If nothing else, Donald Trump’s decision last Wednesday to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital shows how disenthralled his administration is with traditional pieties about the Middle East. It’s about time.
One piety is that “Mideast peace” is all but synonymous with Arab-Israeli peace. Seven years of upheaval, repression, terrorism, refugee crises and mass murder in Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Syria have put paid to that notion.
Another piety is that only an Israeli- Palestinian peace deal could reconcile the wider Arab world to the Jewish state. Yet relations between Jerusalem and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Cairo; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and Manama, Bahrain, are flourishing as never before, even as the prospect of a Palestinian state is as remote as ever.
A third is that intensive mediation by the United States is essential to progress on the ground. Yet recent American involvement – whether at the Camp David summit in 2000 or John Kerry’s efforts in 2013 – has had mostly the opposite effect: diplomatic failure, followed by war.
Bret StephensWhich brings us to Jerusalem and the piety that pretending it isn’t what it is can be a formula for anything except continued self-delusion.