Trump Is Overestimating Palestinians’ Desire For Peace Trump wants to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, but the obstacles to peace that have bedeviled past U.S. presidents have not gone away.
By John Daniel Davidson
May 23, 2017 President Trump’s direct flight from Saudi Arabia to Tel Aviv on Monday is thought to be the first of its kind. The two countries have no diplomatic relations, and the flight was meant as a kind of symbolic gesture, bridging the gap between Israel and the Arab world on the U.S. president’s first overseas trip.
But Trump appears to be interested in more than mere symbolism. Upon landing in Israel, he waded into the thicket of Israeli-Palestinian relations, declaring: “We have before us a rare opportunity to bring security and stability and peace to this region and to its people.”
Trump thinks he can convince Sunni Arab countries to make common cause with Israel against Iran, and maybe he can. But as part of that larger regional realignment, he wants to settle the Palestinian question. Trump’s message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be that the price of unifying Israel and the Sunni Arabs against Shiite Iran will be striking the “ultimate deal” between the Israelis and Palestinians.
That’s a tall order, and one gets the sense Trump doesn’t quite realize what he’s getting into. In his meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in March, Trump said achieving peace is “maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years,” adding that, “We need two willing parties. We believe Israel is willing. We believe you’re willing. And if you both are willing, we’re going to make a deal.”
But therein lies the problem with the dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process: the Palestinians are not really willing to make a deal. After President Bill Clinton’s unsuccessful efforts to negotiate a deal in the 1990s, it became clear that there is no willing and reliable negotiating partner on the Palestinian side with whom to conduct negotiations. That’s as true today as it was in 2000, and it’s why presidents Bush and Obama largely avoided the peace process.
The uncomfortable reality is that for Palestinian leaders, the incentives for concluding peace with Israel pale in comparison to the rewards for maintaining tension, allowing sporadic violence, and advancing the “Israeli occupation” narrative. After all, that’s how they retain their hold on power—and making concessions to Israel as part of a real peace process would be a sure-fire way to lose it.
The Lesson of the Oslo AccordsThe story of how the 1993 Oslo Accords fell apart and led to the Second Intifada in 2000 is a perfect example of this dynamic. It’s hard to think of a less reliable negotiating partner than Yasser Arafat, yet President Clinton was eager to believe otherwise and invest considerable political capital in peace talks. He managed to get Arafat and the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to sign the Oslo Accords, which called for a series of steps over five years that were supposed to lead to a peaceful, comprehensive settlement that ensured self-government for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
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http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/23/trump-overestimating-palestinians-desire-peace/
