Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020: The Deal of the Century

Neville Teller was born in London, read Modern History at Oxford University, and then had a varied career in marketing, general management, publishing, the Civil Service and a national cancer charity. At the same time he was consistently writing for BBC radio as dramatist and abridger. In the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2006 he was awarded an MBE for services to broadcasting and to drama.

He began writing about the Middle East in the 1980s, sometimes using the pen-name Edmund Owen. He has published four books on the subject, is the Middle East correspondent for the Eurasia Review, and his articles appear regularly in various publications and on-line. He writes the blog A Mid-East Journal (www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com).

Also by Neville Teller

One Man’s Israel

One Year in the History of Israel and Palestine

The Search for Détente: Israel and Palestine 2012-2014

The Chaos in the Middle East: 2014-2016

Copyright © 2020 Neville Teller

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For Sheila and the family

Contents

Foreword

1     Intentions and first steps     (October-March 2017)

2     An unsettled Middle East     (April – May 2017)

3     Developing the strategy     (May-September 2017)

4     Action and aftermath     (October-December 2017)

5     Awaiting the opportune moment     (January – June 2018)

6     Complications     (July-December 2018)

7     Still under wraps     (January-June 2019)

8     The economic offer     (June – July 2019)

9     Hiatus     (August 2019 – January 2020)

10    The unveiling     (28 January 2020)

Foreword

Donald J Trump assumed the presidency of the United States of America on Friday, 20 January 2017. Over the 241 years of its existence there had never been a more controversial contender for that office. What split the nation during the election campaign, and continued to do so during his presidency, was not so much Trump’s politics – though they were certainly not to everyone’s taste – as his personality. Indeed, scarcely a politician at all, he was certainly not a presidential candidate in the traditional mould. He was essentially a successful go-getting entrepreneur and showman, with many of the characteristics, good and bad, of the high-powered business leader.

Whatever his faults though, Trump possessed one attribute that many of his most impassioned enemies, as well as his closest allies, were generally agreed on – he was an accomplished deal-maker. He had mastered the craft of finessing negotiations. Deal-making had been the key to his business success which. though controversial, had been considerable. And way back in the 1980s he had co-authored The Art of the Deal, a treatise which reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and stayed there for 13 weeks.

So during Trump’s presidential election campaign, when he was considering the complex political agenda he would face if he gained office, it was perhaps the deal-making potential of the perennial Israel-Palestinian situation that particularly attracted his attention. Highly skilled as he was in the arcane arts of wheeling and dealing, the possibility of brokering a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians – an endeavour attempted without success by so many of his predecessors in office – engaged Trump’s interest from early on.

On the campaign trail back in February 2016 Trump, with what seems like relish, spelled out the challenge it would pose. That’s probably the toughest deal in the world right now to make, he said, in his inimitable style. It’s possible it’s not makeable because, don’t forget, it has to last. A lot of people say an agreement can’t be made, which is OK – sometimes agreements can’t be made. I will give it one hell of a shot. I would say if you can do that deal, you can do any deal.

A week or two later there were rumours of a UN Security Council resolution in the making, aimed at setting out the terms for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. Vehement in his opposition to this initiative, Trump took the opportunity to set out his own deal-making philosophy.

"Let me be clear: An agreement imposed by the United Nations would be a total and complete disaster. The United States must oppose this resolution and use the power of our veto, which I will use as president 100 percent. When people ask why, it’s because that’s not how you make a deal. Deals are made when parties come together, they come to a table and they negotiate. Each side must give up something [of] …value in exchange for something that it requires. That’s what a deal is… That’s not going to happen with the United Nations. .."

Later in the campaign, as Trump earmarked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to lead the peace-making effort, he said: I would love to be the one who made peace with Israel and the Palestinians. That would be such a great achievement.

