RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why now? That’s the question being asked in Arab capitals, at the Vatican, at the United Nations, and even in Washington, after President Donald Trump declared that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv. Calling it “long overdue,” Trump described his decision as the fulfillment of a campaign pledge and “nothing more or less than a recognition of reality.” Thanking him, Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu agreed: “Jerusalem,” he tweeted, “has been the capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years.” Israel’s Knesset, its parliament, is in West Jerusalem. So are its Supreme Court, its key ministries, and most key official institutions. Trump maintained that the dramatic step, endorsed by Congress in 1995 but consistently avoided by his White House predecessors, would not damage the search for a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or change the status of Jerusalem’s geographic and political borders. Those issues would still have to be agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinians, the White House said.

Initial responses were angry and swift, albeit predictable. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, calling for three “days of rage” to protest the move, said that the U.S. had disqualified itself as a neutral broker between the Palestinians and Israelis. So did militant Islamic leaders of Hamas, which rules Gaza and which the State Department has designated as a terrorist group. Eighteen countries also denounced the change, including some of America’s usually more dependable allies. British prime minister Theresa May called Trump’s decision “unhelpful in the pursuit of peace.” Saying he “cannot remain silent,” Pope Francis worried that the move would spark new tension and violence in the city revered by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres also expressed alarm.

Perhaps of greater concern was the reaction from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, all key players in the search for what Trump has called the “ultimate deal”—a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict—and vital allies in the United States’ war on ISIS and Islamic extremism. All three, but particularly Saudi Crown Prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, have worked closely with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and prime Middle East envoy. Administration officials recently promised that Trump would unveil Middle East peace plans soon. G

For nearly seven decades, the state of Israel has endured an unusual humiliation: Alone among the nations of the world, it has been denied the sovereign right to determine its own capital. Israel has regarded Jerusalem as its capital since its War of Independence in 1948. It is the seat of Israel’s president, prime minister, Knesset (parliament), Supreme Court and most government ministries. Yet for the better part of a century, the U.S. has led what is effectively an international boycott of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, keeping its embassy in Tel Aviv as part of a fiction that the status of Jerusalem remains undetermined.

The roots of this policy go back to the first half of the 20th century, when European diplomats set their sights on making Jerusalem an “international city”—a kind of second Vatican, controlled by responsible Europeans rather than by Jews or Arabs. When Jewish forces took the western half of the city in 1948, and especially after Jerusalem was united under Israeli rule in 1967, this fantasy of a Euro-Jerusalem disappeared forever. But rather than recognizing Israeli sovereignty, the international community decided to leave Jerusalem’s status for “future negotiations.”

Yet now half a century has passed, and still there is nothing but Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem anywhere in sight. In a dramatic address Wednesday, President Trump brought to an end the fiction that something else is going to happen. “Today we finally acknowledge the obvious,” he said. “Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do.”

Mr. Trump is right about this. But he also understands that there is more to it. The dream of rebuilding Jerusalem, destroyed in Roman times, is the linchpin that holds Jewish faith and nationhood together. Three times each day, Jews bless God as Boneh Yerushalaim, “the Builder of Jerusalem.” When Jews read, at every wedding, “If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its strength” (Psalm 137:5), we are teaching a subtle truth: We Jews cannot give up on restoring our ancient capital without giving up the source of our strength.

Would we really be giving up on restoring Jerusalem if Israel negotiated a “deal” to share sovereignty in the city? Consider the options: Israel will never agree for Jerusalem to be divided as Berlin was, with mutually hostile police forces on either side of a security barrier. Jerusalem was divided in this way from 1948 to 1967, and anyone who lived through that time of snipers on the city walls knows that such a scheme amounts to destroying Jerusalem, not rebuilding it. The other choice is to govern the city by committee—which would mean that every construction project, excavation, restoration or economic initiative favored by Israel would be subject to an Arab veto (and probably also to a European one). This is a formula for reducing Jerusalem to wretchedness.

President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel will be as a stab in the heart to the Arab World. But anything else would be to succor Arab hopes that Israel might some day be defeated and eliminated.

For perhaps a quarter of the world’s population, President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem on December 6 was humiliating. Just for that reason it makes Middle East peace more probable. More than President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the Israeli-Egyptian peace deal of 1979, President Trump is likely to be remembered as the American president who contributed most to peace.

Wars end not when the loser is defeated, but rather when the loser is humiliated. Throughout history, as I argued in a 2016 survey of ancient and modern wars, losers have fought on until they lack the manpower to fill their depleted ranks. Typically that occurs after 30% of military-age men are dead, as in France during the Napoleonic Wars, the South in the American Civil War, or Germany in the Second World War. The losing side will not abandon hostilities until all those who want to fight to the death have had the opportunity to do so — unless it is humiliated before the physical exhaustion of its resources has run its course.

