Trump's West Bank promise

I wouldn't put much stock in it!

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Today’s post starts with some news worth quoting at length:

President Trump said he would block Israel from annexing the West Bank, issuing a new ultimatum to head off a move that other Western and Middle Eastern powers warned could further inflame regional tensions and jeopardize Israel’s normalized ties with some Arab nations.

“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank. I will not allow it. It’s not going to happen,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, publicly reiterating a pledge he made to Arab leaders privately earlier this week.

Trump’s comments mark a rare escalation of public pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he expands Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and while Western countries such as France have said they would recognize a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s government has approved controversial projects in recent months to expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank on tracts of land that Palestinians seek for statehood.

[…]

Trump first told Arab leaders that he would pressure Netanyahu not to annex the West Bank during a closed-door meeting with them in New York on Tuesday. His latest public comments offer the starkest sign yet that the U.S. president, who has described himself as “history’s most pro-Israel U.S. president,” would seek to constrain Netanyahu’s government.

Senior Arab officials have warned that any Israeli move to annex the West Bank could undermine the Abraham Accords, the 2020 breakthrough diplomatic deal brokered under the first Trump administration that saw countries including the U.A.E., Bahrain and Morocco normalize ties with Israel.

I have a few thoughts about this.

But first some background. Recently, Israel has begun a new offensive into Gaza City, forcing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to flee and killing an unknown amount. At the same time, a number of Western states - France and Britain among them - have formally recognized the existence of a Palestinian state. Although the latter move might sound significant, it’s actually more an act of desperation - a Palestinian state has never looked further away from coming into existence than it does today.

But further in the background, something else has been happening - Israel has been tightening its grip on the West Bank. Since October 7th, there has been a surge of violence by Israeli settlers in the territory. As the IDF has pulled away from the West Bank to focus on other fronts, the Israeli military has armed settlers to plug the gap.

At the same time, Netanyahu’s government is moving towards approving a development plan known as E1. The plan has long been opposed by Washington and jut about every other country because it would effectively sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank the north of the territory from the south. With the West Bank thus split into pieces, it’s hard to see how it could become a viable, independent political entity. Bezalel Smotrich, the country’s finance minister, has said that the plan would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.

And this is where Donald Trump comes in.

It seems no surprise that this is happening on Trump’s watch. Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly defied Trump and suffered no consequences, and Trump has shown himself to be leading a disjointed and chaotic regime.

Most notably, he has dismantled the regular foreign policy making machinery and tries to make all major decisions himself based on his personal relationships with other leaders. It’s precisely that style that got him to this point in the first place. As Netanyahu’s government started to inch towards implementing E1 over the past few months, the U.S. did little to dissuade it. Its ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said that it was a “decision for the government of Israel to make”.

Trump now appears to feel differently. A normal administration would have figured out a policy about this and stuck to it consistently. But instead, Trump’s regime consists of various freelancers doing there own thing - Huckabee is a Christian Zionist - without any central coordination. Trump is ignorant of the issues and takes little interest in rectifying his ignorance. He only pays intermittent attention to any given issue and feels free to reverse himself on a dime rather than be made to look stupid or weak.

And so he gets played by smarter foreign leaders, again and again.

That appears to be exactly what is happening right now. Trump’s sudden awareness and opposition to Israeli plans in the West Bank seems to have been kindled by his friends among the Arab ruling houses, some of whom have helped him engage in the most significant personal corruption in American presidential history. They have told him they bitterly oppose the idea, and that it would be the end of the Abraham Accords, his cherished first-term diplomatic achievement. And so he has been roused to words - for now.