At the end of last week came news that U.S. President Donald Trump had phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and invited him to visit the White House. This followed a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, as well as other lower level communications between administration officials and the PA, including with Palestinian business leaders.
When Barack Obama was inaugurated president in 2009, his first call to any foreign leader was made that same day to Abbas. It took seven weeks for Trump to match Obama’s outreach. The difference undoubtedly reflects an overall shift in orientation and emphasis, but also a reflection of how a president can communicate a level of interest and support in a cause or a country even if little of substance has changed.
For eight years, Israelis fretted with good reason that their ties with the United States were threatened by the hostility of the Obama administration, particularly on the issue of settlement construction. Pretty much every Israeli announcement of any phase of a settlement construction project was met with a nasty public rebuke, even if the construction involved work in settlements that have always been assumed by all the American peace processors, Democrat or Republican, to be in communities that would remain part of Israel in a final status deal with the Palestinians. This understanding had been put in writing by President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004, but Obama never paid it any heed. The final rebuke was the American acquiescence through its abstention on the noxious Security Council resolution passed just after the 2016 election, which labeled all Israeli activity beyond the Green Line as that of an occupier.
The cold shoulder carried over into American pressure during the last Gaza war in 2014, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued an alert about the safety of Ben-Gurion Airport, when a rocket fired by Hamas landed a mile away, thereby shutting down U.S. air traffic to Israel for 36 hours. There were also repeated criticisms of Israeli actions that caused any Gazan civilian casualties, though Hamas seemed to be acting to ensure these would occur by storing and then firing rockets from the grounds of hospitals, mosques, schools and densely populated civilian areas.
And of course there was the American obsession with concluding a deal with Iran on its nuclear program, which effectively traded a short-term reduction in the level of Iranian centrifuge activity for a windfall of $100 billion in cash, sanctions relief, and America looking away as Iran violated other Security Council resolutions on missile development and arms sales, and as Iran stepped up its aggressive activities in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and other countries.
