Trump’s embassy move injects some realism into the Middle East

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Donald Trump’s move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is right in principle and will contribute to the cause of peace in the Middle East, though not in the way that most people think.

But first, is Trump responsible for the loss of life on the border of the Gaza Strip and Israel?

The answer is no. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times is a regular and tough critic of Israel and absolutely loathes Trump. On CNN yesterday he said of the deaths in Gaza: “This was an act of human sacrifice by Hamas.”

He made the incontrovertible point that if you send thousands of people rushing towards the Israeli border in Gaza and mix with them many armed Hamas fighters, you know for certain in advance that a lot of people will be killed.

This is exactly what Hamas wanted and exactly what, as Friedman argues, its actions guaranteed. To some extent it has worked. The international media has swung into its routine denunciations of Israel and the Palestinian cause is back in the media.

It may be that Israel has ethical questions to answer. It is difficult to know exactly what happened and Israel certainly has the right, as Malcolm Turnbull and others have said, to defend its borders.

Having investigated similar issues over many years, I believe the ­Israel Defence Force acts with a comparable set of ethical constraints as any mainstream Western military would do in similar circumstances. That has been the conclusion of many independent military experts, such as our own former general Jim Molan, after exhaustive investigations.

Nonetheless, if it turns out that Israeli soldiers fired live ammunition on civilians unnecessarily, then this should be investigated by the Israeli legal system, which often enough in the past has brought down painful findings against individual Israeli soldiers.

Why though do I think the Trump move will help the forlorn and unlikely cause of peace?

It is not because it brings a deal closer. It is because, instead, it recognises reality and communicates an important message to the Palestinian leadership — that they do not have a veto over any aspect of the US relationship with Israel, or of international moves generally relating to Israel.

This is an important lesson. Producing peace out of conflict is exceptionally difficult. Each historical case is different. Sometimes you can have peace without normalisation, such as the peace between Israel and Egypt. This is possible when two sovereign states are at loggerheads but have solid borders which they can agree on.

Where you have two populations living side-by-side or intermingled, you normally need normalisation to be followed by formal peace.

This is what happened in Northern Ireland. Violence gradually wound down as nationalists — overwhelmingly Catholics — had their legitimate civil rights concerns addressed. In time the Catholic population became opposed to and ashamed of the violence wrongly carried out in its name. The IRA lost the support even of a big minority of the nationalist population for its campaign of viol­ence.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the situation is nowhere near normalisation and nowhere near a deal. The way the world talks about the two-state solution has become dysfunctional, unrealistic and positively damaging to the situation on the ground.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The two-state plan is the only possible long-term solution. It is right in principle. But it cannot be imposed from above and critical preconditions must be met. And those preconditions are nowhere near being met.

Three times the Israelis, in partnership with the Americans, have offered the Palestinians a state on almost all of the West Bank and Gaza with a capital in East Jerusalem and compensating territory from Israel proper to make up for the very small amount of territory Israel would need to keep to accommodate the biggest Jewish settlement blocs that are de facto suburbs of the capital.

This happened twice under Ehud Barak and once under Ehud Olmert. Each time the Palestinian leadership walked away. It could not possibly sign up to a peace deal that committed it to ending its territorial and other claims against Israel. Any Palestinian leader who embraced such a deal would almost inevitably be assassinated by extremists on his own side.

This is where the political character of the Palestinian leadership is important.

Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate” Palestinian leader, recently gave a speech of unbridled anti-Semitism, blaming Jewish behaviour for the hostility that led to the Holocaust. Hamas, designated by Australian law as a terrorist organisation, has a charter that reeks of the most extravagant anti-Semitism. This is not remotely matched by any equal extremism on Israel’s side. It is important because it means that any Palestinian leader who embraces peace with Israel is repudiating the demonisation with which his own political organisation has steadfastly indoctrinated its own population for decades. This is not a leadership preparing its people for peace.

Given the previous rejections of the maximum peace offer Israel could make, and given the proliferation of murderous disorder and genocidal violence across its borders in Syria, and the dominance of the Iranian client, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, Israel in any event could not possibly make exactly that offer now.

A peace today must provide for an intrusive Israeli security presence in the West Bank. The nearest point of the West Bank to Tel Aviv airport effectively overlooks the airport. A militarily hostile neighbour could paralyse the Israeli economy any time it wished.

This is not, however, a counsel of despair.

The Middle East, the world in general, is full of difficult situations that cannot be quickly resolved but that can be improved. The Kurds deserve a state in the Middle East. No one is going to give them one. However, Western powers should be active to ensure the Kurds have a decent life and maximum autonomy.

No one thinks they can reverse the population movements that took place between India and Pakistan 70 years ago. If one side were committed to doing so, and supported in this ambition by big sections of the international com­munity, peaceful coexistence would be impossible.

The only way forward for Israel and the Palestinians is maximum effort to improve the economy and life conditions of Palestinians and to find a way for the two populations to reconcile. If there were 10 years of peace, Israel would rush to the idea of Palestinian statehood. The idea that statehood is just around the corner actually makes that kind of progress harder to achieve. Trump’s move injects realism. That’s useful.