In the few weeks he has left, Donald Trump will push Israeli annexation of the West Bank, in part to sow hostility between Israel and the Biden administration, and Israel might grab this once in a lifetime opportunity to seize more land. This is the view of two prominent Israel lobbyists.
Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum said he is “very confident” that Trump will push Israeli annexation.
“Members of the Trump administration will be doing everything they can to push the Israeli government to go forward with annexation before January 20th and… it ultimately will come down to whether Prime Minister Netanyahu thinks it’s a good idea to act on that with a new presidency that he has to deal with come January or whether he thinks it will be wiser to not start off with a President Biden on such a bad foot. I think the likely scenario here is we see the Trump administration greenlight stuff and try to push the Israeli government to move forward on some aspect of annexation and the Israeli government is smart enough to not go forward with it. But we’re in for a chaotic two months, both on that front and many other fronts.”
Biden has been clear throughout his campaign that he opposes annexation, and he will make “a very clear and unambiguous statement” to that effect if Israel undertakes annexation, Koplow said. But Netanyahu may well decide that it is helpful to his own efforts to stay in office and out of jail “to take an antagonistic approach” to Biden.
Sheldon Adelson is Trump’s biggest donor, and he has long pushed pro-Israel policies from Trump, and is surely doing so now.
Aaron Weinberg, government relations director of Israel Policy Forum, echoed the view that the Trump administration would push annexation in the next few weeks.
It’s yet to be seen whether Netanyahu will take advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to move forward and how oppositional he wants to be with a Biden administration.
Of course Netanyahu and Biden have a long relationship, Weinberg said, and it’s not like when Obama came into office and Netanyahu was immediately “oppositional.” But that may not matter. Netanyahu may want to take advantage of the opportunity based on his own calculations of maintaining his grip on the rightwing power structure in Israel. Weinberg said:
Everyone should prepare for the worst and be surprised if it’s better than that… I think there’s a lot of calculations and instablity to come. .. there will be some movement on that issue by the White House and it’s only a quesiton of whether Netanyahu takes the bait.
Both men also said that while Biden won’t seek to reverse many of Trump’s actions in Israel and Palestine, the Trump “peace plan” of January 2020 is a dead letter. And this stance will also create tensions between Israel and Biden.
Koplow:
I think it is going to be a complete nonstarter for a Biden administration… The Trump plan really just busted beyond any boundaries that had existed before, and there’s almost nothing in it that is really going to be a starting point for a Biden administration. But for the Israeli government, that is the new baseline and that is going to cause difficulties going forward. Because Israeli expectations have been reset and I’m certain that within the corridors of the Israeli government there may be an approach that says All we have to do here is wait things out for the next Republican adminstration, and the next Republican administration will pick up where the Trump plan left off.
Weinberg agreed but said that Israeli and Republican politicians are likely to intrigue against Biden using the Trump plan.
I think it’s totally and completely dead. . .It’s just going to be so dead and gone. . . . [T]he most conservative Republicans in the Congress. . . will clutch dearly to it and continue to speak on the House and Senate floors about the Trump plan being a baseline and whenever the Biden administration makes any moves on the conflict or dealing with Israel at all, it will inevitably come up and I’m sure there will be lots of coordination of talking points about it between a lot of people across the ocean who have worked together on that side. But I think you will even begin to see mainstream Republicans simply see it as not a serious offer, because it wasn’t, and I think we will be moving on fairly quickly and fairly significantly from that.
Koplow also questioned whether Trump really cares about Israel, pointing to Netanyahu’s evident terror of crossing Trump, when he waited 12 hours to congratulate Biden on his victory in a tweet that did not even call Biden president-elect: “Congratulations @JoeBiden and @KamalaHarris.”
“We should all question what it means in terms of President Trump’s pro-Israel record and to what extent Israel can rely on him, when the prime minister of Israel is scared to congratulate the next president because of what he thinks the current president might do,” Koplow said.
Meanwhile:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-committee-again-passes-annual-anti-israel-resolutions-with-huge-majorities/
“UAE, Bahrain, Sudan join huge majority backing anti-Israel moves at UN panel” The Times of Israel, Nov. 7/20, by Raphael Ahren
“Jerusalem’s new ambassador to Turtle Bay, Gilad Erdan, promises not to ‘allow business as usual anymore’; new Arab normalization partners vote with Europeans on annual resolutions.”
EXCERPTS:
“A committee at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday passed with overwhelming majorities a series of resolutions critical of Israel, lambasting the Jewish state, among other things, for ostensible human rights violations against Palestinians and ‘repressive measures’ against Syrians in the Golan Heights.
