Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Trump’s ‘deal’ a mirage

It’s not the neutrality.

It’s the “we.”

It’s more than changing his mind on a policy.

The Donald is clueless.

He said this on the Israel-Palestinian conflict: “I’m a negotiator. I would like to at least have the other side think I’m somewhat neutral as to them so that we can maybe get a deal done.”

We?

While “maybe” Trump thinks a deal can be done, he does not realize that he won’t even be invited to the table.

Because “we” — the US — does not do deals for Israel.

The issue isn’t how neutral Trump thinks he needs to be — he later modified his statement under pressure from the pro-Israel lobby. The issue is that no deal will even be attempted, let alone done, unless it is between the parties themselves, Israel and the Palestinians.

That is and always has been the bedrock Israel position. It doesn’t farm out its security.

Which means that the pro-Israel lobby has been as clueless as Trump. Israel looks mainly at an American president’s personal expectations, not his level of “neutrality.”

Just ask Jimmy Carter. The best he could do — even after imprisoning, so to speak, the president of Egypt and the PM of Israel at Camp David in 1978 — was to make suggestions about a deal. Ditto, President Clinton at Camp David in 2000 — and his suggestions were roundly snubbed by the Palestinian Authority. No American president, however brilliant a negotiator he might be, does the deal between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Israel and any Arab country.

It’s not about negotiating skills.

It’s about living with the deal. The American negotiator doesn’t need to.

The lives and property of the people whom the American negotiator would represent are not on the line.

Not to mention, any American negotiator would, at the very best, get it only up to a point. The history. The hatred. Just ask Bill Clinton. He sat there happily making nice between Israel PM Yizhak Rabin and PA head Yasir Arafat on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993 — yet when push finally came to shove seven years later at Camp David, as Clinton put forth his seemingly perfectly rational ideas for peace, the PA’s Arafat did not even make a counteroffer, either to Clinton or to Israel. This is what the Donald doesn’t get.

When it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, Trump has a lot to learn. His “neutrality” has Israel rolling its collective eyes. Donald may be impressin’ ‘em in swaths of America, but in Israel he is neither a “we” nor an “I,” not even a chip on the table.

Copyright © 2016 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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