The following is an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of Victoria Coates’s forthcoming book, The Battle for the Jewish State: Winning the War Against Israel — and America.

The Palestinians like to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as the “nakba,” or disaster. They considered the presidency of Donald Trump a second nakba. While his term had begun with a congenial visit to the White House in May 2017 by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, which left Abbas “hopeful” about the prospects for a deal with Israel, things rapidly went downhill.