Recently in the course of downplaying the hysteria over UN Security Council Resolution 2334 Garfinkle expressed his view that the bigger danger for Israel is that it will grow too enchanted with President Trump and make foolish decisions based on the feeling that it now has a great friend in the White House.

As an example of what concerns him he cited President Obama’s impact on the Palestinian Authority. Obama came into office determined to put daylight between the United States and Israel and to assure the Palestinians of his support. His second day in office he called for a complete Israeli settlement freeze.

The Palestinians had never advanced such a demand since the beginning of the Oslo process 15 years earlier because they knew it would bring all negotiations to a halt. But once the Americans made that demand the Palestinians could hardly be less assertive vis-a-vis Israel than the United States was on their behalf. And the consequence was just as the Palestinians had feared — an end to negotiations for almost the entirety of the Obama presidency.

Garfinkle fears that the mirror image could take place in Israel. Emboldened by the choice of a US ambassador deeply sympathetic to the settler movement the right-wing of the governing coalition might push for rapid settlement expansion beyond the so-called settlement blocs. Garfinkle quotes former Israeli ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval:

“Netanyahu does not want to annex large chunks of the West Bank; he does not want to accelerate settlement activity; he does not want to directly rule the Palestinians; and whatever his ambivalence about the two-state solution might be he does not want to be the one to destroy its possibility for all time.”

Facing a hostile Obama administration it was relatively easy for Netanyahu to rein in the more pro-settlement elements in his coalition. It will be much harder with a supportive Trump administration.

Another example of potential negative repercussions specifically due to warm support of the Trump administration according to Garfinkle would be a decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem — a move that “could trigger demonstrations and violence throughout the region putting US citizens at risk and generating gratuitous pressure on US friends and associates in the Arab world.”

Garfinkle admits that transferring the US embassy to Jerusalem would be “abstractly justified.” Let us first specify what those justifications — left unstated by Garfinkle — might be. First any blow struck at the double standards applied to Israel as a matter of course by the international community is positive. The recently passed Security Council Resolution 2334 for instance condemns all Jewish settlement beyond the 1949 armistice lines as a flagrant violation of international law. Given the absence of a preexisting sovereign in the areas captured by Israel in 1967 Israel’s legal right to occupy land captured in a defensive war is much stronger than China’s claim to occupy Tibet or Turkey’s right to northern Cyprus or Russia’s recent incursions in Ukraine designed to reclaim Crimea. But none of the latter are ever subjects of Security Council consideration.

In a similar vein every other country in the world determines its capital city and that choice is recognized by the international community. Israel has no less right to do so.

There would also be several important messages to the Palestinians in a decision to finally move the embassy in fulfillment of the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. First that decision would provide a dose of reality testing for the Palestinians. We are constantly told that “everyone knows” what the basic parameters of a two-state solution will be. But strangely the message has never gotten through to the Palestinians — not with respect to the so-called right of return Jerusalem or the densely populated settlement blocs in a small portion of Judaea and Samaria.

Israel will never accept the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose descendants fled in 1948 at the urging of their leaders. Nor will Israel tear down the modern city of Jerusalem built in the wake of the 1967 War in which hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents now dwell. And no Israeli government could possibly contemplate the transfer of hundreds of thousands Jewish citizens from their homes in Judea and Samaria. So it would be positive to stop pretending that it is still 1948 and Count Folke Bernadotte’s proposals on the internationalization of Jerusalem are on the table.

Second transfer of the US Embassy would go a long way to disabusing the Palestinians of the notion that history is on their side and that if they just hang in there long enough international pressure will erase the consequences of their ill-considered efforts to push the Jews into the sea in three all-out wars.

My own guess is that President-elect Trump is fully committed to moving the embassy absent some very clear indication of Israeli reticence. His preference is always for the common sense approach and the refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is as noted above an affront to common sense. The claim that moving the embassy would prejudge the issue of the status of Jerusalem is one of those polite fictions of international diplomacy that have little relation to reality. It is Trump’s b?te noire political correctness in the international arena.

SO WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

Well as Garfinkle notes a lot. True the location of the embassy is not something about which the average Palestinian man in the street cares deeply. Jerusalem Post reporter Daniel Eisenbud walked around the Arab areas of Jerusalem recently interviewing residents and found the issue to be one big yawn for them.

But there would be many in the Muslim world — e.g. jihadists of various stripes President Obama’s friends the Iranians — eager to use the issue to arouse the Arab street (not a difficult task) with ever popular anti-American rabble-rousing. In the event that demonstrations escalated into terror attacks President Trump would be forced to respond and prove his toughness but identifying the targets of American wrath would not be easy and the results would not be likely to satisfy his base.

And what if American blood is shed either within the United States or abroad as Garfinkle suggests is possible? If we know one thing about Trump’s new nationalist supporters it is that they do not cotton to the death of Americans abroad in foreign adventures. They are not pacifists and in many cases are supporters of upgrading the American military dramatically — witness the number of generals in major positions in the incoming Trump cabinet. But they want that military to be used sparingly and only in service of crucial national interests for the quite sensible reason that it is most likely to be their sons who will be doing the fighting and bleeding.

Convincing them that the location of the American embassy is an important American interest in the event that things blow up will not be easy. And if President Trump finds himself in political hot water as a consequence of the embassy move it is not inconceivable that he might come to resent the advisors who pushed him toward taking that step and the Israeli government even if it was not Israel that fought hard for the embassy being moved to Jerusalem.

All this is very speculative. It involves estimating probabilities of events and their repercussions that cannot be known in advance. And it involves weighing very different types of advantages and disadvantages — e.g. a strong statement against the application of double standards and differential treatment to Israel by the international community versus the danger of an upsurge in terror activity.

Estimating those probabilities and weighing incommensurate losses and gains is well beyond my pay grade. But it should at least be of consolation that President Trump could make many of the same points but in a slightly more low-key fashion. He should order the secretary of state to record the place of birth of US citizens born in Jerusalem on their passports as Israel in accord with the provisions of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003. Incoming US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has stated that he will work from Jerusalem (and not Tel Aviv) another positive step that requires no formal decision.

And if President Trump wanted to send a strong but somewhat less visible message to the Palestinians he could place the consulate in Jerusalem under the authority of the ambassador to Israel rather than leaving it as a semiofficial embassy to the Palestinian Authority.

In any event I do take the president-elect at his word that he will move the embassy. And then we shall all see what happens next.

Something's Missing 

The British medical journal Lancet Oncology provided cause for rejoicing recently for anyone like myself with a strong family history of prostate cancer. “Surgeons have described a new treatment for early-stage prostate cancer as ‘truly transformative’” the journal reported.

Trials on 413 men with early-stage prostate cancer found that nearly half had no traces of the cancer after being treated with the new approach using lasers and a drug made from deep sea bacteria without incurring any of the side effects associated with prostate surgery.

The inevitable lede for such a story is: “Researchers at such-and-such university have discovered . . . ” But the BBC report on the findings completely omitted mention of the scientists involved — Avigdor Scherz and Yoram Salomon at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Perhaps as Britain and other European nations were voting to delegitimize Israel at the UN Security Council the BBC did not want to remind listeners of the cost to humanity if the vicious campaign against Israel achieves its goals.