“Friends”
Like These Imperil Israel’s Survival
President Trump’s decision to recognize
Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and his tweet that “we’ve taken Jerusalem off the
table” clearly had more to do with keeping a promise to his billionaire donor
Sheldon Adelson and to his and Vice President Pence’s evangelical Christian
fundamentalist friends than it did with the Administration’s claim to be
seeking a great peace agreement for Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s moves on
Jerusalem, taken together with his allies’ apparent support for the Israeli
rightwing version of a “one-state solution” could doom chances for peace with
the Palestinians and imperil Israel’s survival.
In the
region, predictably, Israel’s Likud-led rightwing government welcomed Trump’s
announcement, while Israeli supporters seeking peace with the Palestinians,
including many senior retired Israeli military and security officials, opposed
it. Trump’s move greatly angered Palestinian Muslims and Christians, as well as
Saudi and other Arab leaders, on whom the Administration seems to be depending
for support of its peace effort.
At
home, Trump’s politically motivated alliance with Adelson and Christian fundamentalists
on moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem disregarded the views of most mainstream
American Protestants, Roman Catholics, and the clear majority of American Jews.
According to an American Jewish Committee poll earlier this year, only 16% of
American Jews favored making this move immediately. Both the pro-Israel/pro-peace national
organization JStreet and the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish
religious denomination, raised concerns about the wisdom and timing of Trump’s move.
What appears to matter more than peace to the President
is that Sheldon Adelson gave $25 million to his campaign for the Presidency and
another $5 million to his inaugural events. It’s an open secret Adelson was feeling
frustrated that, after almost a year in office, Trump had not yet fulfilled his
promise to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s also widely
known that, while Adelson sometimes is described as a “strong supporter of
Israel,” his political leanings and loyalties in Israel are almost exclusively
with the Likud and other rightwing Israeli factions that oppose a two-state
solution with the Palestinians. Adelson has consistently been a loud supporter
and source of funds for expanding Jewish settlements and for holding on to the
Territories.
Even
historically hawkish Israeli prime ministers have recognized that expanding
settlements deeper into the West Bank and maintaining Israeli military control
over all or large portions of the Occupied Territories would very likely make
peace impossible. Both Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert broke away
from Likud over their views of how keeping control of Gaza and the West Bank
threatened the survival of Israel. Sharon withdrew Israeli forces from inside
Gaza in 2005. In 2007, then Prime
Minister Olmert publicly declared, “If the day comes
when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style
struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of
Israel is finished." Based on his view of the threat to Israel’s survival, in 2008, after multiple rounds of secret
talks, Prime Minister Olmert offered a draft two-state peace agreement and
Palestinian President Abbas came very close to accepting it. Abbas declined to sign the draft because at
the time Olmert was drowning in scandal, facing legal prosecution, and was about
to resign from office. Reflecting progress, he and Olmert had made, President
Abbas urged President Trump to restart negotiations based on that draft
agreement.
If President Trump is serious about
wanting to accomplish a great peace deal for Israelis and for Palestinians, and
for important U.S. national security interests, it makes no sense at all for his
Administration to align with Sheldon Adelson or with the fundamentalist,
evangelical Christian leaders assembled as White House advisors. These leaders,
who don’t speak for all evangelicals, arrogantly ignore the urgent pleas of
Palestinian Christians; they support Israel largely based on arguable
“end-times” theology, according to which Israel finally doesn’t survive; and
they tend to understand “prophesy” in ways that promise the same eventual fate
for Jews who don’t convert to Christianity as Christian anti-Semites have
predicted over the centuries. In this view, Jews who don’t convert to
Christianity go to Hell.
What would make sense is that
President Trump present a Framework for a two-state peace agreement to Israel
and the Palestinians along the lines of that proposed by Ambassador Daniel
Kurtzer (See Kurtzer, Parameters: Model
Framework for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations) and, in coordination with
the Quartet (U.S., E.U., Russia and the U.N. Secretary General), present the
Framework to the U.N. Security Council for endorsement. That’s a plan of action
for peace that I believe would evoke active, strong support from leaders and
constituents of major American Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious
organizations, and majority public support among American Jews and Christian
Evangelicals, especially among millennials whose views have changed, reflecting
concern for Palestinians as well as for Israelis.
January 2018
Ron Young is Consultant with heads of
twenty-five Jewish, Christian and Muslim national religious organizations that
compose the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the
Middle East (NILI). This commentary represents Ron’s personal views, not the views of NILI. Ron’s memoir, Crossing Boundaries in the Americas, Vietnam
and the Middle East, was published in 2014. Ron lives in Everett, WA and can be contacted by e-mail at ronyoungwa@gmail.com
