"Paying to be Abused"

In Mid East, Note Who Curses America and Who Blesses It 

- Yoram Hazony 

• In a speech to the PLO last week, PA President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the British, Dutch, French, and Americans for having conspired, ever since the 1650s, to create a Jewish colonial outpost. He then cursed both President Trump and the U.S. Congress: Yehrab beitak("May your house be razed").
• American administrations have sought to make a peace partner out of the PLO since President Ronald Reagan announced a dialogue with it in 1988. President Trump, Vice President Pence, and UN Ambassador Haley are pioneering an alternative policy, which can be summed up in Haley's words: "We're not going to pay to be abused."
• For decades, Washington has crafted policies based on the tacit assumption that America needs the PLO if it is to bring peace to the Middle East. In its effort to "balance" the demands of this extremist organization against Israel's concerns, American policy inflated the PLO's importance, and it learned to tolerate and even embrace an organization whose views have always been profoundly anti-Western, not to mention anti-Semitic.
• These policies did not bring peace to the Middle East. But they severed the ties between American diplomacy in the region and common sense - to the point that more than a few U.S. officials ended up believing that not only the PLO, but even Iran, whose parliament regularly curses the U.S., could be made a peace partner if it were paid handsomely enough.
• In the relations between nations, it matters who blesses you and who curses you.

(National Review)

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UPDATE: 


Trump: "We Took Jerusalem Off the Table"

Prior to a meeting between President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the president said: "We will be moving our embassy, as you know, to Jerusalem. And as we also know, that is way ahead of schedule, by years, and we anticipate having a small version of it opened sometime next year."
    

President Trump said, "When they [the Palestinians] disrespected us a week ago by not allowing our great Vice President to see them - and we give them hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and support - tremendous numbers; numbers that nobody understands. That money is on the table, and that money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace. Because I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace. And they're going to have to want to make peace too, or we're going to have nothing to do with it any longer."

    

"This was never brought up by other negotiators, but it's brought up by me. So I will say that the hardest subject they had to talk about was Jerusalem. We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don't have to talk about it anymore....You won one point, and you'll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I don't know that it ever will take place."
    

"But they have to respect...the fact that the U.S. has given tremendous support to them over the years, in terms of monetary support and other support....Respect has to be shown to the U.S. or we're just not going any further."  

(White House)
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