Donald Trump and Jared Kushner drafted a so-called peace plan that at least one expert claims actually enabled the terrorist attacks in Israel over the weekend.
University of Illinois international relations professor Nicholas Grossman wrote for the Daily Beast Tuesday that the Abraham Accords led to false hopes, ignored the Palestinians and let Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu run roughshod over the whole process.
"U.S. policy, especially the Trump administration’s, contributed to the unsustainable situation that made an outbreak of violence more likely," wrote Grossman. "Claims that 'Trump brought peace to the Middle East' are almost an inversion of reality. He shifted U.S. policy fully in Israel’s favor — reducing support for the Palestinians and treating their quest for statehood as something that could be ignored — and shaped the regional context by heightening confrontation with Iran without strategic benefit."
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While he cited advantages to flights into Israel from Bahrain and the UAE, an alliance wasn't all that much of a heavy lift.
"All three of those countries are small, wealthy American partners that oppose Iran, making an agreement easier," he wrote. "Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s Central Command and the Fifth Fleet. The Trump administration greased the skids with the UAE by authorizing F-35 fighter jet and Reaper drone sales, making them the only country in the Middle East besides Israel with advanced stealth aircraft."
He called it a net positive because it ultimately crafted a stepping stone for President Joe Biden's administration to begin negotiations with Saudi Arabia.
"But lying about the Abraham Accords, stretching them into 'the dawn of a new Middle East,' and playing them up for an American domestic audience was emblematic of Trump’s larger failure," wrote Grossman. "He threw America’s weight behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s squeeze-and-ignore approach to the Palestinians as if the fundamental problem of people displaced and living under occupation would just go away."
Trump slashed spending for Palestinian hospitals and the UN Relief and Works Agency which has helped displaced Palestinians and their descendants since 1949, he explained. Grossman went on to accuse Jared Kushner of a "peace plan" that handed Israel all of the keys and dismissed Palestinian concerns.
Up until that point, Grossman said that presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama "punted" on the issue. But Trump gave Israel everything it wanted without getting anything in return.
"Now Hamas has conducted an impossible-to-ignore attack. The size and brutality of the assault means the logic of national security has taken over — no state would tolerate this — and the Israeli military will try to root out, or at least significantly weaken the organization behind it," he explained. An Israel-Hamas war will begin as questions surface about Iran's involvement and the role of Hezbollah.
He went on to cite the Israeli Defense Force spokesperson saying that they're investigating Iran, but haven't seen evidence it "was involved in planning or training."
Iran is another place where Trump disadvantaged the U.S. Breaking the Iran nuclear deal, which the Pentagon said they were following, allowed them to begin working on a nuclear program again. Trump postured he was willing to go to war with Iran after it appeared they attacked two commercial tankers. The US started cyber operations against Iran, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard general Qasem Soleimani, which is the first time the US had done that since WWII. It continued an escalation with no strategic gain, he said.
Grossman explained it left Biden with a weak hand to play as negotiators desperately tried to get Iran back into an agreement. But Trump gave the leaders enough evidence to see that the U.S. can't be trusted to follow its own treaties.
"In the short-term, Biden’s task is clear, albeit challenging," he closed. "Support Israel’s security while trying to minimize harm to innocent Palestinians, keep the war from turning into a wider conflagration with Iran, and manage the regional instability Trump left in his wake. But the longer-term Israel-Palestinian situation is a tragic mess. It’s easy for outsiders to imagine an end state that sounds fair to them, but no one knows how to get there."
