Trump's Jerusalem Move Could Provide a Pathway to Peace

Ahmed Charai

Security, Middle East

Arab countries, historically a guarantor of strategic depth for Palestinian rejectionist forces, showed that they are becoming a bastion of support for compromise.

The view has set in among Westerners that President Donald Trump’s choice to recognize the Israeli capital in Jerusalem isolated the U.S. diplomatically, cost Washington its role as an Israeli-Palestinian mediator and damaged prospects for a peace settlement overall. The evidence: violence in Palestine and Iran-dominated Arab enclaves, protests and official condemnation in other Muslim countries and a counter-resolution at the UN General Assembly.

Here in Morocco, many observers hold a different view: Whatever the president thought he was doing, both the decision and its fallout exposed a political dynamic in the region that holds new possibilities for an eventual settlement. While the position of foreign powers remains essentially the same, Arab countries, historically a guarantor of strategic depth for Palestinian rejectionist forces, are increasingly a bastion of support for compromise.

After the White House declaration, most Arabs saw continuity in foreign powers’ stance as either seekers or throttlers of peace. Iran showed off its leadership of the rejectionist camp by ordering proxy riots in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Western European powers, while opposing the United States at Turtle Bay, clarified through accompanying statements that they were simply reaffirming the unresolved status of Jerusalem’s totality—a view with which the American president’s statement essentially concurs. Thus the difference between Washington and its major European allies, in some ways at least, remains a matter of emphasis. Most other votes against Washington came foreseeably from Muslim-majority states and the broader anti-Israel chorus. If there was any real departure, it lay in the thirty-five abstentions, which included Muslim-majority Bosnia-Herzegovina and several other EU members.

As to the U.S. imprimatur as mediator in Israeli-Arab negotiation, talk of its demise is unfounded. Arab leaderships have always perceived Washington as a essentially pro-Israel power. It earned its chair at the negotiating table not by projecting neutrality but by extending profound military and economic leverage—toward Israelis, Palestinians and the broader region. It can only lose its role as a regional broker by losing its status as a global power.