Trump on Palestine: A Brief Overview of US Israeli Relations in Four Years

Malak Saleh

When Donald J. Trump took office in 2017, it seemed as though all eyes were on his foreign relationships with China, Russia and North Korea, a trichotomy of trade, scandal and existential threat, respectively. However, it was not a surprise to most onlookers when the Trump administration sharpened its focus and diplomatic reserves to bolster the State of Israel, and in doing so, inherently temper the Palestinian political identity. For decades, presidents of the United States have meticulously addressed the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, often leaning their leverages for Israel while also upholding some degree of human rights preservationist views for Palestinians. As President Trump packs his bags and makes his way out of the White House, we are compelled to take a look back at the Trump administrations’ dealings in the region, its lasting impacts and the hefty inheritance he leaves behind for the next US President, former US Vice President Joe Biden.

Prior to taking the oath of presidency, Trump claimed he would move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that would fully recognize the Israeli state as the sovereign keeper of the highly symbolic and disputed city. This controversial promise pre-presidency forecasted the tone of resolute confederacy the Trump administration would have with Israel. Trump’s first contentious move that demonstrated his administration’s disposition for Israeli sympathy was to drop the United States’ longstanding two-state solution position in February of 2017, stating that the Trump administration would be open to an agreement that doesn’t include separate states for Israel and Palestine. At a news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump remarked that two-state or one-state, either solution “works for him.”

For over 70 years, the holy city had been categorized as disputed territory under the UN’s designation of the land as an international zone. In Decem-

ber of 2017, President Trump revisited his promise to move the US embassy to Jerusalem in a series of declarations stonewalled by backlash from leaders in the Middle East. This controversial promise was not unique to President Trump however. It was an unfulfilled pact made by former Presidents, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, which was made in a claim during his campaign trail in 2008. America’s historical reluctance to fulfill the pledge is for good reason. This bureaucratic move would deepen the divide between the Palestinian Authority and the leadership in Israel.

Thousands of pro-Palestine protesters across the Arab world demonstrated heated disapproval for the US foreign policy action. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to cut ties with Israel if Trump recognized Jerusalem as its capital, according to reporting by Bloomberg. The move also faced pushback from leaders in Europe, including French President Emmanuel Macron, who expressed “concern” about moving the embassy to Jerusalem. The administration agreed to postpone the official opening of the American embassy in Jerusalem for approximately six months, until the administration received the final backing they required. The United Nations General, in a resolution passed by a landslide vote of 128-9, gave the White House the greenlight to move forward with its plans to extend its presence in Israel, making the UN an unexpected backer of the dubious process. Prior to this recognition by the US government, no other country recognized Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem.

The opening of the embassy, which was expedited to May of 2018 on the eve of the anniversary of the Nakba day, led to thousands of Palestinian protestors converging on the Gaza Strip border, a revolt that resulted in the killing of dozens and left thousands wounded in the wake of deadly confrontations.

In the midst of peak tensions between Palestinians and Israelis, President Trump threatened to cut aid to Palestinians on their reluctance to “engage in peace talks.” In August of 2018, the United States cut more than $200 million in economic aid to Palestinians after also drastically withholding $65 million in contributions to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) of a planned $125 million funding pact. By the end of the month, the US State Department entirely cut all funding to UNRWA, noting the organization as an “irredeemably flawed operation,” according to reporting by Al Jazeera.

Following the slash in funding, President Trump formally announced a Middle East Peace Plan at the start of 2020, coining the proposal as “the deal of the century.” The 181-page plan called for a two-state solution, contradicting the President’s earlier stance on a one-state deal. The plan is stocked with inconsistencies, foremost by calling for a Palestinian capital in parts of east Jerusalem, namely Al Quds as the Palestinian capital, while also establishing Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital.” The plan legitimizes all existing Israeli establishments and will not require a repeal of any settlements made in the West Bank. While the peace deal calls on Israel to freeze all settlement activity and arrangements to further annex land in the West Bank, it also redraws Israel’s boundaries to incorporate recent illegal settlements and new unchartered territories in the Jordan Valley. The plan provides a conceptual map that forecasts a nation in which Israel would drastically accede more land, leaving Palestinians with only 15% land mass of historical Palestine. The proposal promises to facilitate more than $50 billion in new investments over ten years, including an infrastructure project that would connect a high speed rail between the West Bank and Gaza.

