RUTHFULLY YOURS

Donald Trump is set for his first overseas trip as the U.S. president, with stops in Saudi ‎Arabia, Israel, Italy and Belgium.‎ The trip will include meetings with Pope Francis in Rome, NATO leaders in Brussels, ‎and G7 members in Sicily in addition to Saudi, Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

The Saudi visit, which kicks off the trip, is expected to result in the announcement ‎of a large arms sale package, as well as demonstrate that the American posture in ‎the region is no longer based on balancing Iran and Saudi Arabia, former President Barack Obama’s inexplicable strategy which has done nothing but to encourage Iran to be an even more ‎provocative and aggressive actor. So too, early and frequent American efforts at ‎the United Nations by Ambassador Nikki Haley to stop the constant Israel bashing, and the Trump-Netanyahu meeting, which offered a warm American embrace of ‎Israel, seemed a part of an effort to restore close ties between the two traditional ‎allies and put an end to the distancing of America from Israel, a strategy carried ‎out throughout Obama’s two terms.‎

While the Trump administration has worked to put U.S. relations with Israel on a ‎more traditional path, there is renewed hope among the career Middle East peace ‎processing contingent, and the vast majority of foreign policy journalists who do ‎such a poor job covering the region, that perhaps Trump will be serious ‎about dealmaking, and is at work setting balls in motion to get another peace ‎process between Israelis and Palestinians going. The new hopes stem from ‎the warm welcome that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas received ‎on his recent official visit to the White House, and other signals that the president ‎and his team seem to have been sending to Israel. ‎

Many are putting weight on the fact that long-time Trump friend Ronald ‎Lauder has been encouraging the White House to launch a new peace process initiative, ‎arguing that Abbas is a moderate and open to a deal and that the time is right ‎given the new American team in place. (Presumably, the timing and people were ‎wrong on all prior occasions.) Attached to this theory is the notion that Abbas ‎could sell a deal to Palestinians, including those affiliated with or supportive of ‎Hamas, a bitter enemy of the PA and currently in control of Gaza. Selling a deal would mean that Israel and the ‎Palestinians could reach a deal, and there is no evidence today of overlapping sets ‎of minimally acceptable positions between the two parties, just as there never has ‎been. Most who have studied Palestinian politics believe that Abbas, who has long ‎overstayed his elected term, is hardly strong enough to ‎conclude a process that would require moderation or abandonment of core ‎Palestinian positions, such as the so-called “right of return” for millions of descendants of ‎refugees.‎

When Trump administration officials have met with Israeli leaders, both at the ‎White House and in Israel, the issue of settlement construction, the obsession of ‎the Obama White House, has come up. Trump chose not to get into a ‎public fight with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue on his first visit to ‎meet with the president, but nonetheless made clear that expansion of settlements ‎beyond their current boundaries would be viewed as problematic. ‎

So too, the early hopes that Trump would fulfill his oft-stated campaign promise ‎and announce the moving of the American Embassy from ‎Tel Aviv to Jerusalem looks much less likely. There have been press reports ‎‎(denied, of course) that the U.S. has already told Israel that the U.S. will use the president’s waiver authority for an additional six-month period to block such a ‎move, and on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested that there might ‎be good reasons to delay such a move.‎

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Tillerson explained that “the president, I ‎think rightly, has taken a very deliberative approach to understanding the ‎issue itself, listening to input from all interested parties in the region, and ‎understanding, in the context of a peace initiative, what impact would such ‎a move have.”‎

The conflation of an embassy move with complicating an Israeli-Palestinian ‎peace process is nothing new, of course. That argument, as well as others ‎suggesting that the Arab street in many countries would riot with the news, ‎and Palestinians would simply refuse to negotiate in protest, are also old ‎standbys. In essence, the Palestinians have shown a history of disinterest in ‎negotiating, and an almost complete unwillingness, when talks did begin, to ‎offer any bridging compromises of their own. If moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem was not the excuse, the PA could be counted on to find ‎another to delay the start of talks, or their success. ‎

The Jerusalem issue became a bit more complicated for the Palestinian ‎rejectionists in recent days, after Russia recognized Jerusalem, or ‎at least what was called “West Jerusalem” prior to the 1967 war, as Israel’s ‎capital. While Russia has not moved its ‎embassy to what it now regards as Israel’s capital, the recognition that ‎Jerusalem is a part of Israel is already beyond where the State Department has been willing to go, given its refusal to ‎acknowledge that Americans born in Jerusalem were, in fact, born in Israel. ‎

Netanyahu’s office, responding to Tillerson’s remarks, seemed ‎to make it fairly plain that Israel, for one, did not see an American Embassy ‎move as a risk to any peace process:‎ ‎”Relocating the American embassy would not harm the peace process, on the ‎contrary,” a statement by the Prime Minister’s Office said. Moving the ‎embassy, the statement said, “would advance it [the peace process] by ‎correcting a historic injustice and by shattering the Palestinian fantasy ‎according to which Jerusalem isn’t the capital of Israel.”‎

American peace processors have often suggested that while Israel ‎takes one position for local public consumption, it will often signal to ‎American negotiators that their real policy is more flexible. The statement today seemed to be an attempt to argue that ‎for a president such as Trump, who likes to say what is on his mind, without ‎a filter, Israel was not going to finesse the embassy issue. Perhaps ‎seeing the Russian move makes it easier for Israel to respond this way. After ‎all, if the Arab street — a Sunni Arab street — were to be unhappy ‎about something, it should be rioting over the Russian recognition of ‎Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Russia is currently aligned with Shiite Iran and ‎Hezbollah to keep Bashar Assad, an Alawite, in power in ‎Syria, while he slaughters hundreds of thousands and exiles millions, most of them Sunnis.‎

It is also possible that Israel has a legitimate concern over Trump’s ‎confidence in his ability to pull off deals that others could not. As a result, ‎Trump may not have the reluctance to step on the third rail of Middle East ‎peace making that has burned other presidents before him. If this is so, ‎Netanyahu likely figures nothing is lost by making clear that Israel wants ‎Trump to stick to his campaign promise over Jerusalem and the embassy ‎move. After all, if the embassy is moved and Trump goes all in on peace ‎processing, there is little reason to think the result of this initiative will be different from those of ‎prior efforts. Failure is pretty much inevitable, but at the end of the day, one ‎thing will have changed — the status of Jerusalem.

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