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2024-11-15 Israel-Palestine-Jordan
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Why the New White House Won't Help Netanyahu Take the West Bank
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] Arguing ahead of evidence. I don’t know which way President Trump will fall on this particular question, but he and Bibi are coordinating their response, whatever it will be.
Newly elected US President Donald Trump has not yet moved into the White House, but his Israeli allies have already mentally tried on the vector of the future policy of the Republican administration to suit their own interests.
In the highest offices of Israel, there is a conviction that Trump's second presidential term will be a continuation of the first, which means that it is possible to continue to act within the framework of the previous logic.
For this reason, the West Bank of the Jordan River (WBJR), where Israel has been engaged in a “creeping expansion” for years, occupying disputed lands with settlers, has been in the spotlight in recent days.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, one of the apologists for settlement control over the ZBRI, does not hide the fact that he sees Trump's presidency as an "important opportunity" to apply Israeli sovereignty to semi-legal settlements. Moreover, he wants to achieve full control over these territories as early as 2025.
However, Trump apparently thinks otherwise.
DISPUTED COAST
The conflict over the status of settlements on the West Bank has been going on since the second half of the 1960s, when the territory came under Israeli control following the Yom Kippur War.
Since 1995, following the signing of the Oslo II Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, parts of the West Bank have been controlled by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which was created as a result of these agreements.
However, this does not prevent the Israelis from actively developing the ZBRI by creating new Israeli settlements, thereby further blurring the status of the disputed territories.
Under the current government, the “settlement expansion” has reached record levels. Since the beginning of 2023, the Israeli government has legalized more than 12,000 buildings in disputed territories, and by the middle of that year, it had agreed on a plan to create new settlements.
Moreover, at least four of them were planned for construction in the ZBRI zones previously abandoned by the Israelis, which violated the long-standing status quo between Tel Aviv and the relatively neutral PNA.
However, the project's progress was hampered by criticism from the United States. Moreover, a number of Israeli public organizations associated with the settlers were even subject to sanctions.
However, with the arrival of Trump, the hawks have hoped to give new impetus to the advancement in the West Bank.
"BEST FRIEND"
The return of the Republicans to the White House was awaited with poorly concealed impatience in Israel. Under the Democrats, the dialogue between Washington and Tel Aviv went into a nosedive, especially after the outbreak of hostilities in the Gaza Strip.
For almost a year, the United States tried in vain to impose its vision of a regional settlement on the Israelis, while Israel sought an opportunity to torpedo the inconvenient “deal.”
And although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to balance publicly between the Democratic and Republican wings until the very end, already during an official visit to Washington in July 2024, the Israeli establishment made a final bet on the "elephant party." Especially since it was the Republicans who provided the lion's share of support for the actions of the Israeli army in the enclave.
Trump was remembered by Netanyahu as “Israel’s best friend,” who did much to strengthen the Jewish state’s regional ambitions. It was he who, in 2017, was among the first to upset the balance of interests between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples.
Trump recognized Jerusalem as the country's capital and supported Israeli claims to the disputed Golan Heights, declaring them part of Israel's territory in 2019. In addition, in 2019, Washington deliberately distanced itself from the topic of Israeli settlements in the ZBRI, calling the issue "an internal matter of Israeli jurisdiction," which made it easier for Tel Aviv to legalize the houses being built.
After all, it was at the instigation and with the energetic participation of Trump that a new stage of Arab-Israeli normalization took place, providing Tel Aviv with the opportunity to do business with the Gulf sheikhs.
PRO-ISRAEL TEAM
Hints of the White House’s imminent “pro-Israel turn” can also be seen in the first appointments to Trump’s team. Most of the high-ranking officials – be it Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, future National Security Advisor Mike Walz, or the nominee for the post of US Ambassador to the UN Elise Stefanik – either have close ties to the Israeli government or support the political course taken by Tel Aviv.
The candidacy for the post of US Ambassador to Israel is also highly symbolic: it is conservative Mike Huckabee, known for his ardent support of Israel’s “settlement expansion.”
The Israeli leadership also tried to "play to the beat" by appointing former settler leader Yechiel Leiter as ambassador to Washington. However, this appointment did not generate much enthusiasm among Republicans.
OTHER PRIORITIES
Israeli politicians' belief in Trump's readiness to promptly support expansion in the West Bank is based solely on the logic of his previous management decisions, and also partly on his election promises to "more decisively support" Tel Aviv.
Of course, the Israelis will get far more support from the White House than the Democrats. But expansionists are missing the changed regional landscape in which Trump must navigate.
First of all, it is important for the Republican to maintain working contacts with two ardent opponents of Israeli “settlement expansion” – Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Trump expects to use their resources for further settlement of the conflict in Gaza, as well as for soft containment of Chinese economic expansion in the Middle East.
Secondly, Trump is not eager to expose another regional partner, Jordan, to additional risk. With the onset of the Gaza crisis, it has already faced unrest among Palestinians living in the kingdom, and destabilization of the situation in the ZBRI does not bode well for the Jordanians.
Finally, it is not in the interests of the new US administration to give Iran an additional point of pressure on the domestic political situation in Israel, especially since the issue of maintaining a balance of interests in the ZBRI is relevant not only for the PNA, but also for a number of Arab parties from the so-called “Joint Arab List”.
It is quite remarkable that Trump had been signaling his unwillingness to get involved in the West Bank story on the Israeli side long before he was elected president, and upon moving to the White House, he will most likely remain in the same position.
Of course, it cannot be ruled out that the new US president will nevertheless make an exception for his “old friends” and publicly remind them that, from the US position, the situation in the ZBRI is an internal matter for Israel. However, such a public pass will most likely require the Netanyahu government to make concessions to the US in other areas – primarily in matters of completing the operation in Gaza and in Lebanon.
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Posted by badanov 2024-11-15 00:00||
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File under: Palestinian Authority
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Posted by Albert Pelosi3459 2024-11-15 06:14||
2024-11-15 06:14||
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