Once in the White House, Trump placed the Israel-Palestinian dispute high on his agenda. Within five weeks of taking office he had invited Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to Washington, and in a media conference made it clear that – in classic deal-maker mode – he was less interested in any particular formula than in actually achieving an agreement. Thus, putting clear blue water between himself and the global consensus, he would neither endorse the classic two-state solution as the only possible way to resolve the conflict, nor would he rule it out.

Indeed, in its classic configuration the two-state solution was probably no longer viable, given the political circumstances. It would have left a new sovereign Palestine, sited on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, entirely vulnerable to infiltration and eventual takeover either by Hamas, or by Islamic State. It would have left up to 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip still under the rule of the rejectionist Hamas organization which, despite trivial amendments to its charter in May 2017, remained intent on obliterating Israel, and thus resolved on perpetual conflict. And it would have left Israel with an unstable next-door neighbour that could be subject to a coup at any time, just as occurred in Gaza, with the inevitable consequence of indiscriminate rocket and missile attacks on Israeli citizens, and another defensive war.

Trump realized early on that if it had to be two states, it needed to be two states supported at least by an Arab consensus. It would probably also need to be fortified by some unassailable political, or even legal structure. Something along those lines is what deal-maker Trump might possibly have envisaged, emerging from a procedure which identified pragmatically what each side really needed, and built on a willingness by both to engage in the deal-making process.

Curiously enough, precisely the same possibility was voiced by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas in September 2018 – an incident described in detail later in this volume.

In the preliminary stages of his peace-making enterprise, even before Trump met with Netanyahu, the US administration was reported to have held discussions with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan about a regional umbrella to cover and shield possible Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Another important step towards getting a Middle East peace summit off the ground was Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s visit to Riyadh on 23 April 2017, to bury the hatchet with Saudi King Salman. This visit, it was reliably reported, was set up by then-US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and, among other burning issues, it dealt with Trump’s initiative for an Arab-led Palestinian peace deal with Israel. Al-Sisi’s visit was to have significant consequences only a few months later, when Egypt allied itself with the Gulf states in demanding that Qatar renounce its support for Islamist extremists and Hamas.

Then, early in May 2017, Trump invited Abbas to the White House. In their subsequent press conference they vowed to work together to strike a peace deal with Israel that would bring stability to the Middle East.

We will get it done, said Trump. We will be working so hard to get it done. It’s been a long time. But we will be working diligently.

I very much look forward to working with you, replied Abbas, in order to come to that historical agreement, historic deal to bring about peace.

Sweet words which were soon to turn sour. Although in his election campaign Trump had signalled his intention of recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of moving the American embassy there, mention of these pledges was not permitted to spoil the show of unanimity. It was only when Trump actually carried out the recognition pledge in December 2017 that Abbas turned on him.

At the time though, intent on carrying through his deal-making intention, one day after his meeting with Abbas Trump announced that he would visit the Middle East in the middle of May 2017 as part of a wider foreign tour. Symbolically, he chose to visit the centres of three great religions – Saudi Arabia, Israel and Rome – and advancing his deal-making agenda was high on his priority list. His tour of the Middle East passed without a hitch and was, by most counts, a great success.

By mid-May 2017 it seemed clear that the new US president, despite a whole variety of mistakes, gaffes, blunders and embarrassments, had also chalked up a number of achievements. He had clearly taken the first steps towards his objective of brokering an Israel-Palestinian accommodation – an ambition he reiterated in his address to some 50 leaders of the Arab world in Riyadh, and in his subsequent meetings with Abbas in Bethlehem and with Netanyahu in Jerusalem.

On the assumption that Trump really did intend to follow through on his declared wish to foster a deal, I decided to chart his progress over the succeeding months, or more probably years. Unlike the majority of media opinion in early 2017, which pretty universally held out no hope of his succeeding, I believed there was no predicting the outcome, good or bad, or how long it might take. So it was in a mood of qualified optimism that I set out to record events as they unfolded.

