RUTHFULLY YOURS

Most reporters for mainstream American news organizations were loathe to describe the obvious improvement in the atmosphere when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Donald Trump held their joint press conference on Wednesday, compared to the frigid and tense poses when Netanyahu and former President Barack Obama held joint appearances in the preceding eight years. 

It was not hard to understand why the Israeli prime minister was smiling during his interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News the next day. One reason is that both Trump and Netanyahu are aware they help their own political positions by strengthening the ties between the two countries. 

But the reality is deeper: The two men get along because they actually see the world the same way. Obama had a very different world view. Although he saw a link between Israel and the United States, this was mainly as colonialist bullies. No American president before Obama, and hopefully none in the future, will ever be so equivocal about his own country’s history and values.

The improved special relationship between Israel and the United States is not entirely new. President George W. Bush had solid ties with Israel’s leaders and endorsed a 2004 letter ahead of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza acknowledging that the 1949 borders were not permanent and that facts on the ground made it inevitable that many Jewish communities beyond the Green Line would not be uprooted in a future peace agreement. Obama ignored this letter, refused to give it any authority, and, along with others in the White House and State Department, attacked Israel after each and every bit of news of new Jewish housing in the West Bank, as if those were crimes against humanity. No supposed foe of the United States received such scorn and rebuke over eight years as Israel. And there was the coup de grace in Obama’s final months, the American abstention at the United Nations on Security Council Resolution 2334, which effectively resulted in awarding the entire territory to the Palestinians and treating any Israeli activity in the area as illegal.

American officials argued they needed to make it clear to Israel they were unhappy about the “stepped-up” pace of settlement activity, which represents an obstacle to achieving the two-state solution. The Obama action, forcefully defended by Secretary of State John Kerry (who seems to be contemplating a run for president in 2020), ignored pretty much all the other reasons for the failure. The Palestinians themselves are divided into two political entities, one run by Hamas, the other by the Palestinian Authority. Elections for PA president and parliament have not been held in over a decade. No Palestinian leader has ever been willing to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish state and that there will be no “right of return” for Palestinians who never lived in or who left Israel and are falsely classified as refugees — more than 98% of the so-called Palestinian refugees. Only among Palestinians is refugee status conferred to endless descendants of the original refugees. The refugee issue was one of five mentioned by Max Singer in a Wall Street Journal column calling for telling the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The good news for both Israel and the United States is that both leaders and their teams do not have to be schooled on the basics revealed in the article: that Palestinians have never demonstrated a readiness for a real two-state solution, that Israel and the Jewish people have a long unbroken history in the region, including in Jerusalem, where competing claims are hardly equal, and that the West Bank territories are disputed and never belonged to any independent Palestinian government.

Anxious to find some disagreement between the two leaders this week, the major media focused on two things: that the leaders did not agree on settlements, and that Trump had abandoned the commitment to the two-state solution. Trump commented several times that constructing new settlements might make achieving peace more difficult. Netanyahu responded that the two leaders would discuss settlements in private and come to an understanding. Such an understanding is not difficult to contemplate. At its strictest, it would differentiate existing settlements from new ones, and between building housing within existing settlement boundaries and expanding the boundaries to construct new units. If Israel chose to go beyond this, it would be unlikely that America would turn on the venom machine oiled to perfection by the Obama team.

Most importantly, the Trump team made it clear that they do not regard the existence of settlements as an obstacle to peace. This is similar to the policy revealed in the Bush letter, but arguably went further, since while the 2004 letter seemed to refer to settlements close to the Green Line, Trump’s statement made no such demarcation. So too the commitment to discuss the issue privately and not to air differences in public was an important step that one would expect among real allies. In the Obama White House, the only thing that seemed to exceed their joy at being able to publicly attack Israel was the anger they could reveal in the condemnation.

The walkaway from the solemn and holy commitment to the two-state solution was the earthquake moment from the joint press conference. After motherhood, apple pie, and steroid-free baseball, the two-state solution is simply something everyone has to endorse, lest they be viewed as giving up on peace, justice for the Palestinians, and the security for Israel as a Jewish majority democratic state. Endorsing this belief system requires ignoring the changing demographics (the now much higher Jewish birthrate and declining Arab birthrate in Israel and the West Bank) and somehow believing that a few touches by some skilled peacemaker are all that is needed to get two states for two people, since everyone knows the contours of the final deal.

The real break is that Trump says the two parties have to make a deal themselves, not agree to one provided to them and pushed down their throats by outsiders. Since they have not done this before, then maybe some options outside the two-state solution may be needed. Maybe what all these outsiders think is wrong, because they are not one of the two parties, and because they are basically lazy about considering options not endorsed by “the international community” and the large fraternity of peace processors. Expecting people who have been paid to say the same thing for decades to actually come up with something original would be an even larger step up. 

The Trump team says it is comfortable with something that brings peace. But something short of peace that is not war, something like the current situation, may be all there is for now. That is not because Israel is uninterested in peace. One focus of the talks between the two leaders was pushing back against Iranian aggression in the region, an effort that has united Israel with some Sunni Arab countries. Neither Netanyahu nor Trump spoke at length about this, but broader cooperation between Israel and Arab states could also be positive for Israeli-Palestinian relations. Maybe the Arabs will no longer give a blank check to Palestinian intransigence and terror. 

America is beginning to read the riot act to the PA, telling it that it will not get American money while inciting violence against Israel’s Jews and using the United Nations as a vehicle for anti-Semitic, anti-Israel poison. At some point, the PA leadership may have to decide if the only purpose of its existence is the elimination of the Jewish state, the position in which it has been stuck for a hundred years. If it is, then Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will not be able to facilitate peacemaking between the parties. 

But this time, the failure would not lead to the predictable condemnations of Israeli settlement activity as preventing peace and the two-state solution, as it has in the past. Unlike those who always blame Israel, the Trump team is not stupid.

Richard Baehr is the co-founder and chief political correspondent for the American Thinker and a fellow at the Jewish Policy Center.