Trump and the Mideast.
Four days into a presidency seemingly bereft of impulse control, one can only wonder who among Donald Trump’s constellation of feuding aides knows how to apply the brakes to this newly minted White House.
But if things do settle down — and by that we mean real stuff like foreign policy, not tantrums over whose rally was bigger — you could do worse than look to the Middle East for clues.
It’s a wild card because everything about Trump is a wild card. But taking his transition at rhetorical face value, Trump seemed to view the Mideast, to the extent that he thought of it at all, as a mess of someone else’s making. What harm can come from a new bull rolling through a china shop already shattered to smithereens? How could it be worse?
Less than a week in, conflicting signals involving the movement of an embassy and the building of Israeli settlements suggest Team Trump may be getting its first whiff of humbling realpolitik — as messed up as the Middle East is, it actually could get worse. And if it does, Trump will own it.
Exhibit A is the absence of a rapidfire decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to disputed Jerusalem. Breathless press accounts from Israel on the weekend suggested the writ on this symbolically momentous move would come Monday. But White House spokesperson Sean Spicer, in an uncharacteristically restrained message to reporters, soon splashed cold water on the notion, saying, “We are at the very beginning stages of even discussing this subject.”
Suddenly, Spicer was sounding a lot like the spokespeople for the last eight American presidents. Delay, delay, delay, has been the policy for decades on the embassy question. And now, the holding pattern continues, at least until the arrival of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanya- hu, who is scheduled to meet Trump in Washington in early February.
Regional blowback against the threatening embassy relocation — a move that would provide de facto recognition of Israel’s hold over the Holy City against all Palestinian objections — has been noisy, as you’d expect. Sunni Muslim neighbours like Jordan, a close U.S. ally beset with a population that is now predominantly Palestinian refugees, fear a conflagration on their streets.
On Tuesday, the fury tipped across to the Shiite side, with influential Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr warning that any such embassy shift would amount to a “declaration of war against Islam.”
The Najaf-based cleric vowed to unilaterally close the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and mobilize his Mahdi Army military in “the formation of a special division to liberate Jerusalem.”
Then came Exhibit B: Israel’s approval Tuesday of a new wave of settlement construction in the face of global pressure, with 2,500 new Is- raeli homes to be built in the occupied West Bank. After an earlier announcement of 566 new housing units slated for East Jerusalem, the message was that of an emboldened government freed up to embark on a Trump-approved building spree.
More than half of the cabinet in Israel’s hawkish government now is opposed to any Palestinian state. And Israelis in ever greater numbers appear to see peace as a lost cause. Palestinians, conversely, see the territorial pie that negotiations are meant to divide into two states as vanishing before their eyes as the facts on the ground — expanding Israeli civilian communities on land they claim for a state — grow larger.
Truth is, the five-decade settlement project — this June will see the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War — grew apace even under Barack Obama, notwithstanding a temporary freeze. More than 4,000 housing units sprouted in the Obama years, about the same number (4,191) that were built during the George W. Bush era, according to the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now.
What they add up to now is more than 400,000 Israeli civilian settlers in the West Bank, in addition to about 200,000 living in parts of East Jerusalem — an approximate doubling since the Oslo peace process of the 1990s.
The argument for what remains of Israel’s dwindling peace community is that the entire enterprise is leading the country off a demographic cliff — beyond a two-state solution, beyond peace, to a place where Israel ultimately will have to choose between democracy, Jewish identity and apartheid. Too many Palestinians will live stateless among them to provide Israel with more than two of those three options.
It’s an argument the Obama administration embraced — and lost. It’s an argument that Trump may not even yet understand, but his learning curve is here. How he navigates it is going to tell us a lot about what’s really to come.