The Palestinians got a big fat zero from Trump’s visit

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas went to Washington and met with his US counterpart Donald Trump earlier this month, his aides described the visit as “historic” and a prelude for grabbing Palestinian rights from the jaws of the Israeli tiger. “It was a strategic visit,” claimed Dr Husam Zomlot, the PA representative in Washington and a senior diplomatic aide to Abbas.

After his meeting, Abbas described Trump as the champion of peace and the “superman” who is able to solve supposedly insoluble problems. “We introduced ourselves and our positons towards terror, as well as our vision about the two-state solution,” he told official PA television. “I see he has a vision to solve the Palestinian cause and he is able to achieve peace.”

The PA president went on to say that he is ready to sit unconditionally with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the negotiation table under the “auspices” of the US president. Abbas has already met with Israeli officials – albeit not government officials – in his office in Ramallah and discussed prospects for peace. All of this has happened, but what have the Palestinians on the ground really got from Trump?

The American leader visited the region – his first overseas tour as president – while a mass hunger strike of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails was taking place; they were protesting at their ill treatment by the Israeli authorities and dire conditions. Trump said not a word about the misery of the 6,500+ Palestinians prisoners in Israel, including 59 women, 200 children and more than 400 patients. It was, reported the Times of Israel, “the elephant in the room”.

However, he listened respectfully to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin’s complaint about the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured by the Palestinian resistance in Gaza during the major Israeli military offensive against the coastal enclave in 2014. Furthermore, he dispatched his special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt to meet with the parents of one of the Israeli soldiers, Hadar Golden, and listen to their grievances.

During his regional tour, Trump did not mention the solution preferred by the PA and the Arab states for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor did the phrase two-state solution pass his lips during his visit to Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories. Meeting with Abbas very briefly in Bethlehem – he was there for an hour – all he said was that he is “committed to trying to achieve a peace agreement” before adding that “peace can never take root in a place where violence is tolerated, funded, and even rewarded.” This was a reference to what Netanyahu had claimed about the PA “rewarding Palestinian terrorists” because it gives financial support to their families.

In Israel, Trump made it clear that he stands with the Israelis and used their preferred description as “God’s chosen people”. During the now obligatory visit for foreign leaders to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial – which overlooks the site of the Deir Yassin massacre committed by Zionist militias in 1948 – Trump expressed his sadness about the Jews who perished in the Nazi concentration camps during World War Two. The Holocaust, he declared, was the worst crime carried out against God and his children. He took the opportunity to announce that he stands strongly with the Israelis and that his administration “will always stand with Israel.”

Trump was the first sitting US president to visit the Western Wall, which is part of the boundary wall of Al-Aqsa Mosque, although Jews claim that it is their holiest religious site. His visit to the wall in occupied East Jerusalem was de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty over this part of the city, which the PA, Arab states and most countries around the world expect to be the capital of a future independent Palestinian state.

Later on, one of the president’s aides revealed that Trump did not want to achieve peace during his meeting with Abbas; it was merely to inform him that he wants the Arab states to normalise relations with Israel. If this happens, he told Abbas, peace would come easily. According to a published report of this encounter, Abbas did not accept what Trump told him.

And that’s it. After examining every detail of Trump’s visit to the region, we find that the Palestinians got a big fat zero from the US president. Identical, in fact, to what they ever got from Trump’s predecessors in the White House. According to Haaretz, the Palestinians were “confident” that Trump’s visit “won’t change anything.” How right they are.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.