One of the running leitmotifs of the Trump presidency so far is the president’s repeated acknowledgment of the fact that issues are more complex than he ever imagined as a candidate.
After discussing North Korea with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he said, “I realized it’s not so easy.”
After reversing himself on NATO, saying he no longer thought it was “obsolete,” Trump said that he had criticized the alliance because he didn’t know much about it. “People don’t go around asking about NATO if I’m building a building in Manhattan, right?” the president averred.
After his first attempt to repeal Obamacare failed, Trump said, “I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
“This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier,” Trump said after his first 100 days in office.
Yet President Trump’s boundless self-confidence has not been dented by his repeated encounters with the messy realities of public policy. On Wednesday, he expressed confidence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—now 69 years old and actually older than that if you include Arab-Jewish violence in the decades before Israel’s establishment in 1948—would readily yield to his Midas touch. After his meeting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Trump said of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: “It’s something that, I think, is frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years,” adding, “We will get this done” and “hopefully there won’t be such hatred for very long.”
In fact, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a lot harder than any of the other policy problems that have challenged Trump so far. It has been the bane of American presidents since Harry Truman’s day, and there is no reason to think that the prospects of a “solution” are increasing.
The Gaza Strip is governed by Hamas, a fanatical Islamist movement dedicated to Israel’s destruction, notwithstanding its recent public-relations ploy to soften its image in the West. Far from “moderating,” as this New York Times account had it, Hamas’s new position remains the same as the old one—“Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea,” its latest policy statement reads, and “There shall be no recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist entity.”
The West Bank, meanwhile, is governed by Abbas, who is more moderate and pragmatic but who is in no position to conclude any “final status” agreement with Israel despite his dependence on Israeli support to stay in power. Abbas has to play a double game, cooperating with Israeli security forces against their mutual enemy Hamas while paying salaries to the families of Palestinian terrorists (“martyrs”) and continuing to challenge Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
As Abbas made clear on his visit to the White House, he will not give up Palestinian demands such as a “right to return” for refugees, which would amount to the destruction of the Jewish State. And even if Abbas wanted to do a deal, he would be in no position to do so—he is 82 years old and not very popular among his own people. He was elected in 2005 to a four-year term and has continued to rule ever since by fiat in fear that he would lose an election to more radical leaders.
Watching all of this, most Israelis understandably conclude that there is no point in sacrificing land—meaning West Bank settlements—in return for empty promises. Israel gave up the Gaza Strip in 2005 and received in return not ever-lasting peace but, instead, attacks from Hamas. Israelis are not going to pull out of the West Bank now when doing so will endanger their own security. Indeed, if Israel were to pull out entirely from the West Bank, ending military and security operations, there would be a real risk of a radical group, like Hamas or ISIS, taking over from the more moderate but corrupt Fatah.
It is truly a mystery how, in light of all these obstacles, Trump thinks that he—or his envoy and former lawyer, Jason Greenblatt–will solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. The most likely explanation is that Trump simply hasn’t given it much thought and is reverting to his trademark braggadocio.
This is probably harmless–beyond the damage to Trump’s credibility–unless he starts to emulate his predecessor, Barack Obama, in pressuring Israel to make concessions in the interests of making a deal. So far, mercifully, that hasn’t happened. Given the president’s pro-Israel bent, it seems unlikely to happen. But you would think that his 100-plus days in office would have taught Trump by now that no issue is as prone to an easy solution as he once imagined.