OP-ED: A change in policy or just sleight of hand?

Depending on who we listen to, President Donald Trump has either taken bold charge of a stagnant peace process and advanced a new tack of a single state solution or has set the question of Palestinian statehood back several decades by moving away from the long-held position of a future involving two states, one Israeli and the other Palestinian.

The two-state solution first proposed under the British Mandate has been a cardinal point of the U.S.’s approach to the Middle East peace process since the George Herbert Walker Bush presidency and was upheld during the Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. With his one press conference aside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday,  the President has not only erased and reinformed the U.S. policy, but in so doing has scrambled mapmakers across the globe to try to make sense of his rhetoric.

Does this mean a return to the historic partnership between the United States and Israel that existed prior to the establishment of OPEC and the diplomacy of avoiding any deals with oil-rich Middle East countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Libya and Saudi Arabia? Probably not.

Will this new favored status for the Jewish state create a rift with the Arab states and drive them to seek out alliances with Russia? That’s doubtful too. The delicate balance and shifting power scheme between them and Iran, Daesh (also known as the Islamic State), the Kurds, Al Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas and anti-government forces in Syria require American weapons and advisors on the ground. There is no black and white in the Middle East as existed during the Cold War to separate factions there. Instead, we find many hues of gray that make U.S. foreign policy quite reactive rather than proactive and often ineffective.

Liberal Israelis had hoped to tie swaps of land with the Palestinians and the opportunity for self-governance in the West Bank and in Gaza into Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist and peaceful coexistence. Israel’s ceding the oil rich Sinai back to Egypt created a tenuous, but still extant partnership between them. Jordan’s acceptance of Israel has also held firm. Bold steps by Israel in allocating the Palestinian Authority as a base for a future independent state in the West Bank and the transfer of Gaza in 2005 was to give the Palestinian people something their Arab brethren had never given them – their own independent state. Instead of peace, what Israel received in return were defiant refusals by the Palestinian Authority to prevent the spread of terror in campaigns like the Intifadas and the election of a terrorist state controlled by Hamas in Gaza.

This has made conservative Israelis angry and heightened tensions in the area. The response to the terror campaigns has been for Israel to create a much-despised security wall and to limit the free entry of Palestinians into its borders. The Palestinians in turn decry Israeli enforcement of peace as occupation and term what they endure as apartheid. Spin doctors on both sides continue to wage a war in rhetoric and resistance based on mutual non-trust. The BDS movement is an offshoot of this deliberate campaign of non-cooperation and zero-sum game by the Palestinians.

Some will say this turnabout in U.S. policy is more dramatic flare than true substantive change. Perhaps it is. The U.S. has never abandoned Israel, the only true democracy in the region. Even during the icy period of the previous administration there were substantial aid packages passed by Congress, which escaped presidential veto.  So what President Trump has accomplished might be seen as little more than legerdemain.

Yet with no change in a stand-off of wills between Israelis and Palestinians, perhaps a little magic is what is called for. At this juncture, an old Jewish expression comes to mind. “It couldn’t hurt.”