Bibi and Donald

Benjamin Netanyahu has had little luck before now with American presidents. During his first term in power, June 1996 to July 1999, the Clinton Administration intervened in Israeli politics to help Ehud Barak defeat and eject him. When Netanyahu returned to power in March 2009, he faced Barack Obama—whose preference for the Israeli left and “peace movement” was as obvious as his personal distaste for Netanyahu. So Donald Trump represents something entirely new for Netanyahu: an American president who is sympathetic and supportive.

Will the visit have an effect on American policy toward Israeli settlements and the so-called “peace process?” During his campaign, Trump was vocally pro-Israel. Soon after being elected he named a well-known lawyer, David Friedman, as his new ambassador to Israel, and it was reported that Friedman, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Trump’s in-house lawyer Jason Greenblatt would form a triumvirate charged with making policy toward the Jewish State. All three men are Orthodox Jews, and Friedman and Kushner have been supporters of settlements in the West Bank. While none of them has diplomatic experience, they get along very well and taken together constitute a very powerful agglomeration of brain power and of influence with Trump. On several occasions Trump has evinced a desire to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, and he has publicly assigned the task to Kushner. He told The Wall Street Journal shortly after the election that an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is “the ultimate deal. As a deal maker, I’d like to do…the deal that can’t be made.” So the Trump objective is the one that has eluded Presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

The administration has made several statements about Israeli policy in the short time since the inauguration. On February 2nd, a White House official told the Jerusalem Post this:

This was a response to Israel’s announcement, just four days after Trump was inaugurated, of a decision to build 2,500 new housing units in the settlements. Upon quick reflection this “refrain from unilateral actions” statement seemed to some in the White House to be too much of a brushback to Israel. Later the same day, White House spokesman Sean Spicer softened the blow and said this:

This was a deliberate abandonment of Obama policy, which was obsessed with construction in the settlements, by Trump advisers who had chafed during the Obama years at endless White House and State Department condemnations of Israel every time a settler put brick and mortar together. In the Bush administration, we had reached a deal with Prime Minister Sharon. We could accept construction and new housing that was “up and in,” not expanding the settlements geographically or expanding the settlers’ footprint but allowing population growth. That’s what the Spicer statement meant by opposing “expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders” but not opposing new construction within them.

White House officials knew what they were doing here, but did not seem (in my conversations with them) to have had Israeli domestic politics in mind. Yet these statements constructed a sort of shelter for Netanyahu, who had been pulled right since the Trump victory. Netanyahu leads the Likud Party, and its right wing, parties to Likud’s right, and the settler movement itself all saw Trump’s victory as their chance to remove all restraints—to annex areas of the West Bank or announce massive new construction programs. Netanyahu is conservative by instinct, but his old excuse for slowing down such proposals—Barack Obama and his hostility to them—was now gone. So the new Trump statements were a gift to Netanyahu, who could argue that construction within settlements could now increase without fear of creating a crisis with Washington but new settlements, physical expansion of settlements, or moves such as annexation would threaten relations with the Trump administration before they even began.

The Trump settlement policy thus seemed clear until Trump himself gave an interview to Israel Hayom. Asked about the settlements, Trump replied:

This statement is unclear; “going forward with these settlements” is too vague to interpret. But the main sentiments seem to be “go slow” and “don’t take any more land,” both of which can help Netanyahu resist pressure from his right.

The second main issue Trump and Netanyahu will discuss is moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This was a Trump campaign promise, repeated over and over before and after Election Day. But now the administration has become more cautious, presumably after warnings from Arab allies that such a move could be disruptive.

Disruptive of what? Some big plans for peace. The administration’s approach to the “peace process” appears to be “outside in” rather than “inside out.” In other words, instead of using an Israeli-Palestinian deal to improve Israel’s relations with the Arab states, use Israel’s relations with the Arab states to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.

This is a very sensible approach. The Arabs were present at the Madrid Conference in 1991 and the Annapolis Conference in 2007, and their absence at Camp David in 2000 is seen by many in the Clinton Administration as a central reason for the failure of those talks. (To believe that you have to believe Yasser Arafat was capable of signing a comprehensive peace deal with all the compromises it entailed, but that’s a separate argument.) The logic behind the “outside in” approach is that the Palestinians have little to offer Israel in exchange for recognizing Palestinian statehood (and painfully removing many settlements) but peace and normal relations with the Arab states is a major Israeli goal; and on the Palestinian side, the internal political dangers of compromise with Israel would be reduced if the Arab states backed the necessary concessions (and funded the new State of Palestine).

