In Mideast, Biden faces Trump legacy Geoffrey Aronson/The Arab Weekly/January 30/2021 جيفري أرونسون/بايدن يواجه في الشرق الأوسط إرث ترامب
Former US President Donald Trump made history in the Middle East. Notwithstanding his considerable transgressions, American recognition of Israel’s conquests in Jerusalem and the abolition of the famous three noes of the Khartoum Declaration by the Abraham Accords leave a legacy that the administration of US President Joe Biden will be hard pressed to beat.
Soon after Israel’s victory in the June 1967 war, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan set out the challenge to the Biden administration still posed by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The problem, Dayan asserted, was not to find a solution, but to learn to live without one.
More than half a century later, Dayan’s assessment has proved to be prescient.
In the face of almost universal approbation, Israel has nonetheless achieved the three objectives at the heart of policies established within months of its 1967 conquests. It has consolidated its security monopoly in the West Bank and settled more than half a million of its citizens in territories beyond its borders. These two achievements have served Israel’s driving strategic quest to undermine the ability of Palestinians to rule as sovereigns anywhere west of the Jordan River.
The relentless expansion of Israeli settlement is the critical barometer for measuring Israel’s success in pursuit of this objective.
The numbers don’t lie. They illustrate the ineffectiveness of any effort over the last half century –diplomatic or otherwise — to constrain let alone reverse the influx of Israelis throughout the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Rather than pursue the ineffective policies of the past, the Trump administration surrendered to this reality.
Apologists for this effort suggest without much conviction that Israel’s reconciliation with Arabs “outside” the immediate circle of conflict would give Israel the confidence to make territorial concessions to Palestinians “inside.”
Like most assessments of Washington’s Middle East cognoscenti over the last three generations, this one too proved to be off the mark.
The value of the “Iron Wall”against the Arabs erected by Israel over the last century is now paying off. The reconciliation of Arabs and Muslims outside the immediate circle of conflict jump-started by Trump has only just begun. The equation at the heart of the Arab Peace plan –recognition in return to withdrawal from its 1967 conquests and the creation of a Palestinian state — joins a host of peace plans that have come to naught.
Israel has always rejected the initiative. But the unfolding Arab rapprochement with Israel signifies that the very authors of the plan themselves have despaired of the prospect of Israeli withdrawal and have other more pressing strategic challenges where good relations with Israel can figure positively in the balance.
It is not only Arabs who have lost hope in an Israeli retreat. Among Israelis, the idea of withdrawal and the creation of a Palestinian state no longer even figures in domestic political debate. The disappearance of Israel’s Labour Party symbolises the destruction among Israelis of an option that has been the central pillar of the international consensus for three decades.
There is a price to be paid for this failure. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu crows that the issue at the heart of diplomatic engagement on the West Bank no longer focuses on how much territory Israel will surrender, but the opposite — how big a bite of the West Bank it will formally annex.
But as Dayan so prophetically argued 50 decades ago, a dynamic status quo that enables the all-but unfettered pursuit of creating “facts on the ground” trumps annexation.
Without a wink from Washington, a unilateral decision by Israel to annex part or all of the West Bank, was and remains a nonstarter.
Netanyahu and Trump made history by placing the issue on the agenda. But Netanyahu’s failed effort to convince the Trump administration to support a unilateral Israeli declaration of annexation consigns this option – like the Arab Peace Plan — to the diplomatic scrap heap for the foreseeable future.
The last two American presidents have bequeathed to the Biden administration a scorched diplomatic landscape lacking the most basic prerequisites for successful engagement. The last agreement between Israel and the PLO was in January 1997 – a quarter century ago!
The hearts of the Biden team are in the right place. They believe that an Israeli withdrawal and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state at peace with Israelis the best and preferred outcome.
But, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Doing no more than tinkering with Trump’s history-making decisions, in other words “do nothing … with conviction” — would make Moshe Dayan smile.