That is why the use of atomic weapons against Japan well may have been an act of mercy. The American fire-bombing campaign had already wrecked most of Japan’s cities and killed far more civilians than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan might have sustained far more damage in a conventional resolution through bombing and an eventual invasion. Atomic weapons humiliated the Japanese by displaying the incomparable superiority of Western technology and the pointlessness of further resistance.

There are some defeats whose memory is too painful to bear. As an executive of Bank of America, I spent considerable time at its Charlotte headquarters. My Carolina colleagues needed only a Bourbon or two to lapse into obsessive rehearsals of Civil War battles which, by rights, they should have won. They sounded goofy, but that’s what happens when you sacrifice nearly a third of your young men.

With his December 6 statement, President Donald Trump has fulfilled his pre-election promise, repeated since his election in November 2016 and also consistent with the Republican Party’s platform, that he will move the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital.

In doing so, he has ended a 22-year epoch in which the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Law, passed with overwhelming majorities in the Senate (93–5) and House (374–37), had been essentially a dead letter.

Due to the presidential national security waiver contained in the 1995 Law, successive presidents continually deferred implementing the law for 6-monthly periods.

Now, as a result of President Trump’s shift, standard diplomatic practice of locating embassies in the designated capital of countries will be applied by the US to Israel.

The consecutive presidential waivers deferring action on the Law was always wrong, a misuse of a presidential discretion contained in the Law. Accordingly, what was designed, according to then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, to be utilized solely in genuine and exceptional cases of threats to national security was instead, without explanation or justification, perpetually invoked for unspecified national security interests and supposedly in the case of peace, every six months.

Yet, as President Trump noted in his statement, the 22-year use of the waiver brought the parties no closer to peace.

Moreover, the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to violate its Oslo Accords obligations to arrest and jail terrorists, disband terrorist organizations and end the incitement to hatred and murder that suffuse the PA-controlled media, mosques, schools and youth camps. It refuses Trump Administration demands to end paying salaries to jailed terrorists and stipends to their families.

It’s starting to sound like a plan.

Since the beginning of the Oslo “peace process,” it has been assumed that Israel has more to give than the Palestinians. After all, the story went, Israel is wealthy, recognized, democratic, and stable. The Palestinians are refugees with nothing. Right? So Israel was told not to build houses for Jews in areas that might become a Palestinian state — lest the Palestinians end up with a country that has Jews in it. Israel has, further, been pressed to “make life better” for the Palestinians in terms of jobs, electricity, water, medical care, and agriculture. The Arab states and the EU — as well as the U.S. — provide funds for, well, for everything including Palestinian leaders’ mansions and bank accounts. The deeper others waded into the “process” over the past two-plus decades, the more the Palestinians could be excused for believing that they didn’t have to do anything, but could wait for people to squeeze more out of Israel on their behalf under threat of a) discontinuing the process and/or b) more violence.

After all, they reasoned, what did they have to lose?

The Trump administration, however, appears to have concluded that the process might work differently if the Palestinians thought they did have something to lose. And by the moaning and shrieking emanating from Ramallah, if that is the plan it may be a good one.

The President started with a clear statement to Palestinian strongman Mahmoud Abbas about not teaching hatred, and then castigating him when he discovered that Abbas’s reassurances were lies. Congress added in the Taylor Force Act, which the President has said he would sign. The bill cuts funds to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as long as the PA is funding salaries for terrorists. Then the administration publicly considered closing the Palestinian mission in Washington because the PA was not meeting its Oslo obligation to negotiate issues directly with Israel and had, instead, made overtures in the International Criminal Court.

Jihadists, the tip of the sharia-supremacist spear, rationalize mass murder by denying the humanity of their enemies: Their doctrine teaches that non-Muslims are less than fully human and that their existence while refusing to accept Allah’s law is offensive. In the same way, Islamists, the broader population of sharia supremacists, rationalize the destruction of their perceived enemies, Israel in particular, by denying the reality of their legitimate existence.

This is what Edward Said referred to as the “psychological barrier.” It is what President Trump is trying to break by doing what he promised as a candidate to do: recognize the blunt reality that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.

Even before President Bill Clinton futilely sought to broker an Israeli–Palestinian peace settlement, Muslim Brotherhood operatives in the United States had formed their “Palestine Committee” to coordinate the activities of various Islamist organizations. It was out of this project that CAIR — the Council on American Islamic Relations — was formed, an Islamist public-relations outfit masquerading as a civil-rights organization. For the Palestine Committee, it was a priority to drum up moral and financial support for Hamas, the Brotherhood’s militant Palestinian satellite. But a second goal was just as important: the development of a plan to counter efforts by American Jewish groups and the Israeli government to normalize relations between Jews and Muslims.

