It went somewhat unnoticed, but President Trump broke with the tradition of his recent predecessors and did not mention the Palestinians and their conflict with Israel in his recent speech to the United Nations.
We were reminded of this when the State Department “clarified” some earlier remarks by U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman to the effect that the administration viewed Israeli “settlements” in the West Bank as being part of Israel.
The president’s omission during his UN speech of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Friedman-State Department kerfuffle suggests that something is up, especially in light of Mr. Trump’s persistent refusal to commit to a “two-state solution.
Referring to UN Resolution 242, which was passed in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War and called on Israel to withdraw from its newly-won in exchange for peace with its Arab neighbors, the ambassador said,
The idea was that Israel would be entitled to secure borders. The existing borders, the 1967 borders, were viewed by everybody as not being secure, so Israel would retain a meaningful portion of the West Bank, and it would return that which it didn’t need for peace and security.
So there was always supposed to be some notion of [Israeli] expansion into the West Bank, but not necessarily expansion into the entire West Bank. And I think that’s exactly what, you know, Israel has done. I mean they’re only occupying two percent of the West Bank. There is important nationalistic, historical, religious significance to those settlements, and I think the settlers view themselves as Israelis and Israel views the settlers as Israelis.
PLO secretary general Saeb Erekat called Ambassador Friedman’s remarks “false and misleading” and said his views “contradict international law, United Nations resolutions, and also the historical U.S. position.… Israel is internationally recognized as the occupying power over 100 percent of Palestine, including in and around occupied east Jerusalem.”
State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert hurriedly declared:
I just want to be clear that our policy has not changed…. [Ambassador Friedman’s] comments – and I want to be crystal clear about this – should not be read as a way to prejudge the outcome of any negotiations that the U.S. would have with the Israelis and the Palestinians. It should not indicate a shift in U.S. policy.
But of course President George W. Bush, in correspondence with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said that Israel would be expected retain settlement population centers in the West Bank in the wake of a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians. And President Obama also embraced the general notion that Israel and a Palestinian state would trade land – he called them “adjustments” – in order to determine their respective final borders.
Further, President Trump from the outset of his administration has said he would accept any formulation Israel and the Palestinians came up with. So he is hardly supportive of the Erekat spin on the West Bank or dismissive of what Ambassador Friedman implied about what the position of the administration would be in any negotiations.
So we have reason to be hopeful that the U.S. will finally get behind a formula reflecting the military and economic realities of the Middle East and stop taking seriously the empty blustering of the Palestinians.