If the Oslo peace process had succeeded, Donald Trump would not have been elected, says the eminent Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar.
Eldar, a liberal Zionist and columnist for Al-Monitor, writes in Haaretz that he was “asked to imagine what Israel would be like today had the negotiations that began at Oslo ended in success — that is, had Yitzhak Rabin completed the task of bringing peace and Yasser Arafat, instead of riding the tiger of terrorism, fought terrorism.” There would be no Trump:
The Gaza Strip would not be controlled by Hamas and Israel would not be led by a radical right-wing government. There would be no more than 120,000 settlers in the occupied territories, most of them in large settlement blocs. Scofflaws would not have been allowed to erect 104 outposts on private Palestinian land. Organizations of the nationalist right wouldn’t have penetrated the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem. And the occupant of the White House would be a balanced president, not one who one day closes the issue of Jerusalem and the refugees with a chance remark, and the next day says Israelis will soon wake up to a prime minister named Mohammed.
The longtime former US correspondent for Haaretz does not fill in his scenario re the United States political process. But we can imagine it for ourselves if the Israel/Palestine conflict had been removed as a friction point. 9/11 would surely have happened anyway (Osama bin Laden was mainly a Saudi nationalist, and his principal grievance with the U.S. was the American troops stationed in his country). Afghanistan would also have probably followed the same tragic course. But the U.S. would not have carried the war to Iraq at the urging of neoconservatives, who famously argued that the route to peace in Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. And liberal interventionism would not have become the creed of Democrats like Hillary Clinton, who argued for regime change again and again.
History would not be entirely different, and Trumpism was born of domestic issues. But Trump won narrowly, and some of the factors that contributed to Trumpism’s rise, notably bitterness over endless wars, and Hillary Clinton’s record of supporting regime change, would not have been present to the degree they are. One academic study has documented that Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan — those crucial states that Clinton lost in 2016 — had some of the highest casualty rates from Iraq and Afghanistan, and voters there saw Clinton as pro-war.
We can imagine other ways of connecting Eldar’s dots. But the point is that Eldar is a distinguished moral voice and shrewd analyst who reminds us the late Anthony Lewis, the longtime New York Times columnist. Eldar’s scenario is highly thought-provoking, and yet it’s never really considered in the American discourse: How important Israel and the Israel lobby are to our domestic politics.
Besides, if the disastrous Iraq war is what helped give us Trump, well then a lot of foreign policy experts and media pundits would have to answer for his rise to power — and most of them are still highly respected.
If our grandmother’s had ballsacks they’d be our grandfather’s. They gave out the Nobel to Rabin and Arafat , (and Obama) way too soon.
@DaBakr
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-jerusalem-embassy-flop-1.6463161
“Opinion The Jerusalem Embassy Flop”
“Relocating embassies to Jerusalem violates a worldwide consensus, and what’s happening now proves that Trump’s exhibitionist move didn’t change that.”
By Ravit Hecht, Sep 07/18, Haaretz
EXCERPT:
“The effort to leverage Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest achievement – America’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and relocation of its embassy to the city – is proving to be an ongoing flop. Only two small countries have so far imitated the United States by moving their embassies to Jerusalem, Guatemala and Paraguay, mainly in order to flatter U.S. President Donald Trump.
“And now that it has a new government, even tiny Paraguay has recanted and is moving its embassy back to Tel Aviv.
“On the day the U.S. Embassy moved to Jerusalem, Dr. Miriam Adelson wrote the following in Israel Hayom, the free daily she publishes: ‘For too long, the Palestinians stymied peace with Israel by insisting on the lie that Jerusalem was theirs. The pragmatists among them understood that this was a non-starter – that Israelis would never give up on the city promised to them in the Bible, millennia before the advent of Islam …. By removing any question about U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump has freed up these pragmatists to think anew and craft a workable accommodation with their Israeli neighbors.’
“But if we’re already talking about pragmatism, then reality, and global public opinion as well, refuse to remove Jerusalem from the negotiating table, just as they refuse to negate the millions of Palestinians planted between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, no matter how wealthy and powerful the Adelsons are or how many Knesset seats Netanyahu is winning in the polls.”
No, if Barack Obama had done his job (as we expected), Trump would never have been elected. Obama gave us Trump.
As for I/P coming to a peaceful solution via Oslo, it was never intended to happen. Ever:
On the Israel/Palestine conflict: “We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism”. – General Yehoshafat Harkabi, Former Israeli Chief of Military Intelligence