As I began one thing was clear – to be meaningful, an account of Trump’s developing initiative needed to be set in the context of the changing political situation in the Holy Land itself, in the Middle East generally, and sometimes beyond. Any valid assessment of the developing deal of the century, as Trump dubbed his peace effort, would have to take account of the ever-shifting political kaleidoscope. Accounting for its eventual success or failure would make sense only in that context.

This book is my effort to do just that.

1

Intentions and first steps

(October-March 2017)

In most areas of US policy, both domestic and foreign, ex-President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump were poles apart. Nowhere was this more true than in regard to the Middle East.

It was only slowly over the eight years of Obama’s presidency, although with growing clarity, that the political assumptions underlying his Middle East policy, and the strategic objectives shaped by them, emerged.

Obama made no secret of the fact that he came into office feeling guilty about America’s strength and its political record, and that he believed much was wrong with his country. He decided to bare America’s chest to the world, and to beat it in remorse. His apology tour began on 3 April 2009 in Strasbourg. In a keynote speech he declared that throughout the nation’s existence America has shown arrogance and been dismissive even derisive of others. If only the power of the US could be reduced, he declared, then America would have the moral authority to bring murderous regimes such as Iran into the community of nations.

So, claim some, based on this reading of America’s past actions and present position, he set about reducing the strength and authority of the US.

His mention of Iran at that early stage was significant. A widely-held view among political analysts is that the signature issue of Obama’s diplomacy, as political scientist Amiel Ungar put it, was to transform US-Iranian relations.

Ungar traced this policy back to the 2006 Iraq Study Group headed by former US Secretary of State, James Baker, and former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton. The great struggle at that time was against al-Qaeda, the Sunni Islamist terror organization that had been responsible for the attack on September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia – described as the single deadliest terrorist attack in human history – and was then totally disrupting American attempts to reconstruct Iraq. Baker and Hamilton dreamed up the notion of exploiting the basic Sunni-Shia division within Islam by fostering a working relationship between America and the two major Shia powers, Iran and Syria, and then to encourage them, in pursuit of their own religio-political objectives, to fight al-Qaeda thus incidentally assisting America’s struggle.

When the Obama administration came into office, its overt aim seemed to be to eliminate Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons. But, some political analysts now believe, it was in fact working to a different and secret agenda based on the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations, namely to come to a working arrangement with Iran, accommodating it on the political front, and to offer it major concessions on the nuclear issue. This reading of the Obama administration’s approach to its foreign policy has never been entirely discounted.

During 2014, by which time Islamic State (IS) had by-passed al-Qaeda as the leading Islamist organization in the world, it emerged that in secret correspondence with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Obama had actually attempted to engage Iran in the anti-IS conflict. In November the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama had written to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, concerning the shared interest of the US and Iran in fighting IS militants.

The October letter, asserted the Wall Street Journal, marked at least the fourth time Mr Obama has written Iran’s most powerful political and religious leader since taking office in 2009, and pledging to engage with Tehran’s Islamist government.

It has been argued that the nuclear deal between Iran and the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, announced in July 2015, might represent Obama’s most significant foreign policy achievement and the most important element of his legacy. This fact alone was perhaps one reason for Trump withdrawing from the deal at the earliest practicable moment.

By 2016 it had become clear that, in the process of facilitating Iran’s journey into the comity of nations, the Obama administration had boosted Iran’s efforts to extend its influence across the Middle East. The inevitable consequence was that the US lost the confidence, and much of the respect, of its erstwhile allies such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Egypt, all of whom had good reason to regard Iran as their prime antagonist. By the time Obama left office, the prestige of the US in much of the Middle East had sunk to a new low.

Did Obama’s placatory approach result in any softening of Iran’s visceral hatred of the Great Satan, as its leaders dubbed the United States? Not one jot. The slogans ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’, proclaimed Khamenei, just after the nuclear deal was announced, have resounded throughout the country… Even after this deal, our policy towards the arrogant US will not change.

