Christianity. But Israeli nerves are frayed, and the trouble with Trump is that, while it may be a matter of debate whether he’s mentally unstable, he’s unambiguously inconstant, impetuous and unreliable.
Trump situated his campaign promises on Israel and Palestine to the extreme edges of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, but in recent weeks nobody’s sure what to make of him. Two weeks ago in Washington, Trump was basking in the flattery of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who praised the former real-estate tycoon and reality-television star as a deal maker of “great negotiating ability.”
After vowing to grant Netanyahu’s wish and move the U. S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv — several countries have consulates-general in Jerusalem, the seat of Israel’s government, but all UN member states situate their embassies in Tel Aviv — Trump’s White House has since backtracked. After giving every impression that he was an enthusiast for Israeli settlements in the West Bank, Trump has since said he does not believe the settlements are “good for peace.” Sometimes, Trump sounds like an unlettered “hawk,” happy to abandon the cause of a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. But he’s also insinuated that Israel is ungrateful for the defence commitments the U. S. has made on Israel’s behalf.
The sands are shifting beneath everybody’s feet across the Greater Middle East these days. Khomeinist Iran is ascendant. After a 40- year absence as a power in the region, the Kremlin — to which Trump appears to be affectionately attached and strangely beholden — is an increasingly malevolent force. Syria has imploded into mass murder, jihadism and chaos. Yemen is a charnel house. Hezbollah is digging into its fortifications in southern Lebanon, issuing increasingly disturbing threats against “the Zionist entity.”
The last thing Israelis or Palestinians need right now is a quite possibly unhinged American president swaggering around the Old City of Jerusalem. But here he comes.
SANDS ARE SHIFTING BENEATH EVERYBODY’S FEET ACROSS THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST.