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12/7/17, "The Jerusalem decision: Trump's geography lesson for the world," Washington Examiner Editorial
"One year ago this month, former President Barack Obama's
administration was working behind the scenes at the United Nations to
slip a resolution through the body’s General Assembly attacking Israel.
It was one of Obama’s final, sneaky, and reprehensible acts in
office. It put an exclamation point on his long, nasty, personal feud
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Previously, our
president [Obama] had gone so far as to interfere in an Israeli election and
then unleashed his minions when Netanyahu had the gall to accept an
invitation to address Congress.
Fast
forward to this Wednesday, Netanyahu was thanking Obama’s successor in a
formal televised statement for officially recognizing Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital.
We believe, and hope, Trump made the right decision — or at least one
that probably won’t make things any worse than they are. The conflict
between Israel and the Palestinians is highly complex, replete with
myriad and tangled disagreements, charges, counter-charges, libels,
counter-libels, offenses given, and offenses taken.
But one simple truth remained for Trump as he approached this
question. In the 25 years since the Oslo talks began, not one thing
Americans have done has successfully advanced the cause of peace in the
Middle East, not even a little. The approaches of the Clinton, Bush, and
Obama administrations, all genuinely diverse, were equally useless.
This should put to rest the idea that an American president can step
in and solve this problem. And one minor consequence of this relieving,
humbling revelation is that there’s no need to keep up tedious fictions
such as the one that Israel’s capital is anywhere except where it
actually has been for years, in Jerusalem.
Other governments don’t need to live thus with their heads buried in
the sand. Russia recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in April.
Hardly anyone noticed. The outrage over Trump's recognition now is born
of opportunism.
To be sure, one can never be completely certain what effect this or
any other event will have on the fragile alliances that are forming in
order to restrain Iran’s ambitions in the region. But with Iran’s
growing threat, the Sunni Arab nations have been forced to find common
cause with Israel and America. That made Trump’s decision easier and
guarantees that most objections are likely to be half-hearted and pro
forma.
But what of the deeper question of justice between Israelis and
Palestinians? The concern that this decision will cause further
violence, voiced throughout America's news media, hinges on the idea
that an injustice is being done. To the extent that Trump’s decision
weakens the Palestinian starting point for negotiations, one might argue
that the decision to recognize Jerusalem harms the legitimate merits of
the Palestinian cause.
Then again, we are reminded by this week’s House passage of the
Taylor Force Act that no one has delegitimized or degraded that cause as
much as the Palestinian Authority itself, whose leaders probably have
to be removed before any justice can be done. That bill, named after an
American tourist who was murdered last year in a Palestinian terrorist
attack, punishes the PA for its well-documented practice of paying
terrorists to commit specific acts of violence against Israeli
interests.
The PA, the beneficiary of an ungodly amount of humanitarian aid
(including from Israel), concerns itself mostly with keeping those it
misgoverns angry, vengeful, and impoverished. It bombards its subjects
(even in its children’s television shows) with feverish anti-Semitic
propaganda and indoctrinates them with denial of Israel’s existence and
false hope of seizing all of its lands.
If Trump’s decision helps impose a little reality on those deceived
through these measures, so much the better. It is a sharp and welcome
contrast to the Obama policy of just a year ago, which hinted to
Palestinians that if they held on long enough, the tide would turn
against Israel. It’s nothing new, but Israel is there to stay."
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