By Bret Stephens
If nothing else, Donald Trump’s decision on 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, Cairo, Abu Dhabi and Manama 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.
Which
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.
What
Jerusalem is is the capital of Israel, both as the ancestral
Jewish homeland and the modern nation-state. When Richard Nixon became the
first American president to visit the country in 1974, he attended his state
dinner in Jerusalem. It’s where President Anwar Sadat of Egypt spoke when he
decided to make peace in 1977. It’s what Congress decided as a matter of law in
1995. When Barack Obama paid his own presidential visit to Israel in 2013, he
too spent most of his time in Jerusalem.
So why
maintain the fiction that Jerusalem isn’t the capital?
The
original argument, from 1947, was that Jerusalem ought to be under
international jurisdiction, in recognition of its religious importance. But
Jews were not allowed to visit the Western Wall during the 19 years when East
Jerusalem was under Jordanian occupation. Yasir Arafat denied that Solomon’s
Temple was even in Jerusalem, reflecting an
increasingly common Palestinian denial of history.
Would Jews
be allowed to visit Jewish sites, and would those sites be respected, if the
city were redivided? Doubtful, considering Palestinian attacks on such sites, which is
one of the reasons why it shouldn’t be.
The next
argument is that any effort by Washington to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital would set the proverbial Arab street on fire and perhaps lead to
another intifada.
But this
misapprehends the nature of the street, which has typically been a propaganda
tool of Arab leaders to channel domestic discontent and manipulate foreign
opinion. And it also misrepresents the nature of the last intifada, which was a
meticulously preplanned event waiting for a convenient
pretext (Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 walk on the Temple Mount) to look like a
spontaneous one.
Finally
there’s the view that recognition is like giving your college freshman a
graduation gift: a premature reward for an Israeli government that hasn’t yet
done what’s needed to make a Palestinian state possible.
But this
also gets a few things wrong. It will have no effect on whether or how a
Palestinian state comes into being, whatever the current histrionics in Ramallah. And it’s not
much of a bargaining chip, since most Israelis couldn’t care less where the
embassy is ultimately located.
Then
again, recognition does several genuinely useful things.
It
belatedly aligns American words with deeds. It aligns word as well as deed with
reality. And it aligns the United States with the country toward which we are
constantly professing friendship even as we have spent seven decades stinting
it of the most basic form of recognition.
Recognition
also tells the Palestinians that they can no longer hold other parties hostage
to their demands. East Jerusalem could have been the capital of a sovereign
Palestinian state 17 years ago, if Arafat had simply accepted the terms at Camp
David. He didn’t because he thought he could dictate terms to stronger powers.
Nations pay a price for the foolhardiness of their leaders, as the Kurds
recently found out.
Peace and
a Palestinian state will come when Palestinians aspire to create a Middle
Eastern Costa Rica — pacifist, progressive, neighborly and democratic — rather
than another Yemen: by turns autocratic, anarchic, fanatical and tragic.
For the
international community, that means helping Palestinians take steps to
dismantle their current klepto-theocracy, rather than fueling a culture of
perpetual grievance against Israel. Mahmoud Abbas is now approaching the 13th anniversary
of his elected four-year term. Someone should point this out.
Hamas has
run Gaza for a decade, during which it has spent more time building rockets and
terror tunnels than hotels or hospitals. Someone should point this out, too. It
is indicative of the disastrous political choices that help explain 70 years of
Palestinian failure.
Meantime,
Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. For those who have lived in denial, it must
be some sort of shock.
