An official in the White House has signaled, anonymously, that President Trump does not consider that a two-state solution between Palestinians and Israelis is necessarily the only option. This leak is a classic way of slipping news of a fundamental change into the public arena. For once Donald Trump has been prepared to abandon Twitter to issue one of his highly controversial statements.
There has never been any doubt about the strong connections between Trump’s people and Israeli Zionists. His son-in-law and close aide Jared Kushner openly backs illegal settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Trump has said that he wants the US embassy in Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. His administration has also indicated it does not see the expansion of the 140 Jewish settlements on Palestinian land with a current population of some 600,000 as necessarily an impediment to peace.
All the indications are that Trump is prepared to drop the long-standing US policy toward the Palestinians and in effect tear up the internationally accepted road map based on the Saudi peace plan advanced by King Abdullah.
This being the case, the question is: What is Trump proposing in its place? Anything less than an independent state for the Palestinians is clearly going to be unacceptable, not just to the Palestinians themselves, but to the wider Arab world, if not indeed much of the international community. The United Nations has responded to the adroit and patient diplomacy of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and in 2012 accorded Palestine “observer status”. Full membership was blocked in the Security Council.
This means that Trump would face extensive international opposition if he sought to unpick and downgrade the Palestinians’ current status.
But this leak from the new administration does have one major benefit. It at last actually admits the real trajectory of US policy toward the Palestinians. This policy has been to tut-tut publicly at the Israeli cuckoo as it seeks to throw the Palestinians out of the nest it has stolen while steadily sustaining the Zionist state with military, financial and intelligence aid.
In his seemingly epic Cairo speech, Obama appeared ready to end this hypocrisy and at last deal evenhandedly with the Arab world over Palestine. But eight years on, only once, in the closing days of his administration, did Obama allow the UN Security Council to condemn illegal Israeli settlement building, by having the US abstain in the vote. That vote still stands and any Trump attempt to reverse it will almost certainly be blocked, at least by the Russians and probably the Chinese.
Trump appears ready to abandon the fig leaf of objectivity over a Palestinian settlement and make clear, if not indeed revel in America’s slavish support for Israel. This, in fact, will be an advance in the peace process because for the first time, Washington’s core policy position will be abundantly open. The decks will have been cleared. It will also be easier for the Trump administration to understand the extent of the ingrained suspicion of America’s involvement in the Middle East and the degree to which that suspicion has undermined US efforts to intervene in the region. The fact that Donald Trump does not appear to “do subtle” means that for the first time the truth about Washington’s view of Palestine will become apparent.