Not only does the deal propose a further minimization of a physical Palestinian presence, the prospectus would mandate a fully demilitarized Palestine and the complete dismantling of Hamas before it can be granted statehood. The Palestinian National Authority, in response to the blueprint, declared it no longer found its nation bound by agreements with Israel and the US, rejecting the peace plan entirely. “There will be no relations at all with [Israel] and the United States including security ties,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said at an Arab League emergency meeting, thus initiating

a three-year boycott, ceasing all opportunities for peace talks and gutting Trump’s “deal of the century.”

The most momentous foreign policy action between the US and Israel during the Trump presidency took place in August, 2020. Trump focused on the Middle East, initiated an accord in which the United Arab Emirates and Israel agreed to normalize ties, abolishing a 40-year boycott law that prohibited the UAE from trading with Israel. In doing so, Israel allegedly promises to pause its plans to annex any further land in Palestine. Despite the pact to preserve Palestinian-owned land, the historical deal was met with disapproval by the Palestinian Authority that formally denounced the deal. Following the UAE’s move to explore an economic and nonhostile relationship with Israel, the Kingdom of Bahrain and Sudan shortly followed suit, adding to the pool of Southwest Asia and North African nations to normalize ties with Israel, joining Egypt and Jordan.

As 2020 election results have officially named Joe Biden as next in line for the US President’s seat, he will need to determine whether or not he will reverse any of President Trump’s foreign dealings in Israel and Palestine. Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, promised to withdraw his three-year boycott of the White House once Biden takes office. The Palestinian Authority remains hopeful that a Biden presidency would bridge the gap in American-Palestinian relations deeply forked by the Trump Presidency. Although Biden has already promised to restore funding in the West Bank and Gaza cut by the Trump administration, he did promise to keep the US embassy in Jerusalem “now that it’s done,” according to reporting by Al Jazeera. Kamala Harris, the next US Vice President, has been known to outwardly support Israel in an “undivided” affiance. The question at hand is whether or not Joe Biden will be laser focused on cradling US-Israel relations as the Trump administration aggressively did, or if he will have a more laid back approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as most previous presidents have in the past.

Only time will tell what Palestinian, US and Israeli accords will look like moving forward in a post -Trump, post-pandemic era.

Note: PACC is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit non-political organization and does not endorse partisan politics.

Hunted

Shereen Malherbe

I could see nothing beyond their peaks as the sun beat down through the windscreen. The first sign of life I glimpsed was an indistinguishable silhouette slinking into a cavernous hole. I was on a journey back to my homeland. It was there I was hoping to discover the other half of me, the missing history of my Palestinian ancestry. It was also to answer my family’s call: to come and help them to hunt a creature that was as enshrouded in mystery as the land it was found in. I had heard tales from locals of a planted enemy, a creature used as a weapon of Occupation, one that survived as a creature of fear, capable of disappearing into the mist as if it had descended from the shadows and returned to them without a trace. It moved through the mountains as swiftly as the mist that passed through them. I had reluctantly offered to help. There was not much else I had planned in the long drawn out days of my sabbatical in a place I barely knew.

The reason most humans hunt was to find and conquer, to find a strength in our own weaknesses. Trepidation sunk into my body as I tried to dispel the fact that hunting was against everything in my blood. I don’t even eat meat. But the tales had circulated and I had come to fear this animal that slaughtered the livestock and stalked those who passed through the mountain range so the enemy had surrounded the people of the mountains on every side. From man and nature.

