President Trump: “Not Sure if Israelis want Peace; Palestinians Don’t

Until his December 6 declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel, it had become a strange anomaly that among all of the new president’s many policies, it was the Israeli-Palestinian track of the Middle East conflicts that generated the least – virtually no – public outcry. Most simply, it was an affirmation of the unifying – if albeit coincidental — effect that a mandatory mantra [read: “two-state solution] necessarily repeated by all who deem to be taken seriously can have on a policy issue. The incongruity righted itself as sure as a stock market sell-off when President Trump gave voice to what he claimed was merely a reading of existing realities: Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel. As is the wont of foreign policy matters, in addition to a divided domestic populace, foreign voices fuel the debate, in this case Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s counter-declaration ostensibly ending the American ownership of the peace process for lack of honest-broker status while seemingly teasing Europeans from Paris to Moscow about prospects for replacing the US as interlocutor. Those who see President Trump as a businessman reading the realities rather than an ideologue pandering to partisan interests were not surprised by his comments to a right-wing Israeli newspaper on Friday in which he expressed uncertainty with Israel’s desire to make peace. Asked by his Israel Today interviewer when the long-awaited Trump Mideast peace proposal will be released, POTUS replied, “Right now, I would say the Palestinians are not looking to make peace, they are not looking to make peace. And I am not necessarily sure that Israel is looking to make peace. So, we are just going to have to see what happens.”