The objective was to preserve Said’s “psychological barrier.” This is the mindset that prevents Muslims from accepting Israel’s right to exist. Even if relations are frosty, people who open lines of communication cross a threshold. They may never agree, but implicitly they concede that the other side has human dignity, is worth hearing out, and may even be guided by everyday concerns rooted more in security than hostility. Even worse from the Islamist perspective, if the two sides interrelate often enough, they may find areas of agreement — common ground that suggests compromise is preferable to bloodshed. Leave them together long enough and they might become cordial — even, Allah forbid, friendly.

Islamists thus labor to fortify the psychological barrier against peaceful coexistence by denying existence itself. Key to this is depicting Israel as not a normal country — an international outlaw that “occupies” but does not legitimately exist, without settled borders, without domestic tranquility, unable to conduct trade and commerce, and bereft of the sovereign authority even to name its own capital city.

The transnational progressives frothing over Trump’s formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — which, in a commonsense world, would be akin to recognizing that two plus two equals four — are either missing the point or showing blind allegiance to their Islamist bedfellows. Trump is taking a sledgehammer to the psychological barrier.

By misrepresenting the poster burning “ceremony” as a reflection of widespread Palestinian rage concerning Trump’s policy on Jerusalem, the international media is once again complicit in promoting the propaganda of Palestinian spin doctors. The journalists, including photographers and camera crews, have been handed detailed schedules of events that will take place in different parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

When we sit in our living rooms and watch the news coming out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, let us ask ourselves: How many of these “events” are, in fact, media burlesques? Why are journalists allowing themselves to be duped by the Palestinian propaganda machine, which spews hatred and violence from morning until night?

It is high time for some self-reflection on the part of the media: Do they really wish to continue serving as a mouthpiece for those Arabs and Muslims who intimidate and terrorize the West?

The “rivers of blood” we are being promised are flowing as we speak. Yet, it is the knife that Arabs and Muslims take to one another’s throats that is the source of this crimson current, not some statement made by a US president. Perhaps that could finally be an event worth covering by the roving reporters of the region?

A short three hours after US President Donald Trump phoned Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to inform him of his intention to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a number of Palestinian photojournalists received a phone call from Bethlehem.

The callers were Palestinian “activists,” who invited the photographers to come to the city to document an “important event.” When the photographers arrived, they discovered that the “important event” was a handful of Palestinian “activists” who wanted to burn posters of Trump in front of the cameras.

The “activists” waited patiently as the photojournalists and cameramen set up their equipment to get the “important event” on film. Shortly thereafter, the media was abuzz with reports about “angry Palestinian protesters taking to the streets to protest” Trump’s intention to move the embassy to Jerusalem and his recognition of the city as the capital of Israel. The five Palestinians who were filmed burning the Trump pictures were made to look as if they were part of a mass protest sweeping Palestinian communities.

For years Israel has been blamed for standing in the way of peace with its Arab neighbours. When it rejected a “peace plan” by the the Saudi regime which would have brought about Israel’s destruction, it was excoriated for turning down a chance to end the Middle East conflict.

Now the new Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has proposed another peace plan. Unlike its predecessor, according to the New York Times, this one would enable the Palestinians and the Arab world to live in peace and harmony alongside the State of Israel. The century-old Arab war of extermination against Israel would end.

Prince Mohammed has told the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to accept this plan or he’s finished. The Palestinians have been screaming betrayal ever since to anyone who will listen.

Lo and behold, Europeans have a new bogeyman. Prince Mohammed is now being painted as a weak, useless dilettante and his plan is being opposed and rubbished in Europe. Why? Because this astonishing Saudi reversal (assuming these details are at least mostly true) is being driven by the Saudis’ need to prevent the Iranian regime from achieving the regional hegemony towards which they are steadily driving, and to do that the Saudis need both America and Israel to join the fight against their common enemy. And to that end, the Saudis are not prepared to allow the Palestinians to get in the way. They have become dispensable.

The Iranian regime oppresses its own people, is driven by deranged hatred of the Jews and states that its goal is to destroy Israel. The Palestinian regime oppresses its own people, is driven by a deranged hatred of the Jews and states (in Arabic) that its goal is to destroy Israel.

The Europeans support the Palestinians and do not see the Iranian regime as their enemy – even though it has been in a state of self-declared war against the west since it came to power in 1979 and is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Instead they are turning the Arab leader who is fighting their common enemy, and who may be prepared to make a historic peace with their ostensible ally, into a foe.

