The following is an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of Victoria Coates’s forthcoming book, The Battle for the Jewish State: Winning the War Against Israel — and America.
The Palestinians like to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as the “nakba,” or disaster. They considered the presidency of Donald Trump a second nakba. While his term had begun with a congenial visit to the White House in May 2017 by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, which left Abbas “hopeful” about the prospects for a deal with Israel, things rapidly went downhill.
Unable or unwilling to control Palestinian unrest on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that summer, Abbas eventually took the unprecedented step of cutting off the security cooperation with Israel that was critical for reducing violence in the West Bank after the Second Intifada, which raged from 2000 to 2005. By 2017, Abbas was ready to jettison that successful cooperation in order to retain his political control of the West Bank.
Then, in September of that year, Abbas traveled to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly and gave his boilerplate speech on Israel’s culpability for Palestinian attacks on Jews and America’s culpability for its support of Israel. Complaining about colonial occupation and calling on the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israeli officials, he said nothing he had not said before. But this time, there was a new member of the audience: Trump.
During their White House meeting, Abbas had persuaded the president that he was a legitimate partner for peace and that it was the Israelis, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refused to make a deal. But it was clear from his U.N. speech that Abbas was equally obstinate — if not more so. He also expressed no gratitude to the United States, as the single largest donor to the Palestinian-aid vehicles, namely the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, for which Abbas demanded still more funding.
Previous American presidents had shrugged off such rhetoric as Palestinian grandstanding, but for Trump, it struck a nerve. Why should the American taxpayer be on the hook for people who were both unappreciative of American support and antisemitic? Abbas and his acolytes didn’t even bother to hide it while they were on our own soil. The Trump administration undertook a thorough review of its Israel– Palestinian policy, concluding that it simply wasn’t working. Critics denounced the subsequent decisions to end Palestinian funding and the announcement of the president’s intention to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, predicting an unprecedented explosion of violence in the region.
Nothing of the sort took place. Despite incessant provocations from Iran during Trump’s term of office (particularly after he ceased compliance with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Barack Obama’s misbegotten nuclear deal with Iran), the Israeli–American alliance entered a new era as the U.S. position was made crystal clear for the first time. No longer would the United States turn a blind eye to Palestinian incitements to violence and antisemitism, nor would America indulge in a moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians.
The world was on notice that Israel was a critical American ally. We would help the Palestinians if they were amenable to our terms but would no longer indulge the fantasy that their cause was equivalent in any way to America’s alliance with Israel. In fact, in this worldview, the resolution of the Israel–Palestinian conflict, while desirable, is not vital to U.S. national-security interests in the Middle East. Countering threats from Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood while integrating Israel as a point of American power projection into the region most definitely is.
With remarkable speed, much of the Middle East got on board with this program. After the U.S. Embassy was moved in May 2018, the recognition of the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory and important changes to the legal framework of Judea and Samaria drew little or no significant reaction. America stood firmly and unequivocally with Israel in international forums such as the United Nations, in the understanding that their attacks on Israel were ultimately aimed at America itself.
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The results of these new policies spoke for themselves. On Sept. 15, 2020, Trump hosted the signing of the historic Abraham Accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain at the White House, which was followed by an Israeli agreement with Morocco and progress in negotiations with Sudan and Kosovo. These peace deals, the first between Israel and Muslim-majority countries in a quarter-century, were achieved because of Trump’s decision to abandon generations of failed policies designed to tempt the Palestinians into cooperation and depreciating the importance of its relationship with Israel to get a deal on the Palestinian issue.
Unfortunately, Trump’s successor failed to understand this cause and effect. From day one, the Biden administration reaffirmed the moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinians, which had bedeviled U.S. policy in the region for half a century. In the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, we found out just how destructive that approach was, both abroad and at home.
Victoria Coates is the vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation.
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