So much for the assumptions and vain hopes of the Iraq Study Group, and for the policy of appeasement. Taking every concession offered in the nuclear deal talks, and subsequently reneging in several vital respects on the final agreement, Iran’s leaders budged not an inch in their ultimate ambitions – to become the dominant political and religious power in the Middle East, to sweep aside all Western-style democracies, and to impose their own Shi’ite version of Islam on the whole world.

Two months after his Strasbourg speech, Obama chose Cairo University as the venue from which to address the Muslim world. Once again self-flagellation was the order of the day. Based perhaps on the Muslim influences of his father’s family and his own childhood in Indonesia, he spoke of past colonialism and the cold-war use of Muslim nations as proxies. He recognised past Muslim humiliation, and spoke of future dignity and justice. In a long passage on Israel-Palestine, Obama spoke of Palestine, not a future Palestinian state.

He was, in effect, attempting to put the US-Muslim relationship on a new footing. In doing so he took the opportunity to condemn Muslim antisemitism and Holocaust denial as baseless … ignorant …hateful, rejected the terrorist methods employed against Israel by Hamas, and urged the Muslim and Arab world to embrace democracy and women’s rights. His tragedy is that for the rest of his presidency he chose the wrong methods and the wrong partners for his bold enterprise. His reluctance to deploy effective military action when it was clearly demanded – as in Syria, when Assad indiscriminately deployed chemical weapons, regardless of the effect on his own civilian population – and the backing he gave to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, both sworn enemies of what might be termed the stable Sunni world, undermined America’s standing to an unprecedented degree.

Into the power vacuum swept Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, eager to enhance his influence on the world stage, to regain the USSR’s clout in the Middle East, and to bolster Russia’s interests in Syria, a long-time ally.

Trump, a great admirer of Putin, had no time for Obama’s aim of reducing America’s power (quite the reverse), nor for Iran, nor for the nuclear deal that was a keystone of Obama’s administration. He could not immediately tear it up, in his own words, since there were five other Western signatories in addition to the US, but coming into office he certainly intended to ensure that the Iranian regime observed the terms of the agreement meticulously. Negligence in this area was something the Obama administration had been criticised for. Finally, frustrated by Iran’s expansion of its missile capability – which technically lay outside the nuclear deal – and by the evidence from Israel’s seizure of secret documents that demonstrated Iran’s continued adherence to its nuclear ambitions, Trump withdrew the US from the deal in May 2018.

Towards the end of 2016 the US and Russia, although both nominally combating Islamic State in the Syrian civil war, were so far from allies that they were very nearly belligerents.

In September 2014 the Obama administration brought together a coalition of countries to undertake a twin-objective military effort in Syria: to defeat the rampant Islamic State that had seized large swathes of the country, and to remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, establishing democratic governance in his stead. There was one proviso: there were to be no Western boots on the ground. The strength of the coalition was to be focused on providing training, logistical support and air cover for the moderate forces fighting IS and opposing Assad, mainly the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

Assad, for his part, controlled the formidable Syrian army and was supported not only by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, but by the forces provided by Iran’s puppet, Hezbollah, and in addition, from autumn 2015, by the full weight of a massive Russian military build-up. But although IS was nominally in Russia’s sights from the start, estimates were that less than 10 per cent of Russian air strikes had targeted it. Russia’s powerful air support, to say nothing of the Kalibir NK cruise missiles first fired on Aleppo from the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich on 15 November, had been directed primarily against the FSA.

So while the US-led coalition had been supporting the FSA, Russia had been battering it. In short, Russia and the US were virtually at war with each other in Syria, albeit by proxy. Trump wanted to stop that proxy contest turning into a full-scale conflict.

The long-standing US position had been that in order to end Syria’s complex and multi-sided struggle, Assad had to be removed from power and democratic elections take place. Trump took a different stance. Some hard-line Sunni Islamist elements were known to be present within the ranks of the FSA, and Trump cast doubt on the credentials of that organization, which was nominally fighting to oust the Assad regime and establish democracy in Syria.

