The orientation of Trump’s Israel advisory team completely removes any prospects of the US being an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, writes Shannon Ebrahim.
With Donald Trump as the new president of the US, the Middle East is staring into an abyss, with Trump having purported the most provocative and right-wing policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of any US president to date.
His choice for US ambassador to Israel says it all – David Friedman. Trump’s long-time attorney, he is considered to the far right of the Israel political map.
Friedman’s positions have been called more extreme than those of the current Israeli government, according to Rabbi Richard Jacobs, who heads the largest Jewish denomination in the US.
“We have serious concerns about someone who says annexing the West Bank to Israel is a viable way to preserve Israel’s Jewish and democratic essence,” Jacobs has said. The National Israel Fund has also expressed alarm that Friedman with his extreme views could be representing the US’s interests.
Friedman is a known advocate of Jewish settlement in the West Bank which he refers to as “Greater Israel”, and he is president of the American Friends of Bet El, a Jewish settlement just north east of Ramallah. He has consistently argued for ending the two-state narrative, and claims under Trump Israel will feel no pressure to make self-defeating concessions.
Friedman has stated Trump will not back down on his promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem once he is president. The 1947 original partition plan referred to Jerusalem as a city administered by an international body whose exact political status would be determined through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
The director of the pro-Israeli advocacy group J-street, Jeremy Ben-Ami, has said his group will be lobbying all Democrats and Republicans that the nomination of Friedman is one that simply should not go through.
The three individuals that comprise Trump’s Israel Advisory Committee share many of Friedman’s views, the most high-profile being Jason Dov Greenblatt. He served as an armed guard on a West Bank settlement in the mid-1980s, and claims to have never spoken to any Palestinian since that time, and only liaises with officials of the Israeli government.
If the US embassy does in fact move to Jerusalem, there is a strong possibility of a new and much more emboldened intifada, as well as riots in Muslim countries across the world.
The Jordanian government has always called moving the US embassy to Jerusalem a red line. Even though former presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush had pledged to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, they backed down once in office. But there is no reason to believe Trump will follow suit.
The orientation of Trump’s Israel advisory team completely removes any prospects of the US being an honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and creates room for other global powers like Russia to fill the void in providing leadership to any future peace process.
Russia knows that the Trump administration is unlikely to act in the Middle East during his first 90 days in office, and is capitalising on this to talk to all sides.
The projected new US foreign policy towards Israel has in effect united Palestinians more than at any other time in the past few decades.
For Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and a plethora of other Palestinian formations to have agreed to unite in Beirut last week is no small feat.Palestinian factions had agreed in May 2014 to form a national unity government and hold elections by December 2015, but this failed to materialise. But Trump’s arrival on the scene has provided new impetus to the unification of the Palestinians. What was emphasised in Moscow this week was the need for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to act as fast as possible to initiate discussions on forming a national unity government.
The stated objective of Palestinian leaders who participated in the unity talks is to bridge the divisions between political formations in Gaza and the West Bank, and to prepare for national Palestinian elections in six months.
The lack of a formal peace process makes the role of South Africa in bridging the divisions among Palestinians and between Palestinians and Israelis even more important. Even Hamas believes that the talks between the different Palestinian factions initiated by the Institute of Palestine and South Africa (IPSA) and In Transformation Initiative (ITI) in South Africa last year made a difference.
According to Hamas’s foreign relations chief Osama Hamdan, the talks were the first time the Palestinian factions had sat together for three days with the opportunity to speak to each other informally. It seems imperative that this process continues.
* Ebrahim is Group Foreign Editor