When the interests of the United States and regional stability call for letting some relationships remain under wraps - by Jonathan Tobin

By trying to force Arab nations to go public with pressure on the Palestinians, the United States could undermine the struggle against Iran for the sake of a hopeless cause.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
13 February '19..

This week’s Warsaw summit was supposed to be about rallying the world against the threat that Iran poses to international peace. But given the complete lack of interest on the part of either America’s Western European allies or the Russians in reconsidering the disastrous nuclear deal that empowered and enriched Tehran, that was never going to work.

But the United States is also reportedly hoping to use the gathering to help set the stage for a renewed effort to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians that the administration has been preparing for the last two years. The problem with that approach is that Trump or presidential adviser/son-in-law Jared Kushner have grasped one element of the region that eluded their predecessors, though they still don’t understand the intractable nature of the conflict.

The conceit of the still secret Kushner plan, which will reportedly be formally rolled out after Israel’s April elections, is the notion that Arab nations are far more interested in resisting Iran than in any further tension with Israel. That basic assumption is correct, as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan and the rest of the Sunni world are sick to death of being dragged into a crisis by a Palestinian leadership that has no intention of ever making peace with Israel or accepting a two-state solution.

It is also true that, thanks to Iran, these same nations have found themselves in a far closer embrace with Israel than anyone would have expected a decade ago. The Obama administration’s policy of allowing Syria to descend into chaos, which was exploited by both Russia and Iran, threatened the security of the entire region. Even worse, Obama’s appeasement of Iran made the Arab states think that the United States was abandoning them.

At that point, under-the-table relations between most of the Arab world and Israel shifted to the point where most of these nations no longer even bothered to pretend that they were hostile to the Jewish state or cared much about the Palestinians.

(Continue to Full Column)

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