We’re backing rebels against Syria, he said, and we have no idea who those people are.

Moreover, while he did not like [Assad] at all, he judged that shoring up his regime was the best way to stem the extremism that had flourished in the chaos of the civil war and that threatened US domestic security.

Taking his position to its logical conclusion, he said that since Russia was totally aligned with Syria, if the US went on attacking Assad, we end up fighting Russia.

This was an essentially pragmatic line to adopt. It acknowledged that the result of President Obama’s weak-kneed policies in the Middle East had been to leave a power vacuum that Putin had been quick to fill. Trump admired Putin for his diplomatic and military boldness, and seemed prepared to allow Putin to enjoy the fruits of his adventurism.

Putin’s incursion into Syria was partly an effort to counter the sanctions and diplomatic cold-shoulder by Western powers that followed his annexation of Crimea and subsequent military involvement in eastern Ukraine. By bulldozing his way to influence and power in the Middle East, Putin had gained a position in which the West simply had to take account of him. Putting aside any personal admiration for the man’s audacity, Trump was in effect bowing to the inevitable.

From Putin’s point of view, his clever, multi-faceted Syrian initiative killed several birds with one stone. In sustaining Assad in power he was safeguarding Russia’s long-standing military and commercial interests in Syria. Foremost among these was the naval facility at Tartus, Russia’s sole outlet to the Mediterranean, soon to become a fully-fledged overseas base of the Russian Navy according to an announcement on 21 November 2016. Putin was also protecting the strategic centre of Russia’s military operations in Syria – the Hmeymim airbase near Latakia – to say nothing of billions of dollars of commercial investments including oil and gas infrastructures.

There were also domestic security issues at stake, with which Trump could empathise. Russia was combatting an Islamist insurgency of its own in Chechnya and the North Caucasus, and the last thing Putin wanted was for young impressionable Muslims, inspired by further Islamist successes in Syria, to join its ranks.

But there was an apparent circle to be squared. In its efforts to shore up the Assad regime, Russia counted Iran as a close ally. Trump was a harsh critic of Iran and the nuclear agreement (the stupidest deal of all time). In short, a US accommodation with Putin under President Trump was unlikely to incorporate a love-in with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei – a situation much to the liking of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which regarded Iran as their worst enemy, and Obama’s consistent appeasement of its leaders as a disaster.

In the event, early in 2019 Trump announced that he was starting the process of withdrawing the 2,000 US troops currently deployed in Syria. Pragmatic as ever, Trump was acknowledging that Russia had secured mastery of the Syrian situation and had assured Assad’s future as its leader. Following his lead, moderate Arab states began to treat Assad as the victor he undoubtedly was, and to start the delicate process of readmitting him into the comity of Arab nations.

As for a continued stand-off between Trump’s America and Iran, that was not likely to concern Putin overmuch. While providing Iran with billions of dollars-worth of military hardware, Putin by no means shared Iran’s declared intention of eliminating Israel. On the contrary, he seemed intent on expanding Russian influence in the Jewish state. One example was the 20-year deal signed between a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom and the Levant Marketing Corporation, allowing for the exclusive purchase by Russia of three million tonnes per year of liquefied natural gas from Israel‘s Tamar offshore gas field. Moreover Putin met Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, no less than five times during 2016. He seemed very nearly as strong a supporter of Israel as Trump claimed to be.

This delicate balance of interests was overturned with a vengeance when pretty incontrovertible evidence emerged that on 4 April 2017 Assad had used chemical weapons in an attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun in north-western Syria, killing more than 80 people, many of them innocent civilians, including young children. Trump, taking a diametrically opposite position to Obama’s when faced with a similar situation, ordered US warships to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the airbase from where the warplanes had carried out the chemical attacks. The result, as one headline had it, was