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The Trump-Netanyahu meeting

Feb 17, 2017

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Update from AIJAC

Update 02/17 #04

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu travelled to Washington on Wednesday for his first summit with new US President Donald Trump since his inauguration, in a visit that was generally seen as important for both US-Israeli relations during Trump’s term in office and for setting a baseline for the Trump Administration’s policy on Middle East peacemaking. Most of the media headlines about the summit have focused on the initial press conference and especially Trump’s remark, when asked about the two-state solution, “I’m looking at two states and one state, and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one…” (The media conference can viewed in full here, while a transcript is here.)

Meanwhile, in remarks following the summit that got recieved less publicity that the one’s at the press conference, Netanyahu declared his views have not changed since his 2009 Bar Ilan speech supporting a two-state resolution and stated, “I said it before, and I will repeat it here again: I don’t want to annex close to 2.5 million Palestinians to Israel. I do not want them to be our subjects.” Meanwhile, a number of senior Trump Administration officials have also insisted the US still supports a two-state resolution – see here and here.

AIJAC’s Ahron Shapiro yesterday published a good analysis of what was actually said at the media conference about a two-state resolution, but this Update looks in more depth at both that issue and the broader themes of the Trump-Netanyahu Summit.

We lead with Jerusalem Post diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon, who notes three takeaways from the pre-Summit media conference. These are the very different atmospherics compared to the Obama years, especially with respect to settlements, the step back from insisting the two-state solution is the only solution possible, and the new emphasis on a wider diplomatic process incorporating the Sunni Arab states. Keinon says all three represent differences from the Obama years, but that the overall effect is that there will be a significant reset of the diplomatic peace process with the Palestinians. For his full analysis, CLICK HERE. Another good general analysis of the Summit’s themes comes from Ron Kampeas of the JTA.

Next up is columnist Jonathan Tobin, who covers the controversy over Netanyahu and Trump’s alleged “step back” from the two-state principle. He says it’s clear Trump, though he spoke somewhat clumsily, was not actually withdrawing support for the two-state option but was instead emphasising another important diplomatic principle – that the US cannot impose peace on terms that aren’t accepted by the parties. While Tobin is critical of Trump’s mention of the non-viable “one state solution”, he says Trump was signalling to the Palestinians he would not reward intransigence while also calling for Israeli restraint on settlements. For all the details of Tobin’s argument, CLICK HERE

Finally, Ben Cohen, another American columnist and analyst, discusses in more detail the apparent new regional focus for the peace process being suggested by both Trump and Netanyahu. He says this new approach can be seen as reversing an idea that has been prevalent since the mid-60s – “Palestine First”. He makes a strong case that moving away from this paradigm could well be a positive step, both because the existing strategy has not worked, and because changes in the region over the last 20 years have to be taken into account in any approach to peacemaking. For this insightful piece in full, CLICK HERE. A news analysis offering differing views on the feasibility of such a regional approach and what it might look like is here. Meanwhile, Koby Huberman, co-founder of The Israeli Peace Initiative, offers his blueprint for making a regional peacemaking strategy work, here.

Readers may also be interested in…

A summary of reactions to the Trump-Netanyahu meeting and their comments about a two state resolution from Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
A post-summit interview with Netanyahu about the US-Israel alliance and where he sees it going under Trump. And here’s another.
The Jerusalem Post, in an editorial, urges Netanyahu not to give in to pressure from his right on construction in settlements and instead coordinate with the Trump Administration before any announcements. In post-Summit comments, Netanyahu seems to indicate that this is indeed his plan. Meanwhile, knowledgeable American columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer, in a TV interview, suggests Trump did Netanyahu a favour by urging restraint over construction in settlements, allowing Netanyahu to tell his right-wing coalition partners he cannot do what they want because of US objections.
Reporter Gil Hoffman notes that polls show that the two-state resolution remains much more popular than a one-state one among both Israelis and Palestinians. And here’s all the details of the latest poll backing this up.
Some Israeli commentators have been highly critical of Trump and Netanyahu’s comments on the two-state solution, such as David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel, and David Brinn of the Jerusalem Post. Other commentators have been much more positive, including Boaz Bismuth and Noah Feldman. Meanwhile, legal academic and public commentator Alan Dershowitz indicates he has no problem with the statements, seeing them as a ploy to pressure the Palestinian to return to negotiations.
A new study shows that Iran has not mitigated its calls for Israel’s destruction at all since the nuclear deal in 2015.
Hamas has named Yahya Sinwar, a pro-Iranian hardliner released in the 2011 Shalit prisoner exchange, as its new head in Gaza. Some expert analysis of this development is here and here.