To reach the remote mountain village, I drove along a roadside carved from the mountains themselves. The edges on either side cut away and dropped down into the abyss. A skid in the wrong direction and I would freefall. Deep in the mountain range I eventually reached the old town. I wound down my window and breathed in the air, cooler and fresher after the climb into the clouds. Pastel colored houses sat on hilltops next to a small brick church, with spires topped with a wire cross. Across the street, the local mosque minarets echoed the call to prayer into the blue sky. Faces of people and life welcomed me, it calmed me. Life decorated the streets with people shopping and greeting each other as they passed by. Cafes were open for business and life continued in the brightness of the sun as if the town had no idea of the creature I had come to find. An animal that had been spoken of like a mythological beast that lurked in the dark corners of the town like an old fairy-tale creature.

I had been promised a life reminiscent of centuries unchanged, a life before the wars. If I hadn’t

been to this place, I would have never believed it. But the place itself was unlike anything I had ever seen. I wound through the town until I reached the fields and just beyond them was another small village of predominantly farmers. It was there that I was meeting my family to stay in the old summer house. The summer house had been in the family for generations and was open to any of us, whenever we wanted to stay in the old town. In the summer it provided us with an escape from the searing temperatures that were prominent below sea level. In winters, the landscape changed to a beautiful blanket of fresh snow.

The house was an old flat-roofed house in a quiet street surrounded by rolling fields and orchards of cherry and apricot trees. It was built of stone and consisted of five basic rooms, a separate shower room and a kitchen with a gas canister and a fourburner stove. The glassless windows blew the breeze around the house so it smelt of the freshness of spring. My uncle greeted me whilst ushering me into his battered Audi sedan which he also used for farming errands. I wondered how it had reached the tops of these mountains, but cars weren’t easy or cheap to come buy so it was a blessing that the family had this one. There were many things that didn’t seem logical or make sense in these towns but then faith was in God, Conqueror of all.

My uncle was late to meet his friends who lived in a half built house near the sage fields on the top of the hill. We drove on the roads until we reached long straw grass that blew gently in the breeze, lifting the air with its sweetness. Dragon flies danced on the pond water and the smell of wild sage blew in from the carpenter’s house.

His wife, Maria, took both of my hands and welcomed me in for tea and a selection of home-made baked breads on the counter of her newly refurbished kitchen. My eyes glanced around the lounge, unused to seeing anything like this in the other houses I had visited during my stay. Statues of Mary holding an infant son decorated the mantel pieces. Crosses depicting a crucifixion of Jesus hung on every wall. In these old towns humanity is rooted deeply in faith. Neighbors have always shared their land and their company peacefully. I have never heard the politics of war and religion discussed in these houses.

My uncle and Maria’s husband, Omar shared a passion for rare birds, so they were busy in the aviary whilst Maria gave me a tour around the house. The staircase opened to the sky. The outside wall was only half built so I climbed up to the roof, unnerved by the open drop to the outside. They had been building the house for years, whenever money and materials became available. We reached the rooftop, looking out to the distance where wild sage grew amongst sturdy rocks and the remnants of stone houses littered the fields where they used to live before. In the distance we were hemmed in either by barbed wire boundaries of occupied territory or the peaks of the mountains that towered above us all. I sipped the tea, sweet and flavored with the sage; a livelihood of the locals who collected, dried and sold it in the markets.

The sun was falling in the sky. Ahead in the fields we saw my uncle and Omar had gone to check the traps. She could tell my eagerness to go and join them so she handed me a jumper. I had arrived unprepared. By the time I had maneuvered down the stairs and caught up with my uncle, the night was falling. Eventually, the only light was the torch beam shooting around the darkness. Bones crunched beneath my feet. “It's prey,” Maria said, hearing them crunch under my feet.

“Have you ever seen it?”

Maria shook her head.

My uncle shouted for us to stop. Maria and I froze in the darkness.

“We have found tracks,” he shouted back.

We walked slower, quieter, closer. In case it was watching us from behind the trees, waiting for us to wander off like a lost sheep away from the herd. I felt vulnerable. We had no weapons. Guns were not allowed for any Palestinian. I could hear our breath in the darkness forming its own mist in front of our faces. My uncle and Omar paced back to us. Whatever it was had disappeared. I breathed a sigh of relief. The closer I seemed to get, the more I didn’t want to find it.

