This week Donald Trump has stared Kipling’s two great impostors, triumph and disaster, in the face – and doesn’t appear to understand the difference between them.
The move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv was billed as a personal triumph for Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seem to be in lockstep in personal bombast, if not in general worldview.
Trump rightly claimed that he was fulfilling a pledge of several of his predecessors in the White House to move the embassy. But his timing has been off. Trouble had always been on the cards for the 70th anniversary of the foundation of the State of Israel; for the Palestinians, it has long been the Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’ when more than 700 000 Arabs were forced out of their homes and became a refugee nation.
In the spate of demonstrations at the Gaza fence at the beginning of this week at least 60 Palestinians were killed, and over 2 700 injured. Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital could not cope – they were short of medicine and equipment – and the worst injured moved out by road to Egypt.
The Israeli defence ministry claimed that Hamas, who run the ailing government in Gaza, had armed the demonstrators. They even suggested that the money to pay militants had come from Hezbollah and Iran – a line that they dropped within a few hours.
Netanyahu said that the Israel Defence Force has acted in a ‘disciplined’ way, and had to shoot, as terrorists were on the point of breaching the fence and likely to attack kibbutzim in the vicinity. For their part, Hamas has declared that it did back the militants at the fence. It is trying to take ownership of the demonstrations from the ‘Right to Return’ movement which initially embraced the tactical approach of nonviolence preached by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Towards the middle of the week, the tempo and violence of the demonstrations have declined. Reuters out of Cairo has speculated that the Sisi government has leaned on Hamas to cool things down.
This violence caused by America’s decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem has interplayed with and exacerbated the destabilising effects of Trump’s decision to tear up the Iran nuclear deal.
America has broken a major international agreement and is set to punish major European partners for adhering to it. Trump has tried to push the line generated by Netanyahu (‘Iran lied’), but there has been scant international support for the blusterers-in-chief. Netanyahu, in his TV address, produced a set of files from 2003 as evidence that Iran was still pursuing a covert nuclear arms programme. This has nothing to do with the terms of the JCPOA, which sets out a path for limiting an actual development of a nuclear weapons capability, now. It also sets out terms for the development of civil nuclear programmes at the Fordow underground centre, the reduction of centrifuges at Natanz, and the conversion of the heavy water facility at Arak – all of which the IAEA, the UN monitoring authority, says Iran has complied with.
Trump is seeking tougher sanctions, to include restricting Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon, because of Iran’s missile programmes and general aggressive and subversive activity around the Middle East, such as backing Assad in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen. Missiles and foreign policy were never in the package of the JCPOA at the outset. The weakness of the JCPOA was that President Obama did not enshrine it as a treaty – possibly because he was not able to. If he had, the agreement’s revocation would be a matter for Congress, not presidential whim.
So, why has Trump done it? The simple answer from his loyalists is that he was fulfilling an election pledge, as he did in welshing on the Paris climate accord, and the Pacific Trade agreement (it now looks as if NAFTA may be next).
However, what he is proposing on Iran seems to go a lot further than a good slogan at the hustings. The first aim is to remove Iran’s presence in Syria, where it leads an alliance of ground forces which are as important for propping up Bashar al Assad as Russia’s air force. In addition, in insisting on a further round of tough sanctions, Trump seems to be aiming at regime change in Tehran. He has not mentioned this terminology as such, but his security adviser John Bolton has often spoken of it.
The rhetoric points to war with Iran, possibly before the summer is out. Changing the order in Tehran and Qom is a lot tougher than anything attempted in Iraq in 2003, and look what a hash that turned out to be. This time, too, there would be an alliance of about three – a hubristic Israel, and a reluctant Saudi Arabia.
What we see from this month’s showing is that the governing principle of Trumpian foreign policy is to pour oil on raging fires in the Middle East. This also applies to the embassy move. Jerusalem stands as one of the five core issues of the peace process laid out over two decades ago in the Oslo accords – along with right of return, the boundaries of the state, security and access, and natural resources such as water. The peace process is all the more defunct this week – and chances for revival are a lot longer than for Lazarus.
Alongside the Middle East imbroglio, we now have Kim Jong-Un outplaying the great Commander-in-Chief at the game of histrionic uncertainty. Citing the current US-South Korean ‘defensive’ exercises, the young leader has cried that this is deliberate provocation and the scheduled summit in Singapore next month is off. Furthermore, he is not going to give up North Korea’s nuclear weapons.
Team Trump just didn’t see this one coming. Was this always part of Kim’s game plan – to get a few economic concessions from Seoul and carry on confrontation as before? As big a mystery is the role of China in all this. How much is Beijing guiding Kim, and with what guarantees? Certainly Xi Jinping does not want a flare-up between the Pyongyang and its foes. Nor does he want a Korean peninsula pacified under US patronage.
The Singapore summit was supposed to be a triumph for the unorthodox dealmaking methods of Donald Trump. He has promised the same for solving the Israel-Palestine conflict. But in both settings, he is looking at a busted flush before the final hand has been dealt.
In all the turmoil over Iran and Korea, it is likely that Gaza will be forgotten. It should not be.
After blaming Hamas for provoking the shootings in Gaza, the senior Israeli military spokesman Lt Col Jonathan Conricus told a Jewish community meeting on Wednesday that Israel had failed to minimize the casualties in the clashes. He added that Hamas had won the PR contest ‘by a knockout.’
‘The amount of casualties has done us a tremendous disservice, unfortunately,’ he conceded, ‘and it has been very difficult to tell our story.’ He admitted that there had been chaos at the border, but Israel’s troops had been disciplined. He did add, however, that some people ‘had been hit by mistake.’
The use of military snipers for crowd control, however, looks like a failure of tactics, training and doctrine at the local command level, and strategic incompetence by the higher command, whether military or political.
Beyond this, there are the dire conditions of the people of Gaza themselves, long forecast and understood but worsening by the day now. Sewage, electricity and water supply are functioning intermittently. In 2012 the UN Country Team in the occupied territories reported that from Palestine’s population would increase from 1.6 million in that year to 2.1 million by 2020. It is almost there already. It has – proportionally — the second highest youth population in the world, with 650,000 of school age of between six and 18. There are no new jobs, and those in public service employ are unpaid, because the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in Ramallah won’t release funds to Gaza as it is controlled by their rivals, Hamas.
By the year 2020, most of the natural water supply is due to run out because the aquifers are polluted and damaged from war and neglect. Today, nearly 80% of inhabitants depend on aid from the UN and its agency UNRWA. The 2012 report offers the mild exhortation, ‘Gaza needs to be open and accessible to the world. The viability of a future Palestinian state depends on a proper connection between the West Bank and Gaza, providing access to the Mediterranean for the entire occupied Palestinian territory.’
Since then, there has been another Gaza war, in 2014, and another one could be on its way this summer. The Mediterranean shoreline of Gaza is under blockade.
Israel’s security apparatus seems to be reverting to default mode in its approach to Gaza. It is one of analysis paralysis made up of tactics with no long term strategy. Earlier in the spring the defence minister Avigdor Lieberman said he saw no real crisis for Israel in Gaza. The head of the forces Gadi Eiznekot disagreed, describing it as a daily disaster.
Yet nothing is likely to be done – until it gets a lot worse.
This is compounded by an American leadership that runs foreign policy on high-octane emotion and bruised ego. The meaner types in Washington used to say of President Ford that he couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time. The Trump-Bolton duo do not seem capable of coordinating foreign policy equivalent of walking and chewing gum. They do not seem to begin to address the genuine issues of the Middle East and South East Asia in a sensible fashion and time frame.