Article 1

From Obama to Trump, a change in tone and substance

By HERB KEINON

Jerusalem Post, 02/16/2017

Trump’s refraining from clearly saying that two states is the only way, while endorsing a wider regional approach, is a significant reset of the entire diplomatic process with the Palestinians.

Trump, Netanyahu and Obama. (photo credit:REUTERS)

Eight years ago, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met then-president Barack Obama in the Oval Office, this is what the new president had to say about the settlements: “Now Israel is going to have to take some difficult steps as well, and I shared with the prime minister the fact that, under the road map and under Annapolis, that there’s a clear understanding that we have to make progress on settlements. Settlements have to be stopped in order for us to move forward. That’s a difficult issue. I recognize that, but it’s an important one and it has to be addressed.”

And here is how new President Donald Trump addressed the very same issue before his first meeting with Netanyahu in the Oval Office: “As far as settlements, I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit, we’ll work something out. I would like to see a deal being made, I think a deal will be made.”

The message wasn’t that significantly different, but there was a great difference in how it was delivered.

And that is one of the three major takeaways from the Trump-Netanyahu press conference on Wednesday in the White House: There will be differences between the two men because they are leaders of different countries, whose interests do not always intersect, but the differences will be dealt with very differently – as among friends, not rivals.

Obama’s tone, his demeanor at his first meeting, was almost that of a teacher telling a pupil what he has to do. Trump’s tone was friendlier, lighter.

“Bibi and I have known each other a long time,” Trump said. “A smart man, a great negotiator, and I think we are going to make a deal. It might be a bigger and better deal than people in this room even understand.”

When Netanyahu responded with a curt “All right,” Trump joked that “doesn’t sound too optimistic,” and Netanyahu shot back in reference to a book Trump once wrote, “That’s the art of the deal.”

That jocular tone was significantly different from the heavy, tense tone of most of the Obama-Netanyahu meetings, even their first. Tone cannot paper over differences, but a good tone can make those differences easier to deal with.

The second major takeaway from the press conference was one of substance: Trump’s refusal to unequivocally endorse the two-state solution, US policy since president George W. Bush announced support for a Palestinian state in 2002.

“So I’m looking at two states and one state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Trump said, as Netanyahu laughed.

“I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while that the two states looked like the easier of the two, but honestly, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”

That is a significant shift from what has become axiomatic, that the only solution is a two-state solution. Trump is essentially saying that he is open to entertaining ideas and approaches to the diplomatic process other than the ones that have been tried – and have failed – since the Oslo process began in 1993.

The third major takeaway is this administration’s endorsement of looking at a wider regional diplomatic process, as Netanyahu has been advocating for a number of years.

According to this idea, the sands in the Middle East have shifted fundamentally, and it will now be easier for Israel to reach understandings with the pragmatic Sunni states in the region – Egypt, Jordan, the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. Once those understandings are reached, those countries will then nudge the Palestinians to be more flexible, which will make an Israeli-Palestinian deal more likely.

Former US secretary of state John Kerry dismissed this out of hand as unrealistic, saying the Arabs would never go for it. Not Trump; he wants to give the ideal a whirl.

“It is actually a much bigger deal. A much more important deal, in a sense; it would take in many, many countries, and cover a very large territory,” he said. “I think we have some pretty good cooperation from people who in the past would never, ever have thought about doing this.”

Much has been written in the last few days about how this first Trump-Netanyahu meeting – and the new, friendlier tone between the two leaders – will reset Israel-US relations after the rocky Obama years.

But more than a reset of Israel-US ties, Trump’s refraining from clearly saying that two states is the only way, while endorsing a wider regional approach, is a significant reset of the entire diplomatic process with the Palestinians.

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Article 2

The Two State Solution: Does Trump’s Indifference Matter?

The benefits and drawbacks of leaving the details to the Israelis and the Palestinians

By Jonathan S. Tobin

National Review, February 16, 2017

Those who expected Donald Trump to effect genuine change in Washington still might be waiting for him to take action on some issues, but when it comes to altering existing Middle East policy, the president has not disappointed. With his refusal to specifically endorse a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the president has seemingly discarded the idea that has been the bedrock principle of U.S. Middle East diplomacy for the past generation.

Controversary has followed US President Donald Trump’s refusal to specifically endorse a “two-state solution” at Wednesday’s press conference with Israeli PM Netanyahu, but he was actually endorising another diplomatic principle that was just as important.

When asked about a two-state solution during a joint press conference prior to his first meeting as president with Israeli prime pinister Netanyahu, Trump replied:

I’m looking at two-state and one-state. I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.

