September 25, 2016 | No Comments
Donald Trump once promised to be the “neutral guy” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and said he didn’t want to assign fault in the never-ending conflict.
Trump struck a very different tone on Sunday, telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would recognize an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital and squarely blaming the Palestinian “hatred and violence” for the ongoing failure of Middle East peace efforts.
It was the first of two planned Netanyahu meetings with the presidential candidates — a sitdown with Hillary Clinton was to follow in the evening — spotlighting the U.S.-Israel relationship on the eve of the first presidential debate. The get-together also prompted complaints from Trump critics that the Israeli leader was legitimizing Trump on the world stage.
Netanyahu met with the New York mogul on his own turf on Sunday morning: his Trump Tower residence. A Trump campaign statement said the meeting, which also included Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, lasted for more than an hour. A photo released by Trump’s campaign showed the two men smiling broadly as they shook hands against a backdrop of ornate gold furnishings in Trump’s apartment.
The statement said the two men had discussed the U.S.-Israel relationship, Iran, and Islamic terrorism.
On the Middle East peace process, the statement said that “Trump recognized that Israel and its citizens have suffered far too long on the front lines of Islamic terrorism. He agreed with Prime Minister Netanyahu that the Israeli people want a just and lasting peace with their neighbors, but that peace will only come when the Palestinians renounce hatred and violence and accept Israel as a Jewish State.”
That is a switch for Trump, who not only said in February that he would adopt a “neutral” approach to the peace process, but also refused to assign blame for the decades-long impasse between the parties. “I don’t want to say whose fault is it,” Trump said in a February 17 MSNBC town hall.
And it continued a process Trump began in March, when he addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, telling the influential pro-Israel lobbying group that he shared its alarm about the nuclear deal with Iran and excoriated the Palestinians’ “culture of hatred.”
The old Trump boasted awkwardly of his leading role in New York’s Israel Day parade and told a crowd of conservative Jewish donors “I don’t want your money.” On Sunday, Trump offered a list of talking points that could have been written by AIPAC itself.
Aaron David Miller, who has served as a senior Middle East peace negotiator under several presidents, said he was struck by Trump’s language about Jerusalem and the peace process.
“These positions are a far cry from Trump’s earlier views,” said Miller, now a vice president at the nonpartisan Wilson Center in Washington.
The statement also noted that Trump and Netanyahu had “discussed at length Israel’s successful experience with a security fence that helped secure its borders” — a clear allusion to Trump’s vow to build a secure wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Some observers were surprised, however, that neither Trump’s statement nor a briefer one from Netanyahu’s office mentioned the growing worry in Israel that President Barack Obama, before leaving office, might seek a United Nations resolution outlining the parameters for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Netanyahu opposes such a move, and Israeli media outlets and Washington analysts had speculated that Netanahu’s goal was to win the backing of Trump and Clinton against U.N. action, thus boxing in Obama.
“It’s striking that there was no mention of that,” said Dennis Ross, a former Obama White House national security official and Middle East peace negotiator under several presidents.
Ross also noted that many presidential candidates have vowed to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital, a position endorsed by the U.S. Congress, but no president has followed through on the pledge, which Palestinians furiously oppose.
Hillary Clinton has called for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and moving the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv, since at least 1999; she made no discernible effort to do so as secretary of state, however.
Netanyahu has thus far avoided entanglement with the 2016 campaign. Israeli media reported said Sunday’s meetings came together after Netanyahu, in New York this week for the United Nations’ annual General Assembly session, expressed an interest in seeing the candidates. A meeting was first arranged with Trump, but only confirmed once a meeting with Clinton was also nailed down to avoid any perception of bias.
Four years ago, Obama aides considered Netanyahu a brazen supporter of Mitt Romney, whom he hosted in a summer 2012 visit. Pro-Romney campaign ads also aired in Florida that fall featuring news footage of Netanyahu criticizing Obama’s Middle East policies. (Netanyahu aides said they were never consulted about the ads.)
Though Clinton and Netanyahu occasionally butted heads during her tenure as secretary of state, Israeli officials consider her more in sync with their worldview than Obama, who repeatedly clashed with the Israeli prime minister through two failed pushes to secure a peace deal with the Palestinians and over the July 2015 Iran nuclear agreement.
Netanyahu denounced that pact as a “bad deal” and a mortal threat to his country because it allows Iran to develop nuclear weapons soon after most of its provisions expire in a decade; he pressed his case on a visit to Capitol Hill that had the White House openly trashing the Israeli leader as a naked GOP partisan.
Polls in Israel have shown public opinion roughly divided between Trump and Clinton. Some Israelis approve of Trump’s hard-line views towards Islamic radicalism and his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. But he has unsettled others with his unpredictability and comments like a (quickly reversed) call for Israel to repay the U.S. for foreign aid.
In the U.S., one recent poll showed Clinton with a 66-23 lead over Trump among Jewish voters in Florida. (The poll was conducted by a firm that has also worked for the liberal Israel policy group J Street, which has staunchly criticized Netanyahu.)
During Netanyahu’s 2013 re-election campaign, Trump recorded a video endorsement of the Israeli leader, telling Israelis, “You truly have a great prime minister… he’s a winner, highly respected and highly thought of by all.” Netanyahu, Trump added, is a “terrific guy.”
With Clinton arguing that Trump is unfit to lead the U.S. on the global stage, Netanyahu subtly boosted Trump by appearing with him, the columnist Chemi Shalev wrote in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz this weekend.
“The truth is that there is only one candidate who desperately needs Netanyahu’s blessing and legitimization, and his name isn’t Clinton. Only Donald Trump will benefit from Netanyahu placing him on an equal footing with his rival. Only he will require the stamp of kashrut [kosher] that Netanyahu can give him,” Shalev wrote.
Miller was more skeptical of the meeting’s effect.
“If it helps anyone other than Bibi it might benefit Trump but ever so slightly,” he said. “I guarantee you that within 6 months Bibi and whoever becomes president will be annoying the hell out of one another.”