Go figure.

“For people who say “all this sets back the peace process,” the short answer is “what peace process?“

Since Jerusalem is actually Israel’s capital and since it will continue to be so in any putative peace settlement, I don’t see how this blocks such a settlement.

The US Consulate–and future Embassy–are in WEST Jerusalem. Everyone (except people who believe in Israel’s annihilation) understand that West Jerusalem will be part of Israel forever. No voluntary peace settlement will change that.
There was no American statement that the embassy move prevents some part of Jerusalem from being a Palestinian capital, too.
I don’t like hecklers’ vetoes on campus and I don’t like rioters’ vetoeselsewhere. That threat was used to try and block the move. It failed. Good.
The Palestinians have not exactly proven themselves partners for peace since Oslo.
Until now, the US had not made them pay any price for their truculence.
Now, it has.
The only way there will ever being peace, IMO, is if Israel thinks it is absolutely secure against Palestinian threats and has firm US backing against such threats.
Obama’s strategy made the opposite assumption. It made US support for Israel and other allies more problematic, more contingent on following US directions, and, of course, more hectoring. US friends in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and across the region understood and adjusted–against the US.
Trump has fundamentally reversed that policy, not only in Israel but in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and elsewhere.
The only way many other Arab states will back off their rejectionist, maximalist demands to eliminate Israel is for them to be utterly convinced it is impossible and costly to continue.
Fundamentally, only Israeli military strength can convince them Israel will not be eliminated.
US support, including the moving of the embassy, shows that Israel cannot be completely isolated diplomatically. (Again, Obama’s moves against Israel raised question marks about diplomatic isolation.)
What will change the cost of Arab/Muslim/European opposition to Israel? Two calculations:
Fear of Iran, for states in the Middle East. They will edge toward alliance with other anti-Iranian states, of which Israel is the most powerful, the most technically sophisticated, and the most capable in its intelligence services.
Desire for trade with a growing, sophisticated, and technologically-innovative economy. It is called “start-up nation” for a reason. (The GDP per capita of once-poor Israel is now equal to Italy and about 20-30% below the wealthier European states. It is about 3.5x higher than Turkey, 7x higher than Iran, 10x higher than Jordan on a per capita basis.)

This essay first appeared at Quadrant Online in January, 2017.
Today, as President Donald Trump makes it official
and recognises Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it is well worth a reprise

The last time Arabs ruled eastern Jerusalem and the Old City all but one of the Jewish Quarter’s 35 synagogues was demolished. Trump’s pledge to recognise the city as the capital of Israel will go a long way towards preventing history from repeating itself.

As a candidate in the 2016 election season Donald Trump often talked of moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It was easy enough to dismiss. After all, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush had made the same promise before winning the White House.

This time around might be different. For a start, David Friedman sounds like a very different kind of U.S. ambassador to Israel. Here’s Friedman responding to Trump endorsing him for the post: “I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Should the United States relocate its embassy to Jerusalem? A lot of opinion in Australia is against it, although Tony Abbott saw merit in the idea. Australia joining a move by President Trump to shift its embassy to Jerusalem could “demonstrate its unswerving support for Israel, as the Middle East’s only liberal, pluralist democracy”. Members of the Turnbull government rebuffed “talkative” Abbott’s latest idea. Shifting the embassy would exacerbate an already problematic situation, especially with regards to the “two-state solution”. Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce referred to Abbott’s comments as “not helpful”, while Foreign Minister Julie Bishop gave her former leader short shrift: “The Australian government does not have any plans to move the Australian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.”

Greg Barton, professor in global Islamic studies at Deakin University, made this case for retaining the status quo:

“The future of Israel for Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis and for people living on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank depends upon trust and negotiation…If we went ahead and moved our embassy, following suit after the Americans to Jerusalem, we would be closing off doors of opportunity to play that mediating role.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s, not surprisingly, took an even harder line, and warned that changing the US embassy would unleash a “crisis we will not be able to come out from” for “the peace process in the Middle East and even peace in the world”. Departing Secretary of State John Kerry appeared to be reading from the same script, characterising the planned embassy change as dangerous: “You’d have an explosion, an explosion in the region, not just in the West Bank, and perhaps in Israel itself, but throughout the region.”

But so many explosions are already taking place in the Middle East and none have anything to do with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Syria’s civil war alone has resulted resulting in as many as 470,000 deaths. Perhaps this outgoing secretary of state might have found better things to do than trying to foist on Mahmoud Abbas a Palestinian mini-state (the West Bank and East Jerusalem) instead of his real goal, a fully-fledged Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.