Donald Trump talked a lot about inflation, immigration and crime during his two-year campaign for the presidency. Indeed, his third bid for the White House was predicated on those three issues. But Trump wasn’t shy on another issue that has far less resonance with the American electorate generally: peace in the Middle East. On occasions, Trump talked about how the war in Gaza needed to end sooner rather than later and how the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue was, in his words, going to be “very, very tough” to implement.
Nobody would dispute the final point. Resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been the proverbial white whale of U.S. diplomacy stretching back to at least the George H. W. Bush era. President Bill Clinton had some success, striking the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). But that agreement, once synonymous with success, is now a byword for disappointment. Today, the West Bank remains under Israeli occupation, the Palestinian Authority is a laughingstock and Palestinian politicians are divided among themselves.
In his first term, Trump waited far too long before he released a plan for Middle East peace — and when he did, the draft was riddled with so many deficiencies that the Palestinians threw it into the trash.
To state the obvious, the Middle East has changed markedly since that plan was presented more than four years ago. Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault in southern Israel tore apart the old rulebook U.S. administrations of both political parties operated with for so long. While U.S. officials still view the two-state solution as the best method for resolving the conflict, Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas and the utter hate both sides have for one another makes any talk of a two-state solution downright delusional. Gaza is now a wasteland riddled with hunger, death, displacement and damage to infrastructure to the tune of $18.5 billion. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to a Palestinian state, as is a growing segment of the Israeli population.
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