On Thursday night, the Trump administration announced that, while it does not believe “the existence of [Israeli] settlements [in the West Bank] is an impediment to peace,” it does believe “the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.” The American press by and large interpreted the statement as an endorsement of the previous administration’s attitude, with the New York Times running a report under the headline “Trump Embraces Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy.” However, writes John Podhoretz, the opposite is true:
What [the recent White House statement] does, in effect, is return the United States to the . . . policy outlined in a letter sent from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon in 2004. In that letter, Bush [accepted] the reality that the most populous Israeli settlements beyond the pre-1967 borders would certainly remain in Israeli hands at the end of any successful peace negotiation with the Palestinians. And according to the officials who negotiated the matter, . . . it was understood that the expansion of existing population centers due to natural growth (families getting larger, people moving in) should not be considered a violation of the idea that there should be no new settlements. For if, like New York City, [the town of] Ariel gets more populous, its land mass does not increase in size, just the number of people living there.
The Obama administration did not like these ideas, and reversed them. Its conception of a “settlement freeze” was that it be a freeze on the number of settlers as well as the number of settlements. Add new apartments to Ariel, and you were “expanding the settlements.”
The Trump language puts an end to that idea. It says “the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful.” This returns U.S. policy to the notion that the physical acreage holding settlers should not increase but that the number of settlers is not at issue. This is a wholesale shift in America’s approach.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/israel-settlements-media/