One can easily understand that PA President Mahmoud Abbas is very angry with President Trump these days. After all, Mr. Trump has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and has said he has begun the process of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. He also declared his intention to cut funding to the Palestinians unless they return to the negotiating table with Israel and end the PA program of providing stipends to Palestinian terrorists or their families.
In addition, President Trump has signaled that he is planning to cut funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency. And following the overwhelming vote of UN members calling on the U.S. to rescind its new policy on Jerusalem, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said the Trump administration will take such votes into account when countries that did not stand with the U.S. at the UN come to Washington for aid.
So Mr. Abbas must long for the days when Barack Obama was calling the shots. Still, the “burning bridges” vehemence of Mr. Abbas’s criticism of President Trump at last week’s session of the PLO National Council (e.g., “shame on you, Mr. President…we will slap back”) was troubling, as was his charge that the president no longer had credibility as a peace broker because he “sided” with Israel.
As we see it, President Trump’s moves reflected not favoritism but a hard-eyed nod to realism as the basis for serious peace negotiations. That is, Palestinian fantasies would never be accepted by Israel and were getting in the way of progress. And this is to say nothing of the not inconsequential matter of American interests.
The Abbas response demonstrates that the PA chief is living in a dream world in which counterintuitive, unrealistic expectations are self evidently, fundamentally, and ultimately true. And that mindset is problematic going forward.
Thus, in order to promote the Palestinian claim to Jerusalem, Mr. Abbas has spent a considerable amount of time peddling the palpably absurd argument that there is no evidence of a Jewish connection to Jerusalem – neither biblical nor historic. But when President Trump announced the change of policy respecting Jerusalem last month, he said this:
It was 70 years ago that the United States, under President Truman, recognized the state of Israel. Ever since then, Israel has made its capital in the city of Jerusalem – the capital the Jewish people established in ancient times. Today, Jerusalem is the seat of the modern Israeli government. It is the home of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, as well as the Supreme Court. It is the location of the official residence of the prime minister and president. It is the headquarters of many government ministries.
For decades, visiting American presidents, secretaries of state, and military leaders have met their counterparts in Jerusalem as I did on my trip to Israel earlier this year…. Jerusalem is not just the heart of three great religions, but it is now also the heart of one of the most successful democracies in the world….
[T]oday, we finally acknowledge the obvious: that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality.
So was President Trump “favoring” Israel when he acted to dismiss the arrant Palestinian nonsense about Jerusalem and the Jews? In fact, wouldn’t it have been a case of favoring the Palestinians to allow the baseless falsehood to continue unaddressed?
In a similar vein, would President Trump be favoring Israel if he conditions aid to the Palestinians on the Palestinians returning to the negotiating table and ending subsidies for terrorists? A resumption of negotiations is plainly in American interests, as is preventing U.S. funds from finding their way to terrorists. To define these issues in terms of whether there is also a benefit to Israel is surely off the mark.
Also, it is common knowledge that for decades the sole function of UNRWA has been to provide political leverage for the Palestinian claim of a right of diaspora Palestinians to settle in Israel. This claim is based on the assertion that they were driven from their homes by the Israeli military in the various wars waged by Arab countries against Israel.
Every other group of refugees is under the jurisdiction of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose programs are geared toward trying to relocate them in other countries. Yet UNRWA, headquartered in Gaza, has become an integral part of the Hamas regime there and done nothing to finding homes for the purported refugees, most of whom have never set foot in Israel. This despite the fact that there are a number of nearby countries whose majority populations share the same ethnicity as the Palestinians.
The U.S. provides roughly $368 million of UNRWA’s $1.2 billion annual budget. Is discontinuing support for patently political enterprise an example of “favoring” Israel when UNRWA works against U.S. interests in perpetuating phony impediments to resolving the Middle East conflict?
And is the U.S. favoring Israel when it reacts to an unfavorable vote in the UN that goes against American interests?
Israel is not required to buy into Palestinian illusions. And the U.S. is not taking sides when it refuses to continue pressuring Israel to honor those illusions to its detriment. But refusing to dismiss Palestinian illusions would be siding with Israel’s adversaries and working against America’s own interests.
It is time for the Palestinians to begin thinking about a reality-based revision of their tiresome demands, especially given the new American approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unfortunately, they still don’t seem ready.