United States officials told Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) last week that President Donald Trump will demand Israel divide Jerusalem and relinquish four of the city’s Palestinian neighborhoods, which Trump hopes to see become the capital of a future Palestinian state.
The transfer of control over Abu Dis, Jebl Mukabar, Isawiya and Shuafat was presented to Lieberman as just one piece of a larger American plan to partition the country into two separate states. While the two-state solution has been consistent US Mideast policy since the 1967 Six-Day War, the Trump administration has until now been intentionally vague as to whether Washington would admit failure on the plan and change course or continue to demand partition.
Trump tasked a special team comprising Jason Greenblatt, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to create a new Israel policy over the last year.
Few details of the policy have leaked out until now and news of the American demand to divide Jerusalem comes less than two weeks before the US Embassy is expected to officially move to Israel’s capital on May 14.
According to a report in the Hebrew-language Maariv newspaper Friday morning, the American plan also includes the internationalization of Jerusalem’s Old City.
The full plan is expected to be unveiled shortly after the embassy moves and American officials made clear to Lieberman last week that Israel would be expected to accept the new policy once presented, despite expected major reservations.
Unlike his predecessor, President Barack Obama, Trump has been careful to warm relations with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) and to force Israel into a position of greater dependence on American power in the region, specifically with regards to escalating involvement in Syria and heightened tensions with Iran.
In doing so, Trump and his Israel team appear to be following the advice of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who publicly criticized Obama in late 2011 for wrecking American efforts to force Israel from the West Bank.
Rice, who served as secretary of state under former President George W. Bush and was instrumental in pressing Israel to cede land to the American-backed Palestinian Authority, blamed Obama for losing the trust of the Israeli public with its “tough line” on Jewish building in the territories.
According to Rice, Obama’s unnecessary focus on banning Jewish construction in the West Bank created a sense of distrust for America on the Israeli street, which she claimed thwarted efforts to press Jerusalem to accept Washington’s policy agenda for the region.
“When you look at where we are now, we’re a long, long way back from where we were,” Rice said in a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, implying that the “Israel-friendly” image of the Bush administration was the key to its success in forcing former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to surrender the entire Gaza region and forcibly remove all Jews from the area in 2005.
Rice said that when Obama took office in 2009, she had initially hoped he could quickly revive stalled negotiations toward further Israeli concessions. She added, however, that she was soon disappointed by the new administration’s handling of delicate issues that lost Israel’s trust, specifically referring to Obama’s public confrontation with Netanyahu over new Jewish construction in Israel’s disputed heartland.
A detailed account of negotiations she helped broker in 2008 was a highlight of Rice’s memoir of her time in Washington. Published in November 2011, “No Higher Honor” concedes some missteps by the Bush administration on several fronts but strongly defends Rice and the former president’s efforts toward pushing Israel to surrender territory won from Egypt and Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War.
All those who claimed Donald Trump would somehow be different than his predecessors in regards to Israel and the Middle East need to wake up. American presidents are merely servants to very specific interest groups and policy agendas that transcend the four to eight year administrations that set the flavor more than the actual content of US foreign policy.
Despite bombastic pledges and pro-Israel platitudes, Trump has by now discovered that the interests of American empire in the Middle East are tied to the two-state agenda.
Trump is an egomaniac and a political bulldozer. Now that it’s clear he plans to force a policy that would not only fail to bring peace or justice to Jews and Palestinians on the ground but would actually further divide the populations and escalate tensions, Israeli political leaders should prepare to resist him harder than they did Obama.
And the public should once again learn from this experience the necessity for Israeli independence from Washington.
