This is the best explanation I’ve heard yet.
I have to say I roll my eyes at the various attempts to explain President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, and to make plans to move the U.S. embassy there. Is it an attempt to shake up the region to make peace more possible — or merely a strategic concession to reality? Why would Trump give the Israelis such a gift while asking nothing in return? Tom Friedman ponderously asks. And how on earth does it help the U.S. in navigating the entire region, since it guts any American pretense at even the appearance of neutrality? The earnest questions are everywhere.
And they are ridiculous. The reason for this move is self-evident. The Trump administration believes in the project of Greater Israel, and the right of just one people to control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. They believe this as a theological and moral imperative, and all other diplomatic considerations take second place. Who are the key figures who hold this belief? Jared Kushner, the dauphin who has dedicated his short adult life to obliterating any concept of a Palestinian state; the U.S. ambassador David Friedman, whose commitment to Jewish supremacy in Greater Israel has always been total; and Mike Pence, whose theological conviction is that Israel must be made whole and eternal (and the Palestinians wished away) if the Second Coming is to arrive. Sometimes, Occam’s razor really helps. There is no need to wonder why this has happened. It has happened because this is now U.S. policy: the extirpation of the Palestinian cause and the complete conflation of America’s national interest with Greater Israel’s in the region. This is what Sheldon Adelson paid for and what Ralph Reed demands. And this is what they will get.
Take the absurdity of Kushner as an envoy to both sides. Appointing him to oversee an Israel-Palestine two-state solution is like appointing David Duke to resolve America’s racial tensions…
