In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East–and How to Stop Joe Biden From Unmaking It by Jason D. Greenblatt

Author:Jason D. Greenblatt [Greenblatt, Jason D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine, Political Science, American Government, National
ISBN: 9781637583098
Google: qOrGzgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1637583095
Publisher: Wicked Son
Published: 2022-07-18T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 7

A Rendezvous in Ramallah

March 14, 2017

I had left the King David Hotel that morning for a windshield tour of East Jerusalem and the Ramallah-area West Bank “tension points” with Consul General Don Blome and US Army Lieutenant General Frederick S. “Rudy” Rudesheim, who was then serving as the US Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem. Along the way, we went through Qalandia, a military checkpoint through which several thousand Palestinians had to pass each day to access work in Israel. This checkpoint, which has now been replaced by a modern, comfortable, and far more efficient one, then consisted of three narrow metal cage-like walkways through which Palestinians needed to pass before reaching one of five checking stations, where they then had to go through metal detectors and manually present their permits to soldiers. What I observed that day was concerning to me. The whole process was needlessly and excessively slow, cumbersome, and irritating, to say the least. At the same time, I certainly understood the reason for it, and the critical need for Israel to be safe and secure. Israel was aware of the problem and was already planning to address it before my tour, but I certainly encouraged them to make it a priority, and they did. I’m happy to report that what at that time took Palestinians approximately an hour to navigate, today takes only a few minutes. In my opinion, it was a long-overdue and welcome improvement.

Qalandia is also the name of a nearby Palestinian refugee camp, established by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Established in 1949 by the UN General Assembly, UNRWA provides relief to those it labels “Palestinian refugees” resulting from what Israelis call the War of Independence and which Arabs call the “Nakba” or “The Disaster,” and for the Palestinians, it was indeed that. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations had voted to divide what was then called “Mandatory Palestine” into separate Jewish and Arab sovereign states, with Jerusalem being designated as a shared “international” city.

I hasten to add here that the term “Mandatory Palestine” is not the same thing as the “State of Palestine” that Palestinians seek and some countries recognize. America is not among them. The Palestinian leadership often uses this as propaganda to suggest that there was a State of Palestine all along, but this is not the case. Mandatory Palestine was an area in southern Syria, in which nearly two dozen different ethnic peoples lived. But none of them were identified or identified themselves as “Palestinians.”

While the Jewish leadership accepted the partition plan, Arab leaders of those who lived in Mandatory Palestine, as well as a coalition of the Arab states, unanimously opposed it. What the Arab world originally envisioned as an easy victory over an upstart nation turned, instead, into a bitter and humiliating defeat. The 1947–1949 war ended with the territory of Mandatory Palestine divided among the new State of Israel, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which

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