Secretary of State Mike Pompeo plans to visit the West Bank and the Golan Heights during an impending trip to Israel, the Washington Examiner has confirmed with a source familiar with details of the trip.
The historic itinerary was first reported by Axios. Pompeo’s trip exemplifies a pair of high-profile decisions taken in 2019 that provide diplomatic reinforcements for Israel’s de facto control of the territories, a posture that Pompeo believes helped the Jewish state and Arab nations set aside the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in favor of partnership against Iranian threats.
“What fundamentally shifted is by President Trump making a few simple decisions based on his belief in conservative realism, right? Jerusalem is, in fact, the capital of Israel, Golan Heights, in fact, are inside of that country, it’s not illegal per se for every settlement to be established,” Pompeo told conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt Thursday morning. “Those basic understandings, along with a commitment that says to the Gulf states you are better off with a foreign policy that recognizes Israel — that is the direction of travel for humanity. It’s the direction of travel in the Middle East.”
The West Bank stop comes one year after announcing that the United States would no longer regard Israeli settlements in the territory as a violation of international law. The administration went a step further than that in regards to the Golan Heights, endorsing Israel’s claim to sovereignty over that land in the spring of 2019.
“President Trump took away this notion that absent solving the Israel-Palestinian problem, you can’t increase stability, security, and prosperity in the Middle East,” Pompeo told Hewitt. “That is now gone. No one can possibly believe that anymore.”
