NYT blames Hamas shooting rockets to Israel on....Trump!

This headline from Sunday's New York Times is almost too stupid for words.

It starts with a straw man premise - that the Abraham Accords was meant to be a comprehensive peace plan that would solve all the Middle East problems - and then knocks it down.

It was, President Donald J. Trump proclaimed in September, “the dawn of a new Middle East.”

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Trump was announcing new diplomatic accords between Israel and two of its Gulf Arab neighbors, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

“After decades of division and conflict,” Mr. Trump said, flanked by leaders from the region in a scene later replayed in his campaign ads, the Abraham Accords were laying “the foundation for a comprehensive peace across the entire region.”

Eight months later, such a peace remains a distant hope, particularly for the Middle East’s most famously intractable conflict, the one between Israel and the Palestinians. In fiery scenes all too reminiscent of the old Middle East, that conflict has entered its bloodiest phase in seven years and is renewing criticism of Mr. Trump’s approach ...

Only in paragraph 38 (!) does one of the architects of the accords get to say that the premise is wildly wrong:

Even some Trump administration officials said any suggestions that the accords amounted to peace in the Middle East were exaggerated.

“During my time at the White House, I always urged people not to use that term,” Mr. Greenblatt said.

But in between we see the kind of flawed logic that has been the basis of the failed Obama Middle East policies - and absurd criticisms of Trump's achievements:

Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama administration official, conceded that Israel had also clashed with the Palestinians under Democratic administrations that had adopted a more evenhanded approach to the conflict than Mr. Trump’s nakedly pro-Israeli stance.

And he said opportunistic missile attacks on Israel by Hamas after the eruption of Jewish-Arab violence within Jerusalem was not Mr. Trump’s fault.

But Mr. Goldenberg argued that the current internecine violence within Israel “at least partially is driven by the fact that the Trump administration supported extremist elements in Israel every step of the way,” including Israel’s settlement movement.

In November 2019, for instance, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo changed longstanding U.S. policy by declaring that the United States did not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law. (The Biden administration intends to reverse that position once a review by government lawyers is complete.)

Mr. Trump also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, officially recognizing the city as Israel’s capital, in a move that infuriated Palestinians who have long expected East Jerusalem to be the capital of any future state they establish.

“Trump opened the door for Israel to accelerate home demolitions, accelerate settlement activity,” Ms. Hassan said. “And when that happens and you see Israel acting upon it, that’s when you see the Palestinian resistance.”

Palestinians can't be blamed at all for starting wars. It is always Israel's fault.

But that wasn't the only NYT piece on this issue.

Michelle Goldberg wrote a nutty editorial that echoed this premise:

But the explosion of fighting in Israel and Palestine in recent days makes clear something that never should have been in doubt: justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. And one reason there has been so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the United States.

“I don’t think that there’s any way that this occupation and creeping annexation process could have gotten where it is today if the United States had said no,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J-Street.

It takes spectacular ignorance of the politics and history of Hamas to think for a second that "occupation" has anything to do with Hamas rockets. But old, stupid memes die hard. 

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