The days and nights rolled past, hunting became replaced with meals on terraces and late night tea and shisha under the grape vines. Stories of darker tales and the reality of an Occupation replaced the

hunt for the beast; it had slipped away under the darkness and I was relieved to leave it there.

The landscape shifted and as quickly as the burnt orange leaves fell from the trees, the snow followed. It fell from the white skies brightening the long winter nights as it glistened under the moonlight. It carpeted the land, covering the soil and the remnants of what was buried underneath.

My trip was coming to an end. My hunt was replaced with me becoming lost in a place of ever changing beauty; a lost town in the mountains that tied me to its history and my ancestry and the stories of an era long passed.

Then the evening came which has resided itself into the chambers of my brain and has merged between history and memory and madness to produce something it is almost impossible to retell with any precision. It was a dark evening devoid of snowfall. Heavy clouds blew in and blocked out the moonlight. We had word that a man had found his way through the mountains to pass to the City and had caught sight of the beast. My uncle and I left in the darkness. There was something about the evening, a foreboding that made me doubt the safety of the town that had cut me off from the rest of the world. For life under Occupation is not without disturbance. But I found myself unable to resist the paths into the mountains. I followed silently, as the stories of those entering and never leaving replayed in my head. The darkness wrapped around me so all I could hear was the sound of footsteps and animals shrieking into the night sky. The mountains towered either side of me, my footing became loose on the rocks and I slipped and cut my hand. Even the snow had turned on me. No longer a blanket of beauty, its treacherous coldness whipped through my clothes and froze my feet through my boots. I imagined snakes watching me from dark crevices as we intruded on their world, an inhospitable one I didn’t belong too.

Ahead of us, I made out a silhouette of a figure. It was the man my uncle had spoken of. He looked like a man of the mountains with weathered skin, wrinkles as deep as the crevices in the gorge. He didn’t speak a word, only beckoned us to follow and to stay silent. I looked up at the starless sky and the imposing silhouettes of the mountain and I was reminded of the Quran foretelling Judgement Day when the horn sounds and the mountains will crum-

ble into dust and the stars will fall out of the sky.

Suddenly a piercing bright light struck from the sky followed by a thunderous bang. I dropped to my knees on the floor. I tried to comprehend what had happened. If it was the earth crumbling around me. If this was how people died in the mountain as they heaved and sighed and swallowed listening to a Will more powerful than ours. But as my eyes adjusted, I began to paint a picture of the scene in front of me. I had found it. It was not the beast of my nightmares. Nor did I have any strength in me that I could have done anything but stay rooted to the spot. It was limping and bleeding on the rock. I looked for the gun swinging from the shoulder of my uncle or the man of the mountain but of course, there wasn’t one. Lights glinted from the settlements up ahead. We stayed crouched down until silence fell, suddenly thankful for the night’s cloak. And in the stillness, I watched as the hyena tentatively stepped out from the shadows. It was smaller than the one I had imagined. Its eyes petrified by the sound. By its loss. Behind it, a mother lay dead on the rocks. The creature, planted in my mind as the one to fear, was struggling to survive. It was forced to steal livestock, to try and snatch away meat whenever it could because it was starving. The night had ended brutally for one of us that night and I felt as if we were saved by it. As if it took a shot that was meant for us.

The image of this animal and the fear in its eyes has stayed with me. I see it as I pass through this torn country. I see it in the eyes of the young. I see it in the boys and men behind iron bars. I have seen it shift from fear into a strength despite what is against them. The land of men and beasts belongs to a land of warriors. It is one I feel my weakness in. It does not entirely belong to me. I do not have their strength. I am a passer-by. I am both lost and found within it. But still it remains connected to me. It remains my home.

Shereen Malherbe is a British, Palestinian writer. Her debut novel, Jasmine Falling is set in Palestine. Her second novel, The Tower is now recommended academic reading at a US University course on Muslim voices. Her migrant children’s series is due to be published by Beacon Books in October 2020. After a decade living throughout the Middle East, Shereen now resides in the UK with her husband and four children. You can follow her on Instagram @Shereenmalherbe and find out more via www.shereenmalherbe.com