In doing so, Trump upset people on both sides. Palestinians think his unwillingness to pledge to work for an independent Palestinian state reveals his belief that they don’t deserve sovereignty. By the same token, many Israelis worry that his willingness to “live with” a one-state solution means he wouldn’t care if a Jewish state were replaced by one in which Arabs outnumbered Jews — which would end the entire Zionist experiment.

His statement was typically Trumpian in that it displayed either his ignorance or his lack of interest in the details, but it’s clear that the president wasn’t supporting either the one-state or the two-state option. Instead, what he was doing was endorsing a diplomatic principle that is just as important: The U.S. cannot impose peace on terms that aren’t accepted by the parties, and we shouldn’t behave in a manner that encourages Palestinians’ ongoing refusal to make peace.

Using the words “one state” was a mistake on Trump’s part. A one-state solution could lead to peace of a sort but only if one of the two sides surrendered. If Israelis acquiesce to the destruction of their country, it would end the conflict — at the cost of a potential Holocaust. Similarly, peace could result from the Palestinians’ deciding that they were ready to cede all of the country to the Jews and give up all hope of governing themselves. But since neither scenario is going to happen, to speak of one state is to declare that any compromise is impossible even in a distant and theoretical future.

The one-state option is the platform of Hamas, the Islamist terror group that governs the independent Palestinian state that exists (in all but name) in Gaza. Hamas’s goal is one Islamist state in which the Jewish population would either be massacred or expelled. The Fatah Party that runs the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank pays lip service at times to a two-state solution, but its ideology centers on denial and hope: Deny the right of the Jews to any part of the country, and hope for a state Arabs will dominate. Both Hamas and Fatah glorify violence against Jews and honor terrorists.

That’s why few Israelis believe a two-state solution is possible. Though it’s clear an overwhelming majority of Israelis want a two-state solution, they understand that the Palestinians have yet to come to terms with Israel’s legitimacy, and they think more territorial withdrawals would endanger their security without bringing peace. The idea of possibly replicating a Hamas state in the West Bank — far larger and more strategic than Gaza — strikes most Israelis as not only ill-advised but utterly insane.

A minority of Israelis do think that Israel can rule between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River indefinitely in spite of the presence of millions of Palestinians who don’t want to share the country with them. But there is a difference between supporting the right of Jews to disputed territory and asserting that you regard the exercise of that right as more important than making peace (if making peace were possible). Those to the right of Netanyahu might oppose giving up any territory, but they know that if the Palestinians ever did accept one of Israel’s offers of statehood, the Right would be heavily outvoted by the Israelis willing to give up territory for peace.

But just because Trump isn’t demanding a two-state solution doesn’t mean he is opposing it or even that his stance makes it less likely. For eight years, President Obama insisted that the Israelis give up the West Bank and part of Jerusalem in order to allow a Palestinian state. Putting all the pressure on the Israelis was a bigger mistake than anything Trump has said. Obama didn’t take into account that Palestinian politics and the Hamas–Fatah rivalry made it impossible for their so-called moderates to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders might be located. Obama’s approach had the effect of rewarding Palestinian intransigence, which doomed his efforts.

In saying he didn’t care what the terms of peace were so long as both sides accepted them, Trump sent the opposite message to the Palestinians. The Palestinians believe that pressure from the international community will isolate the Jewish state and make it vulnerable. Trump’s refusal to sanctify the two-state mantra is a warning that if Palestinians want a state, they will not get it by jettisoning negotiations and asking the United Nations to impose terms on Israel — which is how they rewarded Obama for his efforts on their behalf.

Trump appears genuine in his desire to broker a peace deal. Indeed, to the dismay of many on the Israeli right, he wants Netanyahu to restrain settlement growth in parts of the West Bank that would be included in a Palestinian state — even if Trump knows that settlements are not the cause of the conflict.

Yet like all others who have tried, Trump is bound to fail in his quest to conclude the ultimate Middle East real-estate transaction. If he does fail, it will not be because he declined to utter the magic words “two states” at a White House presser. Even the ablest diplomat or deal-maker can’t wish away the realities of Palestinian politics. But Trump’s willingness to put pressure on the Palestinians — rather than pointlessly hammering the Israelis as Obama did — actually increases his chances of success, minimal though they may be.

— Jonathan S. Tobin is a contributing writer to National Review Online.

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Article 3

Trump-Netanyahu meeting shatters ‘Palestine First’ regional peacemaking strategy

By Ben Cohen

JNS.org, Feb. 16, 2017

The morning after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first official meeting with President Donald Trump, multiple headlines proclaimed Feb. 16 that the two-state solution—whereby an independent, sovereign Palestinian state would be created alongside the state of Israel within agreed and final borders—was, if not quite dead, fast approaching death’s door.

