From Ian:
Analysis: Jerusalem likely disappointed by Trump's secretary of state pick
Analysis: Jerusalem likely disappointed by Trump's secretary of state pick
Nobody will admit it, but it is safe to assume Jerusalem was disappointed Tuesday when US President-elect Donald Trump announced the winner of his secretary of state sweepstakes.ICC threat lingers over Settlements Bill among others
It’s not because Jerusalem dislikes or does not trust Trump’s nominee, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson – policy makers in Israel, like those in most other non-oil producing countries, don’t know that much about him. It’s just that the Netanyahu government really liked some of the other candidates that were bandied about over the last five weeks: Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John Bolton.
Giuliani, Romney, Bolton – these are men that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has known for years and with whom he shares a similar world view. Tillerson, however, is a largely unknown quantity.
Jerusalem knows that Tillerson is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and that he has worked intensively in Arab countries with which ExxonMobil does business. But no one seems to have any idea about where he stands on issues such as the settlements, Jerusalem and the two-state solution.
Some are making assumptions, however, that because he was highly recommended for the position by former secretaries of state James Baker and Condoleezza Rice, and because he is reportedly close to former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, that he doesn’t have a warm spot in his heart for either the settlement enterprise or Israel. But Tillerson has left no public record of comments on these issues to support that assumption. In short, his positions on the Mideast conflict are, at this point, anyone’s guess.
One thing it is important to keep in mind, said Danny Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and deputy foreign minister, is that US secretaries of state “serve at the pleasure of the president, and we know that Trump is closer to Israel on issues like the settlements.”
Politicians on the Right have been regularly underplaying the threat of the International Criminal Court and slamming Israel’s internal lawyer take-over revolution as well as the Supreme Court for interfering in the Amona debate by telling them what is or is not legal.Can Trump Really Move the Embassy?
Apparently some of this is for show and on Monday at the Knesset’s joint committee closed-to the media meeting on the Settlements Bill, some of the same politicians took the threat far more seriously, which will likely impact their votes.
The question is whether passing the Settlements Bill would change an ICC full criminal war crimes investigation into the settlement enterprise from a neutral or remote possibility to a much higher likelihood.
If the ICC went after the settlement enterprise for war crimes, Israeli defense ministers, housing ministers, local settlement councils and possibly others could be on the hook.
The assumption of those promoting a two-state solution is that the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem would serve as the capital of the Palestinian state that would be created as part of a peace settlement. We don’t know whether the Palestinians will ever take yes for an answer and accept a peace that would recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. But no reasonable person can dispute that Israel will always keep Western Jerusalem and those Jewish neighborhoods that were built after 1967. The city is the country’s capital, and always will be.
To a Middle East novice like Trump, recognizing this is just common sense. But for the foreign policy establishment, doing so would be a grave mistake. It would prejudge the outcome of peace negotiations, their thinking goes, and would result in violent riots throughout the Arab and Muslim world with unforeseen consequences. Yet Trump, with his outsider’s viewpoint, may get that these dire predictions are self-fulfilling prophecies, and trap the U.S. in a policy that perpetuates the conflict rather than moving towards a solution. If peace is to be achieved, the Palestinians and their supporters must accept that the Jewish presence in Jerusalem will never be reversed or its history erased (as the Palestinians have sought to do in various United Nations resolutions that designate the Temple Mount and the Western Wall as exclusively Muslim shrines).
It would be foolish to pretend that an embassy move would not cause problems or lead to riots ginned up by Islamists who hate the U.S. as much as they do Israel. But the world will not come to an end if the U.S. sends a signal to the world Washington has finally understood that the conventional wisdom about Jerusalem has done more to encourage Palestinian intransigence than it has to promote a solution. The new embassy would also not preclude a two-state solution or make it harder to achieve assuming the Palestinians wanted peace since all it would do is to make it easier for U.S. diplomats to travel between their new offices (at an empty site owned by the U.S. that has been designated for that purpose for decades) and Israeli government institutions they deal with.
On Jerusalem and One China, Trump may not be playing by the existing diplomatic rules. But it’s time for even those who doubted his fitness for the presidency to admit that those rules don’t always make sense and changing them might do more good than harm.






















