A New Intifada?

Last week, President Donald Trump openly acknowledged what everybody knows: that Jerusalem in the capital of Israel. He promised that the United States would build an embassy there and thus defied America’s foreign policy establishment, the European Union, the British foreign secretary, the French president, the pope, transnational policymakers of every sort, and governments other than Israel across the Middle East. According to the received opinion, recognizing Jerusalem rather than Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital would provoke Islamic radicals to violence and jeopardize the “peace process.”

Some violence took place over the weekend. Protesters made trouble outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut; security forces used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Thousands protested outside the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. An Israeli soldier was stabbed by a Palestinian man at a bus station in Jerusalem. Someone tried to set fire to a Jewish community center in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

Hamas, the Islamist governing party in Gaza, promised that the U.S. decision would “open the gates of hell.” The organization announced that December 8 would be a “day of rage.” Rockets were fired into Israel and protesters clashed with Israeli soldiers in the West Bank and Gaza, but there were few signs of a new intifada. By the end of Sunday, Fatah, the party that controls the West Bank, was calling on Palestinians to “keep up confrontation and broaden it to all points where the Israeli army is present.” It’s too early to tell, but we see reasons to hope that the average Palestinian isn’t moved to outrage and violence in the way his leaders hoped—and in the way transnational elites assumed.

What about the peace process? We placed no great hope in it to begin with, and not simply because Hamas and Fatah are perpetually at each other’s throats. These groups’ lunatic response to Trump stating the obvious (and acting in accordance with the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, which passed Congress by large, bipartisan majorities), signifies precisely why there is so little hope for good faith negotiations. Although Israelis of nearly every political allegiance believe Palestinians have a place in Israel, Palestinians do not believe Jews have a place in Palestine. Palestinian leaders still insist that East Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine and that West Jerusalem may or may not be part of the Palestinian capital but definitely isn’t the capital of any entity called Israel.

Presidents Clinton, Obama, and Bush all promised to declare Jerusalem the capital but didn’t follow through, as President Trump has relentlessly reminded the world over the last several days. We credit the current president for rejecting the stale and disproven counsel of Western and Arab foreign policy elites and lending a dose of honesty to a geopolitical problem long exacerbated by delusional rhetoric. The more honest reckoning may not make a peace deal more likely, but it may make a fraudulent one less likely.