I want to suggest that those who interpret the outcome of the Trump-Bibi meeting in that manner should dig a little deeper. There is something of a revolution in thinking and approach going on, and what’s being overturned is what you might call the “Palestine First” strategy of regional peacemaking. But that doesn’t have to mean that a solution involving Palestinian sovereignty has been extinguished.

The idea of “Palestine First” was rooted in the mid 1960s, just before the Six-Day War, when Yasser Arafat and his comrades in the Fatah movement took over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)—until that point, the PLO had been an instrument of the Arab League. By asserting Palestinian independence from Arab collective decision-making, Arafat set the stage for a violent struggle against Israel in the name of Palestinian “return” and full sovereignty from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

The “Palestine First” strategy, which dates back to when Yasser Arafat gained control of the PLO in the mid-60s, is now rightly being re-thought, according to Cohen.

It took thousands of deaths and several bitter wars for Arafat to realize that his armed struggle was doomed to failure. In 1990, the “Palestine First” strategy took a heavy blow when Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime in Iraq invaded Kuwait—an intra-Arab dispute suddenly toppled the Palestinian issue in the hierarchy of Arab priorities. Following the First Gulf War, Israel’s representatives met face to face with the Arab states and the PLO in Madrid, launching a lengthy, inconclusive peace process.

In parallel, however, the “Palestine First” strategy was resurrected when the Norwegian government opened a secret channel between the Israelis and the PLO, resulting in the 1994 Gaza–Jericho Agreement—a follow-up treaty to the 1993 Oslo Accords—which created the Palestinian Authority (PA) and was designed to set the Palestinians on the road to full statehood. More than 20 years and one brutal civil war later, the Palestinians are still ruled by a divided leadership and not a unified state.

That period includes, of course, the eight years in which President Barack Obama was in office. In marked contrast to his predecessor George W. Bush, Obama elevated the Palestinian issue to the center of Middle East politics, further antagonizing Israel by rehabilitating Iran, which explicitly seeks the elimination of the Jewish state, as an international actor through the 2015 nuclear deal. But neither Obama nor Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry could deliver on Palestinian statehood, and the Palestinian leadership embarked on an international campaign to seek unilateral recognition of their independence in various United Nations and international agencies.

That embittered and failed strategy, which saw Palestinian representatives verbally assaulting the historical and religious connections of the Jewish people to Jerusalem and the land of Israel, is the principal memory of the Obama years when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian dimension of the region’s multiple conflicts. It didn’t deliver for anybody, and served only to deepen Israeli fears of Palestinian eliminationism, as evidenced on a minute-by-minute basis in Palestinian school textbooks, on Palestinian TV and across the internet.

This is the environment that Trump walked into when he became president. Were Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) or Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), or Hillary Clinton, in the White House, I’d wager that they would all conclude—as Trump has, in the language that makes the most sense to him—that the current version of the “Palestine First” playbook should be tossed aside. “I’m looking at two states and one state, and I like the one that both parties like. I can live with either one,” Trump said Feb. 15.

“Palestine First” never meant that the Palestinians should rank at the top of the Middle East’s myriad national and religious struggles. It meant acknowledging that the absence of full Palestinian sovereignty, and the unfulfilled demand for the “return” of all the Arab refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants, lay at the heart of the region’s ills. It is that assumption that was so dramatically exploded by the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu.

The Middle East has gone through several extraordinary transformations in the last 20 years, whose cumulative effect has been to question whether the current state system in the region can even survive. Nobody can seriously make the argument that creating a Palestinian state in this context would be a boon for peace, neither with Israel nor more broadly. Nobody—save, perhaps, for a racist—could argue that the Palestinian birthrate poses a greater threat to Israel’s existence than does Iran and its Hezbollah ally in Syria and Lebanon. Nobody can make the moral or strategic case that resolving the question of Palestinian independence is of greater import than, say, that of Kurdish independence, or the profound lack of religious freedom, or the crying need to generate economic and educational opportunities for the youth of the Arab world.

The regional approach to peacemaking outlined by Trump and Netanyahu, grounded in a partnership between Israel and the Sunni Arab states, is foremost a recognition that there are grave problems that run across the borders created in the aftermath of World War I. If Israel is to achieve peace with the Palestinians, and if the Palestinians are to finally turn their Authority into something resembling a functional, accountable state, then those Arab states that are yet to make their own peace with Israel have to lead the way. Doing so will finally unravel the illusion that, just by existing, Israel is the source of the region’s crisis. Should that moment arrive, I hope that everyone—Arabs and Jews alike—will find it liberating.

Ben Cohen, senior editor of TheTower.org & The Tower Magazine, writes a weekly column for JNS.org on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of “Some of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism” (Edition Critic, 2014).

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