Can Trump Find an Israel-Palestine Solution?

Leon Hadar

Politics, Middle East

A pro-Israel reputation could let him create unexpected pressure on Netanyahu.

When two right-wing Israeli prime ministers assumed power in Jerusalem just a few months after left-of-center American politicians entered the White House, it meant that the presidential stars had failed to align for them.

Talk about bad timing. Menachem Begin, the founder of the Likud Party and a proponent of a vision of “Greater Israel,” was elected to head the first right-wing government in Israeli history on June 1977, six months after Americans elected Democrat Jimmy Carter, a president who rejected the realpolitik policies of his Republican predecessors. Carter was also committed to a liberal internationalist agenda, to improving relations with the Soviet Union and to friendship with third-world nations.

Begin had hoped that Washington would welcome treating Israel as an ally as part of its Cold War strategy. Instead, he was forced to contend with a U.S. president who rejected the notion that Israel had an historical right to maintain control over the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) and Gaza, and believed that Israel should not be allowed to continue building Jewish settlements there, a view that was also shared by previous U.S. administrations.

Carter pressed ahead with an activist American policy aimed at working with Moscow on reaching an Arab-Israeli peace agreement, which would involve Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories in exchange for peace. And like his United Nations ambassador, Andrew Young, he seemed to perceive the Palestinians as oppressed third-world people who should have the right to self-determination.

Yet the never-ending tensions between Carter and Begin didn’t trigger a major diplomatic crisis in the Israeli-American relationship. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, President Carter, as part of an effort to preserve U.S. interests in the Middle East, focused on negotiating a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, which forced him to come to terms with Begin. The Soviets weren’t invited to participate in the talks and the Palestinian issue was relegated to the bottom of the agenda.