by Mati Tuchfled
Hat tip: Dr. Jean-Charles Bensoussan
Lawmakers and pundits have been going out of their way to present apocalyptic diplomatic scenarios for U.S. President Donald Trump's visit to Israel next week • These doomsday predictions are likely to be just another case of fake news or baseless hopes.
If you believe media reports from the past two
weeks, the most serious issue Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
government has to deal with in the near future is U.S. President Donald
Trump's visit to Israel next week.
Coalition and opposition members and media
pundits alike have been going out of their way to present apocalyptic
diplomatic scenarios just waiting to become a reality the second Air
Force One touches down on the runway at Ben-Gurion International
Airport. These scenarios, they warn, could affect not only Netanyahu and
his government, but the Israeli Right as a whole.
If you believe these doomsday predictions, the
national camp must rally en masse to avert a potential disaster. Not
only does Trump share former President Barack Obama's views on the
Middle East, they say, his views are even worse, which means Netanyahu,
Yisrael Beytenu head Avigdor Lieberman and Habayit Hayehudi leader
Naftali Bennett will soon find that they miss the days of the Obama
administration.
One must keep in mind, however, that the same
pundits were also sure that Obama would try to force Israel into
reaching some sort of agreement with the Palestinians. First, they
predicted Obama would make his move early in his first term, as the
administration was trying to bolster its relations with its Arab allies.
Four years later, they hedged that since Obama was now free of
political pressure, he would get around to seeing his Middle East vision
through. When that did not happen, the pundits attributed it to Obama's
reluctance to jeopardize Hillary Clinton's chances to win the 2016
presidential elections, saying that surely, the U.S. will apply massive
pressure on Israel during the final days of the Obama administration,
before Trump takes office.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration became no
more than an unpleasant chapter in American history, and no doomsday
scenario became a reality.
The same pundits were beside themselves when
Trump was elected, and they fumed when, during his Feb. 15 meeting with
Netanyahu in the White House, the new American president refused to
pledge allegiance to the two-state solution.
Next week, when Trump meets with Netanyahu in
Jerusalem, we will see if the pundits were right and a crisis is brewing
between Jerusalem and Washington, or whether this was another case of
fake news and their doomsday predictions were just another case of
baseless false hopes.
The overall impression among senior Jerusalem
officials is that Trump himself has no concrete plan for the Middle East
peace process, and neither do his advisers. According to Israeli
officials who maintain close ties with Trump administration officials,
two advisers have made the Israeli-Palestinian conflict their priority:
businessman and World Jewish Congress President Ron Lauder and U.S.
Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.
Trump and Lauder have known each other for
decades, going back to their youth. They moved in the same circles in
New York City and Lauder's mother, Estee Lauder, founder of the Lauder
cosmetics empire, saw Trump, then a fledgling businessman, as a close
family friend.
Lauder once had a close relationship with Netanyahu but the relationship soured some
five years ago, and there are those who believe Lauder's attempt to
influence Trump's policy is an act of revenge over his personal conflict
with the prime minister.
Reality, however, is simpler, as Lauder is
known for his left-wing views: Back in the 1990s, he was Netanyahu's
emissary when overtures were made concerning potentially ceding the
Golan Heights to Syria; in 2011, when the Arab states were pushing for
an anti-Israeli resolution in the U.N. General Assembly, Lauder said
that "the only way for Israel to extricate itself from the situation it
faces ahead of the U.N. vote in September is to negotiate without
preconditions"; and in June 2012 he took out a full-page ad in The Wall
Street Journal endorsing the two-state solution.
It seems that now Lauder is taking advantage
of his close relationship with Trump to realize his own vision and push
the president into dealing with an issue he and his advisers know
nothing about.
Friedman also has the ear of the president,
but the intense discussions he has with Trump on Israel go the other
way, as he is a staunch supporter of the Judea and Samaria settlement
enterprise. As such, he has no intention of seeing the administration pressure
Israel into imposing a moratorium on settlement construction. Moreover,
if it were up to Friedman, the American flag would be flying over the
U.S. Embassy building in Jerusalem, instead of Tel Aviv.
Trump's decision to name Friedman as his ambassador to Israel met harsh criticism. At the time, Lauder came out in the president's defense and expressed support for Friedman's nomination. Now both advisers find themselves competing to whisper in the president's ear.
Trump's decision to name Friedman as his ambassador to Israel met harsh criticism. At the time, Lauder came out in the president's defense and expressed support for Friedman's nomination. Now both advisers find themselves competing to whisper in the president's ear.
Mati Tuchfled
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=42507&hp=1
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