Washington Inertia Threatens Middle East Peace

Do these supposed experts actually think their approach will do better? Or are they too afraid to go out of their comfort zone and admit that they might have been wrong? By Aaron Kliegman Never underestimate the ability of the Washington establishment to sacrifice what works for what’s familiar. Case in point: The Middle East peace process. Last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the Biden administration intends to push ahead with its plan to reopen a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that functioned essentially as an embassy to the Palestinians. The plan, he explained, is part of a broader effort to “deepen” America’s “ties with the Palestinians.” Since then, the administration has remained steadfast in its determination to reestablish the consulate, which President Trump closed while in office. There’s just one small problem: The U.S. needs the consent of the host government to open any diplomatic facility, and Israel vehemently opposes reopening the consulate. “There is no place for an American consulate that serves the Palestinians in Jerusalem,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said last Saturday. Other Israeli officials have made clear to the press and U.S. officials that reopening the consulate will likely collapse Israel’s current governing coalition, which includes some members who may not tolerate such a move. They’re not alone. The vast majority of Israelis recognize that reopening the consulate would undermine a historical truth: Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and has been the Jewish people’s North Star for millennia. The Israeli people and most of its leaders won’t tolerate a government that surrenders on this fundamental issue. Think about it: If the Biden administration has its way, there will be an embassy to handle Israeli affairs and a consulate to handle Palestinian affairs in Gaza, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem — both operating from Jerusalem. Nowhere else would any country, certainly the U.S., have an embassy in the same city where it opens a consulate for another entity. If the Biden administration wants to make certain consular and diplomatic services more accessible to the Palestinians, why not open a consulate in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, under the auspices of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem? Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said as much last weekend: “If the Americans want to open a consulate in Ramallah, we have no problems with that.” Palestinian leaders have made clear, however, there will be no U.S. consulate in Ramallah — it’s Jerusalem or nothing. This gets to the most dangerous consequence of reopening the consulate: It would perpetuate conflict. Indeed, if the U.S. spits in the face of Israel and Israel takes it, then the Palestinians will be given false hope, believing their decades-long intransigence works. The result would be more conflict and no peace. The Biden administration’s plan for Jerusalem is part of the Washington establishment’s long-held approach to Middle East peace In 2016, John Kerry articulated the conventional wisdom that career diplomats had “known” for decades about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world. I want to make that very clear to all of you,” Kerry said at the Brookings Institution. “I’ve heard several prominent politicians in Israel sometimes saying, well, the Arab world’s in a different place now, and we just have to reach out to them, and we can work some things with the Arab world, and we’ll deal with the Palestinians. No. No, no, and no.” And then he added this nugget to emphasize the point: “There will be no advance and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that. That is a hard reality.” In other words, according to Kerry, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be resolved before any Arab-Israeli peace deal can be reached. Just four years later, in 2020, the Trump administration brokered the Abraham Accords, a series of historic Arab-Israeli peace agreements, without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first. Specifically, four Arab states agreed to normalize relations with Israel in as many months. First, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed on. Bahrain soon joined, followed by Sudan and then Morocco. Meanwhile, the Palestinians remained stateless. Kerry and the so-called experts were proven wrong — but not just about whether peace with the Arab states or the Palestinians should come first. Worse, they were proven wrong about America’s basic approach to the Middle East peace process. As implied in Kerry’s remarks, the Washington establishment has long believed the U.S. shouldn’t side too strongly with Israel and must appease the Palestinians, whose statehood is supposedly a prerequisite to any Arab-Israeli peace. This has been the view of so many bureaucrats, journalists, think tank experts, and political elites who occupy Washington and U.S. embassies abroad. The alternative, they’ve long argued, is more chaos, more violence, more death — and no chance of peace. In short, you lose the Arabs if you lose the Palestinians, and you lose the Palestinians if you’re too pro-Israel. The Trump administration took the exact opposite approach. Indeed, President Trump strongly supported the Jewish state, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and recognizing Israel’s sovereignty of the Golan Heights. He also closed a Palestinian office in Washington, cut U.S. aid to the Palestinians, and shuttered the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. The foreign policy establishment warned each move would blow up the Middle East and any chance of peace. Yet, Arab countries still joined the Abraham Accords, showing the conventional wisdom couldn’t have been more wrong. The establishment’s predictions were wrong on every count. But now the Biden administration, full of veterans of the Washington establishment, is still pursuing the same flawed and debunked conventional wisdom by pushing to reopen the consulate in Jerusalem. In other words, the administration is reversing the Trump era policies that led to the Abraham Accords. To what end? Do these supposed experts actually think their approach will do better? Or are they too afraid to go out of their comfort zone and, perhaps more to the point, admit that they might have been wrong? We all know the answer. After all, what good is peace if it makes the Washington elite uncomfortable and look bad? More from Aaron Kliegman: