[American Spectator] A new report suggests that under President Trump it certainly has.
The biggest obstacles to peace between Palestinians and Israelis are the Palestinian Authority (PA), its president Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO, and Fatah ‐ the vary parties that have been promoted as Israel’s peace partners for the last 25 years. After its own futile attempts to forge a deal between the parties, the Trump administration now appears to recognize that the PA is not really interested in peace. And while the State Department has been reluctant to walk away from its investment in the PA, the just-released 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism suggests that it too is finally coming around.
The Secretary of State is required by law to provide Congress, by April 30, "a full and complete report on terrorism" from the previous year. The Country Reports on Terrorism (CRT), as it is known, provides an annual glimpse into U.S. policy regarding nearly every nation on earth, some of which require only a paragraph or two while others go on for pages. Israel, forever adjoined to the Palestinians, is described in one of the longer sections, titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, And Gaza." During Barack Obama’s presidency, this section reflected a naïve trust in the PA and Abbas and a departure from the skepticism about the PA’s ability to make peace evident in the Bush-era CRTs.
This year’s CRT, the first of the Trump administration, was produced during a chaotic period, under two different Secretaries of State, following some very public resignations and a hiring freeze, and under the direction of a new boss of the Bureau of Counterterrorism (Nathan A. Sales). The advanced copy of the Israel section I was provided, now released, suggests a change is under way at the State Department.
Last year’s CRT was the final one of the Obama era. Parts of the Israel section could have been written by the UN (or the BDS movement). Particularly egregious was the conclusion that "Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive." When it came out, I wrote that, "Gross incompetence aside, the only logical explanation for the State Department’s inaccurate and misleading report is that its authors still believe, as Barack Obama put it in a 2013 speech in Jerusalem, that Israel has ’a true partner in President Abbas.’" 
|