“The motions are passed annually by the UN’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee, with minor adjustments, and ratified by member states in December. Nearly all European countries, including staunch allies of Israel such as Germany and the Czech Republic, traditionally support most of these resolutions.
“The three Arab countries with which Jerusalem recently signed normalization agreements — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan — did not change their traditional voting pattern and supported all resolutions critical of Israel.
“The motions are passed annually by the UN’s Special Political and Decolonization Committee, with minor adjustments, and ratified by member states in December. Nearly all European countries, including staunch allies of Israel such as Germany and the Czech Republic, traditionally support most of these resolutions.
“Israel’s new ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, participated in the debate that took place before the vote, making an impassioned but ultimately unsuccessful plea for countries to reject the motions.”
“The resolution in support of UNRWA passed with 153 yes votes. Only two countries — Israel and the US — voted against, and 12 countries abstained.
“A resolution decrying Israel’s ‘repressive measures against the population of the occupied Syrian Golan’ passed 142–2, with 19 abstentions.”
Who am I to debate the experts, but… I doubt that there will be an annexation before Trump leaves office. I don’t think it will help Bibi hold onto power to appear antagonistic towards Biden. It doesn’t help him to undercut these new relations with the small sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, which were established upon the basis of the negation or delay of any annexation. I don’t believe it will help Bibi’s troubles and so he won’t do so. (Odds of Biden becoming president on January 20th 2021, 999-1, Odds against Bibi annexing the West Bank before January 20th, 4-1.)
Biden, short on mandate, power, will have no choice but to suffer Netanyahu’s coming humiliations until he gets some leverage.
Trump, seeking greatness by effecting the “deal of the century”, may well believe Abbas helped cost him re-election by disrespecting him instead of negotiating, producing the requested counter deal. Abbas simply couldn’t grasp Trump was boxing Netanyahu in toward a deal. Trump may take revenge.
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Zionism defined:
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-soldier-who-shot-two-innocent-palestinians-needs-not-regret-israel-has-his-back-1.9304209
“The Soldier Who Shot Two Innocent Palestinians Needs Not Regret. Israel Has His Back” By Gideon Levy, Harretz, Nov. 11/20
EXCERPTS:
“A soldier firing from a fortified tower killed an innocent man, & seriously wounded another, for no reason. I repeat: For no reason. Despite all the lies, the falsehoods & made up stories circulated by the soldier and his lawyers.
“If he was a Palestinian soldier, he would be sentenced to life in prison & another 25 years – something I am noting for the benefit of the Zionist experts on apartheid, who say there is no apartheid in Israel because there are no racial laws. You don’t need any racial laws if you can bend the law based on someone’s ethnic origins: And the soldier is a Jew; therefore he will be sentenced in a plea bargain to three months community service.
“Up to this point, it’s all within the realm of the expected. The investigation is reduced to nothing, the accused is not really accused of anything, the serious indictment evaporates into the ether, the plea makes a mockery of the term bargain; we end up with community service for manslaughter – a much lighter sentence than if the soldier had stolen a 100-shekel bill.
“This time, the instigators, the good ol’ boys, the generals in the reserves, got involved to defend the perpetrator. This is how the cosa nostra operates: One for all & all for one. The organization heads come to the soldiers’ aid no matter what they’ve done. The criminal becomes a victim, and the victim becomes a non-person.
”Even the political background of the character witnesses doesn’t matter: When you’re talking about generals, there’s no difference between left and right. Justifying the crime stands above all else. (cont’d)
.
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“The logic is clear: If the shooter is a criminal then his commanders are worse criminals. It is not for nothing that Moshe Ya’alon took pride in how his soldiers shot an American journalist in Lebanon because they thought his camera was a rocket. Let’s just say – for the sake of drawing miserable, outrageous comparisons between the junctions south of Bethlehem and the killing fields of Lebanon, and between the stone and a rocket – that Ya’alon thinks it’s all okay as long as it was unintentional.
“The killing of Ahmed Manasra shows that it was anything but unintentional. He was killed after he stopped to help Ala Rayida, who had been shot in front of his wife and daughters only because he got out of his car. There is nothing unintentional about the control the Israeli soldier exercises at this junction at the entrance to a Palestinian city; there is nothing unintentional about the fact that the soldier knows he can fatally shoot someone if he thinks they may have thrown a stone; and there’s nothing unintentional about generals rushing to his defense.”