Those considerations are not new, but Israeli-Arab cooperation looked nearly impossible in previous decades. Today, Israeli, Jordan, Egypt, and the Sunni Gulf states have cooperative security relations spurred by their common fears: Iran; terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS; and the policy that was emanating from Washington, at least under Barack Obama. So a regional approach that seeks to build on Israeli-Arab cooperation is not bizarre or hopelessly unrealistic.

It is, however, quite a reach. Israel’s cooperation with Gulf states remains secret; no Gulf official has made an official trip there or acknowledged security ties in public. One Arab ambassador in Washington told me in January that if he were even photographed shaking hands with the Israeli ambassador, he’d be fired instantly. What concessions would Israel need to make to motivate the Arabs to come forward in public? Would such concessions be palatable to the Israeli public, and would Netanyahu’s coalition survive if he made them? And at bottom, do the Arab states care enough about the Palestinians to spend a lot of diplomatic energy, and take real domestic political risks, to advance their cause? They never have before.

Moreover, the fundamental issues remain extremely difficult. It is a commonplace to say that in previous negotiations the Israelis and Palestinians were an inch apart, but it is not true. Resolving Jerusalem alone seems an almost insuperable barrier. And that returns us to the issue of the American Embassy. Trump’s campaign promises have been replaced by caution. Last March (2016) he promised to move the Embassy in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer:

As the saying goes, that was then and this is now. Here’s Trump’s Israel Hayom interview on February 10:

So Trump is following in the footsteps of his predecessors on this issue: a perennial campaign promise is never quite translated into reality. The issue is a complex one because “moving the Embassy” can mean many things: from actually building a new Embassy office building and ambassador’s residence in Jerusalem, to changing the sign on the American Consulate General building near the King David hotel to read “U.S. Embassy,” to having the U.S. ambassador live and work in Jerusalem while the Embassy remains in Tel Aviv. There are many combinations and permutations, but the current situation is bizarre. Israel is a close ally, and there are no Palestinian claims to the Western part of the city where the Israeli government is located and a U.S. Embassy could be built. Moreover, it isn’t as if the United States has no diplomatic presence in Jerusalem. We do: our Consulate General represents us to the Palestinian Authority and PLO. It is with respect to Israel alone that we have no diplomatic presence—a historical anomaly that should be corrected.

But correcting it will potentially rile up Arab states whose cooperation the Trump administration seeks—not only to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace, but to fight against Iran and ISIS. So the President’s “thinking” and “studying” may last a semester or two, or more.

The other big item on the meeting agenda is Iran. In his interview with Israel Hayom, Trump was coy:

The meeting on Wednesday will allow Netanyahu to feel Trump out on the Iran nuclear deal. If Trump were going to renounce the deal entirely rather than going for strict enforcement, there would probably be some evidence of this already. So the Israelis will want to know what enforcement steps Trump plans: tough new sanctions, for example? And how forcefully will Trump push back on Iran’s belligerent regional conduct, everywhere from Yemen and the Gulf to Iraq and Syria? Like his Arab neighbors, Netanyahu will hope for a strong U.S. posture and will weigh every word from Trump and Secretary of Defense Mattis. Will it be all talk, or some action?

Meanwhile, Netanyahu is the subject of several serious police investigations right now in Israel. It would be a case of cosmic injustice if he were forced to resign now—after surviving eight years with Barack Obama—but it is not impossible. In fact, Netanyahu has been prime minister for a total of ten years, which was the magic number for Tony Blair; Margaret Thatcher in the UK and John Howard in Australia lasted 11. It is hard to believe that Netanyahu will be the only Israeli prime minister whom Trump will face, even if Trump only serves one term as president. The American embrace of Netanyahu will do him some good in Israel, but Netanyahu’s political fate and the decision whether to prosecute him will not turn on his relations with Donald Trump. Nor will American policy turn on whether Netanyahu lasts one more year, or four: Trump seems tough on Iran, soft on Russia’s conduct in Syria, and favorable to an effort to work out some Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that emerges from Israeli-Arab negotiations. None of that will change no matter who is prime minister of Israel.

The good personal relations between Netanyahu and Trump are very helpful to Israeli-American relations. In the new administration we will not see members of the White House staff sniping and cursing at Netanyahu in public, and the word will go forth to cooperate closely at all levels of government. The United States will actively support Israel at the UN more than the Obama administration did. The effort to improve Israel’s relations with Arab states is a tough but worthwhile one. But as Trump’s reversal on moving the embassy to Jerusalem “fairly quickly” shows, the issues Israel and the United States face together are extremely difficult ones; the failure to solve them in the past decades was due to their complexity, not to a lack of smart and dedicated officials trying their best.

Expect a terrific visit. Warm remarks. Hugs. Firm commitments. And then, back to work “studying” and “thinking” about the same intractable problems that have faced American and Israeli officials for decades.

Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.