Sometimes the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is just
breathtaking. The reaction to Trump’s announcement that the US (eventually, not
now) will move its embassy to Jerusalem is a case in point. Arab leaders are
predictably voicing dramatic disapproval, but I doubt they will do much more
than that because frankly they don’t really care much about the Palestinian situation
except as a useful lever now and then to divert their public from their own
domestic problems. Anyway, they are far more worried right now about ISIS-like jihadist
movements and Iran’s growing influence in the region, and are highly unlikely
to seriously offend the US when they depend heavily on us for support in their
quest to restrain the Iranian and ISIS threats.
Nor are Arab leaders (outside of Iran and its supporters,
like Russia) likely to provoke Israel at a time when they have discovered a common
enemy (Iran) and have begun behind the scenes to work together to share
intelligence and perhaps more. Not that they will admit this to their strongly
anti-Israel populations, but they are pragmatists. It is an Arab saying after
all, that the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend (for the moment, at least)”
The Palestinians and their various jihadist support groups,
like Hezbollah, of course will try to stir up trouble and violence against
Israel (why? Israel didn’t make the announcement, the US did.) in a futile
effort to be relevant again, but they aren’t relevant.
European leaders and UN officials will issue sanctimonious one-sided
proclamations demonstrating once again that European anti-Semitism is far from
dead, or even buried very far below the surface. Never mind that it was the
virulent anti-Semitism of Germany and its enthusiastic supporters in occupied
nations like France that produced the Holocaust in the first place. Absent that
virulent anti-Semitism much of the population of Israel would probably be
living happily in the European nations their parents fled, and that their families
enjoyed before the death camps.
The US foreign policy experts all claim to be dismayed that
this will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. What peace process? One president and Secretary of State after another
has tried fruitlessly, and often fairly naively, to bring peace to these two,
and we are no further along than we were 40 years ago. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians are
anywhere near ready to negotiate for a true settlement, and everyone who understands
the region knows it. The Palestinians have been and still are governed (to the
extent they are governed at all) by fairly ruthless, yet fairly incompetent leaders
who can’t give up the impossible dream of exterminating Israel totally, and who
can’t even get together themselves (hence Hamas in the Gaza Strip vs Fatah in
the West Bank). The Israeli government depends
on coalitions which always include some ultra-orthodox parties who will never
agree to give up an inch of what they consider their true homeland. So again,
what peace process? That annual sham US leaders go through to pretend they
really care?
It is perfectly obvious to all that Jerusalem is in fact the
capital of Israel, and has been for a long time. All branches
of the Israeli government are located in Jerusalem, including the Knesset the residences of the
Prime Minister and President, and the Supreme
Court. Of what use then is the longstanding fiction that it isn’t? And in fact it should be the capital. It is the central city of the Jewish people. Jews
would no more stand for it to be divided than the Arab world would stand for
Mecca, the central city of Islam, being divided.
Democrats profess to be outraged, yet it was
their own President Clinton who signed the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995,
which ordered the embassy moved to Jerusalem, though he issued waivers to keep
the act abeyant. It was President Barack
Obama himself who declared in a 2008 campaign speech, “Jerusalem will remain
the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” Apparently it’s OK for Democratic presidents to
make campaign promises about Israel they don’t keep, but if a Republican
president, and especially Donald Trump, actually does what he promised to do on
the campaign trail, and follows a law actually passed by a Democratic
President, it is outrageous.
As I say, the hypocrisy of the world’s leaders is sometimes
breathtaking. I worry about a lot of what Trump does, but this seems like a
perfectly sensible and long overdue action, perhaps finally shaking up the
longstanding, unproductive, and largely anti-Semitic world foreign policy
consensus to maintain a fiction about Israel, a fiction none of them would tolerate
for a moment about their own nations.
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