Trump’s clamor for Israeli approval

US President Donald Trump promises to be pro-Israel in every aspect. “I’m the best thing that could ever happen to Israel,” he boasted at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s presidential forum in Washington in December 2015.
For a brief moment, Trump appeared to rethink his unconditional support for Israel, when in February 2016 the Republican presidential nominee pledged “neutrality” between Palestinians and Israelis. “Let me be sort of a neutral guy,” he said during an MSNBC town hall meeting. Since then, this position has been surpassed by the most regressive rhetoric, beginning with his speech at the conference of the Israeli lobby AIPAC the following month.
As for Israel, its expectations of the US president are very clear: Unconditional financial and military support, carte blanche to expand illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and an end to any form of political “pressure” via attempts to revive the “peace process.”
Not that Trump has had any qualms with these expectations. The real challenge was that his main rival Hillary Clinton was an unprecedentedly ardent supporter of Israel. She was completely brazen in her groveling before the pro-Israel lobby.
Reflecting on the death of former Israeli President Shimon Peres, she told Jewish leaders: “When he spoke, to me it was like listening to a psalm, and I loved sitting and listening to him, whether it was about Israel, the nation he loved and did so much to defend, or about peace or just about life itself.”
She promised them to “protect Israel from de-legitimization,” as reported in Israeli newspaper Haaretz — de-legitimization meaning attempts by civil society groups worldwide to boycott Israel for failing to respect international law and the rights of occupied Palestinians.
This is the kind of political landscape that Trump, essentially a businessman not a politician, needed to navigate. In a foray of hasty moves, he has agreed to give Israel what it sought, but going even further than any other US president in modern history by promising to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
It was a clever move at the time, enough to match Clinton’s love offerings for Israel and make Trump the darling of Israel’s right-wing politicians, who now control the government. However, the fallout of that promise, if implemented, will prove very costly. If Trump goes through with this, he is likely to unleash chaos in an already volatile region.
Jerusalem was occupied in two different stages, first by Zionist militias in 1948, and then by the Israeli army in 1967. Understanding the centrality of Jerusalem to the whole region, British colonialists — who had won a League of Nations mandate over Palestine in 1922 — were keen for the city to remain an international hub.
Israel, however, took it by force, referencing some self-serving interpretation of Biblical text that supposedly designates Jerusalem the “eternal” capital of the Jewish people. In 1980, Israel officially annexed Jerusalem, in violation of international law and to the dismay of the international community, which has continually rejected and condemned Israeli occupation.
Even countries that are considered allies of Israel, including the US, reject Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem, and refuse its invitation to relocate their embassies from Tel Aviv to the illegally occupied city. Yet since 1995, the US position has vacillated between the historically pro-Israel US Congress, and the equally pro-Israel but more pragmatic White House.
In October 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act by an overwhelming majority in both the House and Senate. It called Jerusalem the undivided capital of Israel, and urged the State Department to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. US administrations under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have signed a presidential waiver that deferred the Congressional bill, six months at a time.
The last time the waiver was signed by Obama was on Dec. 1, 2016. Now, the real-estate mogul enters the White House with an alarming agenda that looks identical to that of the current Israeli government of right-wingers and ultra-nationalists. “We have now reached the point where envoys from one country to the other could almost switch places,” wrote Palestinian Professor Rashid Khalidi in The New Yorker.
This comes at the worst possible time, as new bills are springing up in the Israeli Knesset to annex even the Jewish settlements rendered illegal by Israel’s own definitions, and to remove any restriction on new settlement construction and expansion. Over the course of just a few days following Trump’s inauguration, the Israeli government has ordered the construction of thousands of new housing units in occupied Jerusalem.
Even traditional allies of the US and Israel are alarmed by the grim possibilities resulting from the nascent Trump-Israel alliance. Speaking to the Paris peace conference on Jan. 15, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault warned Trump about the “very serious consequences” that await if the US Embassy is moved to Jerusalem.
Palestinians and Arabs understand that moving the embassy is far from a symbolic move, but a carte blanche to complete the Israeli takeover of the city — including its holy sites — and complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Muslims and Christians. The Trump administration’s gamble in moving the embassy is likely to ignite a political fire throughout Palestine and the Middle East, with horrific and irreversible outcomes.
Considering the significance of Jerusalem to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and hundreds of millions of believers worldwide, Trump might be igniting a powder keg that would further derail his already embattled presidency. In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump restated the tired jargon of how “badly” Israel has been treated, and that relations between Washington and Tel Aviv have been “repaired.”
But he then refused to talk about moving the embassy because “it’s too early.” This might be his way of back-tracking in order to avert a crisis. It is a downgraded position from that stated by his senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who recently said moving the embassy is a “very big priority.”
Even if the embassy move is delayed, the danger still remains as Jewish settlements are now growing exponentially, thus compromising the status of the city. Trump’s lack of clear foreign policy that aims to create stability — not rash decisions to win lobby approval — is a dangerous political strategy.
He wants to reverse the legacy of his predecessor, yet has no legacy of his own, which is the very formula needed to invite more violence and push an already volatile region further into the abyss.