President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hint at broader regional approach
“I believe that the issue of the settlements is not the core of the conflict, nor does it really drive the conflict,” the Israeli leader said. “I think it’s an issue that has to be resolved in the context of peace negotiations.”
.. Mr. Netanyahu has officially advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since 2009, but in practice he has approved increased settlement construction that the U.S. has said imperils that approach. He is under pressure from members of his right-wing coalition government to abandon support for a Palestinian state.
.. The Trump administration is discussing with Arab allies forming a military alliance that would share intelligence with Israel to help counter Iran,
.. Mr. Trump said on Wednesday his distancing himself from the two-state approach gives the Israelis and Palestinians leeway to reach a deal.
.. “The alternatives to a two-state solution would mean that Israel would have to choose between its commitment to democracy and the solemn obligation to be a homeland for the Jewish people,” Mr. Engel said, an apparent reference to the challenge of integrating more than four million people in the Palestinian territories with Israel’s predominantly Jewish population of eight million
.. Democrats and Republicans have vowed in the past to move the embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, and a 1995 U.S. law requires the move. But since then, presidents from both parties have used a national-security waiver included in the law to avoid doing so.
President Trump, Will You Save the Jews?
Hopefully Israel’s Supreme Court will strike down the law, but, in the meantime, Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, did not mince words. He reportedly warned at a private meeting that Israel can’t just “apply and enforce its laws on territories that are not under its sovereignty. If it does so, it is a legal cacophony. It will cause Israel to be seen as an apartheid state, which it is not.” Seen as an apartheid state!
.. That debate will not be about which are the best borders to defend the state of Israel, said the Hebrew University philosopher Moshe Halbertal, “but whether the state is worth defending in moral terms.”
.. I don’t expect Israel to just up and leave the West Bank without a Palestinian partner for a secure peace, which Israel doesn’t now have. But legalizing this land grab by settlers deep in Palestinian areas is not an act of security — it will actually create security problems.
Trump May Turn to Arab Allies for Help With Israeli-Palestinian Relations
The emerging approach mirrors the thinking of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who will visit the United States next week, and would build on his de facto alignment with Sunni Muslim countries in trying to counter the rise of Shiite-led Iran.
.. The difference is that in the last eight years, Israel has grown closer to Sunni Arab nations because of their shared concern about Iranian hegemony in the region, opening the possibility that this newfound, if not always public, affiliation could change the dynamics.
.. “The logic of outside-in is that because the Palestinians are so weak and divided — and because there’s a new, tacit relationship between the Sunni Arabs and Israel — there’s the hope the Arabs would be prepared to do more,” said Dennis B. Ross
.. That is a departure from the countervailing assumption that if Israel first made peace with the Palestinians, it would lead to peace with the larger Arab world — the “inside-out” approach.
.. Jordan’s King Abdullah II seems to have played a particularly pivotal role. Concerned that an embassy move would anger the many Palestinians living in his country, the king rushed to Washington without an invitation
.. The king appealed to the administration’s fixation with the Islamic State, arguing that it should not alienate Arab allies who could help.
.. The statement was worded in a way that let different parties focus on different parts. The “may not be helpful” phrase was the first time Mr. Trump had warned against new housing in the West Bank.
But the “beyond their current borders” phrase suggested a return to George W. Bush’s policy of essentially acquiescing to additional construction within existing settlement blocs as long as Israel did not expand their geographical reach or build entirely new settlements.
.. undeterred, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through Parliament a bill to retroactively authorize thousands of homes in the West Bank that even under Israeli law had been built illegally on Palestinian-owned land.
.. The challenge now is whether Mr. Trump can use this ambiguity to his benefit.
Five myths about anti-Semitism
According to the FBI, Jews in the United States are annually subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite constituting only 2 percent of the American population. The picture is considerably darker in Europe, where Jews were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks in France in 2014, even as they made up less than 1 percent of that country’s population. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools and museums have been subject to terrorist attacks in France, Denmark and Belgium. A 2013 E.U. survey found that nearly 40 percent of European Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish, including 60 percent of Swedish Jews.
.. The state of Israel often confounds the anti-Semitism conversation. Some assume that an attack on Israel and its policies must necessarily be an attack on Jews; evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for instance, dubbed criticism of Israeli settlers an assault on God’s “chosen people.” Others justify their attacks on Jews around the world by pointing to Israel, claiming to be anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Much of this confusion stems from the conflation of all Jews with the state of Israel, its government and its policies.
.. Anti-Semitism, however, is a unique case — and uniquely corrosive to those societies that embrace it. That’s because it often takes the form of a conspiracy theory about how the world works. By blaming real problems on imagined Jewish culprits, anti-Semitism prevents societies from rationally solving them. In one of the most famous examples, Nazi scientists shunned Einstein’s advances as “Jüdische Physik,” as opposed to “Deutsche Physik,” enfeebling their understanding.