Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) reported on Wednesday that the United States has called for Israel to officially relinquish claims to 70% of the West Bank and establish the boundaries set by President Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century” as the State of Israel’s eastern border.
The report quoted anonymous members of Israel’s new coalition as stating that the Trump administration is pushing for the joint US-Israeli mapping team, which has been in the process of delineating which portions of the disputed Samaria and Judea regions should fall under Israeli sovereignty, to define the Trump plan map as Israel’s official borders.
While the precise boundaries have not yet been finalized by the team, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) is expected to apply Israeli sovereignty over approximately 30% of the West Bank, including parts of Samaria, Judea, the Jordan Valley and Dead Sea coast.
In keeping with Trump’s two-state plan, Washington is expected to recognize Israeli sovereignty in these areas, while requiring Jerusalem to enact a ban on Jewish construction beyond the map’s lines and officially drop all claims to the remainder of Israel’s disputed central mountain region. According the US plan, the remaining 70% of the territory should be allotted for the eventual establishment of a demilitarized Fatah-led Palestinian state.
Israeli officials cited by the Galei Tzahal report said that the new US demand is part of a series of measures that are “unfavorable to Israel” being pushed by Trump’s mapping team. Scott Leith, a senior advisor to the US National Security Council on the Israel-Arab conflict, was identified in the report as the administration figure most responsible for the new measures.
Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan – who has previously referred to the Trump plan “poisoned candy” – called Wednesday’s report “further proof” that the US is “slowly making its demands harsher and in so doing is harming the basic interests of the State of Israel.”
Dagan called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to apply sovereignty immediately – with or without the Trump administration’s support.
“With all due respect to the US and its friendship,” said Dagan. “Israel is a sovereign state, not a banana republic of the US. The excessive demands of the US and its interference in setting Israel’s borders are beyond what is acceptable between friends, even good friends.”
Washington has meanwhile grown frustrated with Israeli opposition to the Trump plan.
According to a Tuesday report in Israel Hayom, an unnamed US official said that if Jewish nationalists “don’t want what the administration currently has to offer, they shouldn’t come to us in the future.”
The official then cited former US President Barack Obama’s decision to allow the United Nations Security Council to pass Resolution 2334, which condemned Jewish communities in the West Bank as “illegal settlements,” implying that Israelis should be grateful to Trump and stop criticizing his plan.
But examining the behavior of Trump’s predecessors vis-à-vis the State of Israel reveals a pattern that the current administration hasn’t actually broken from. Since the 1967 Six Day War, it has been consistent US policy to force Israel from the lands won in that conflict. Despite attempts to market it as Washington’s “most pro-Israel two-state plan” to date, the Trump “Deal of the Century” clearly adheres to the long standing US objective of dividing Israel into two separate states and should be viewed not as a rupture but rather a continuation of what previous administrations have proposed.
In many ways, Trump has shown himself a more formidable threat to Israel than most of his predecessors. Due to his open hostility to Netanyahu, Obama ultimately failed to wrest any territory from Jerusalem during his eight years in office. In fact, he caused many Israelis to sour to the US and grow suspicious of American involvement in the region.
But Trump, like former President George W. Bush, has adopted a warm posture of friendship towards Jerusalem that has not only made many Israelis more comfortable with the US-Israel relationship but has even caused Netanyahu and other right-wing political figures to feel indebted to the US president.
In doing so, Trump has essentially taken the advice of Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who publicly criticized Obama in late 2011 for wrecking US efforts to force Israel from the West Bank.
Rice, who as Washington’s top diplomat in 2005 was instrumental in forcing Israel to cede the Gaza region to the American-backed Palestinian Authority, blamed Obama for losing the trust of the Israeli public with his confrontational posture towards Netanyahu.
According to Rice, Obama’s open hostility and unnecessary focus on banning Jewish construction in the West Bank created a sense of distrust for Washington on the Israeli street, which she said thwarted efforts to partition Israel into two states.
“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 Bush’s “Israel-friendly” image was the key to his success in forcing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to surrender the entire Gaza region and forcibly expel all Jews from the territory.
Trump’s new demand that all territory outside his map be officially relinquished by Israel should be a red flag for right-wing Israelis and Diaspora Jews who have until now bought into Trump’s bombastic pledges and pro-Israel platitudes. Despite his brash style, Trump is no different than his more polished predecessors when it comes to foreign policy. If anything, he should be seen as the US empire unmasked. As the American political system currently functions, presidents are generally mere servants to very specific corporate interests and policy agendas that transcend the four to eight year administrations that set the flavor more than the actual substance of US imperial policy.
But unlike many of his more polished establishment predecessors, Trump is a dangerously unhinged egomaniac and a political bulldozer. Now that it’s become clear that his “Deal of the Century” 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 leaders should prepare to resist him even more aggressively than they did Obama.
In addition to complete rejection of the Trump plan and resistance to its implementation, the most sound available political course for Israel’s national camp is to push for increased independence from the United States so no Washington administration can ever coerce our leaders into betraying the Jewish people’s homeland or national interests.
At the end of the day, Israel doesn’t need a sympathetic emperor in the White House. What Israel actually needs is freedom.
