Washington: US President Donald Trump and his advisers, venturing for the first time into the fraught world of Middle East peacemaking, are developing a strategy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would enlist Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt to break years of deadlock.
The emerging approach mirrors the thinking of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who will visit the United States next week, and would build on his perceived alignment with some Arab countries in trying to counter the rise of Iran. But Arab officials have warned Trump and his advisers that if they want cooperation, the United States cannot make life harder for them with provocative pro-Israel moves.
The White House seems to be taking the advice. Trump delayed his plan to move the US Embassy to occupied Jerusalem after Arab leaders told him that doing so would cause angry protests among Palestinians, who also claim the city as the capital of a future state. And after meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan last week, Trump authorised a statement that, for the first time, cautioned Israel against building new West Bank colonies beyond existing lines.
“There are some quite interesting ideas circulating on the potential for US-Israeli-Arab discussions on regional security in which Israeli-Palestinian issues would play a significant role,” said Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I don’t know if this is going to ripen by next week, but this stuff is out there.”
The discussions underscore the evolution of the new president’s attitude toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as he delves deeper into the issue. During the campaign and the postelection transition, Trump presented himself as an unstinting supporter of Israel who would quickly move the embassy and support new colony construction without reservation. But he has tempered that to a degree.
The notion of recruiting Arab countries to help forge an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians — known as the “outside-in” approach — is not a new one. As secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, James Baker organised the first regional conference in 1991 at which Arab leaders sat down with Israel’s prime minister. President George W. Bush invited Arab leaders to a summit meeting with Israel in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2007. And President Barack Obama’s first special envoy, George Mitchell, spent months in 2009 trying to enlist Arab partners in a joint effort.
The difference is that in the last eight years, Israel has seen itself as growing closer to some Arab nations because of their shared concern about Iranian hegemony in the region, opening the possibility that this newfound, if not always public, affiliation could change the dynamics.
“The logic of outside-in is that because the Palestinians are so weak and divided — and because there’s a new, tacit relationship between [some] Arabs and Israel — there’s the hope the Arabs would be prepared to do more,” said Dennis B. Ross, a Middle East peace negotiator under several presidents, including Obama.
That is a departure from the countervailing assumption that if Israel first made peace with the Palestinians, it would lead to peace with the larger Arab world — the “inside-out” approach. That was at the core of President Bill Clinton’s attempts to bring the two sides together and was Obama’s fallback position after his efforts to find Arab partners failed.
Netanyahu, who is due at the White House on Wednesday, has been talking about an outside-in approach for a while. His theory is that the inside-out approach has failed. And so, he argues, if Israel can transform its relationship with Arab nations, they can ultimately lead the way toward a resolution with the Palestinians.
Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser whom Trump has assigned a major role in negotiations, has been intrigued by this logic, according to people who have spoken with him. Kushner has grown close to Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador and a close confidant of Netanyahu. Trump and Kushner also had dinner at the White House on Thursday night with Sheldon Adelson, the Zionist casino magnate and key supporter of Netanyahu.
A series of telephone conversations and personal meetings with Arab and regional leaders in recent weeks have also shaped Kushner’s thinking and that of the president. Kushner has also met with Arab officials.
Jordan’s King Abdullah seems to have played a particularly pivotal role. Concerned that an embassy move would anger the many Palestinians living in his country, the king rushed to Washington without an invitation in a gamble that he could see Trump. He visited first with Vice-President Mike Pence, who had him over for breakfast at his official residence last week. The king appealed to the administration’s fixation with Daesh, arguing that it should not alienate Arab allies who could help.
Several days later, the king buttonholed Trump on the sidelines of the National Prayer Breakfast and made a similar case. He advised against a radical shift in US policy and emphasised the risks that Jordan would face if Israel were to become even more assertive about building colonies, according to people who spoke with Kushner and Steve Bannon, the chief White House strategist.
Trump had already decided by that point to slow down the embassy move — a decision that did not especially trouble Netanyahu and his team, who, while publicly supporting a move, privately urged caution to avoid a violent backlash. The administration had also received reports from US diplomats in Jordan that the threat level for a terrorist attack there had been raised to the highest level in years.
But a series of announcements of new colony construction worried some White House officials, who thought that Netanyahu was taking action without first meeting with Trump.
Within hours of Trump’s meeting with King Abdullah, the administration leaked a statement to The Jerusalem Post saying, “We urge all parties from taking unilateral actions that could undermine our ability to make progress, including colony announcements.”
After that was posted online, the White House issued a public statement with softened language: “While we don’t believe the existence of colonies is an impediment to peace, the construction of new colonies or the expansion of existing colonies beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.”
It was worded in a way that let different parties focus on different parts. The “may not be helpful” phrase was the first time Trump had warned against new housing in the West Bank.
But the “beyond their current borders” phrase suggested a return to George W. Bush’s policy of essentially acquiescing to additional construction within existing colony blocs as long as Israel did not expand their geographical reach or build entirely new colonies. Elliott Abrams, one of the authors of that policy under Bush, is poised to become deputy secretary of state under Trump.
Netanyahu’s team focused on that part of the statement.
“I happen to know they were very pleased with the statement because it was such a contrast from Obama,” said Morton A. Klein, national president of the Zionist Organisation of America, who has been supportive of the Trump administration.
Indeed, undeterred, Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through parliament a bill to retroactively authorise thousands of homes in the West Bank that even under Israeli law had been built illegally on Palestinian-owned land.
Klein, who argues that colonies are not an obstacle to peace, said the White House had made the statement too confusing to provide clear direction.
“I did find it ambiguous, and not as clear as I would like it to be,” he said.
The challenge now is whether Trump can use this ambiguity to his benefit. If the United States can extract gestures from the Arabs, most likely based on steps outlined in an Arab peace initiative first proposed in 2002, that could provide a basis for Israelis and Palestinians to make compromises that they could not do by themselves, Ross said.
“You’d have to have some kind of parallel approach,” he said. “This would be a serious investment of diplomacy to probe what is possible.”
