Mouin Rabbani

It has been a bizarre week for US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On 23 December, the Obama administration narrowly avoided becoming the first since Harry Truman’s to leave office without a single United Nations Security Council resolution censuring Israel to its credit. Washington has spent the past eight years shielding what John Kerry on 28 December called ‘the most right-wing [government] in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements’ from international scrutiny.

A Hamas delegation recently paid an official visit to Egypt, which these days is news in and of itself. While in Cairo, the delegation also met with the former Fatah warlord Muhammad Dahlan, which is even bigger news.

Late yesterday evening, ‘a senior administration official’ confirmed that the United States will today recognise Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem. Given that the policy is to be announced by Donald Trump, a volatile airhead presiding over a highly fractious government, it’s still far from clear how – or even whether – Washington will put forward a new position. But if, as expected, the US does proceed with this measure, the physical relocation of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will be the least of it.

The Trump administration’s policies and initiatives towards the Arab-Israeli conflict – the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017; the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 2019; the Peace to Prosperity plan in 2020 – have been rightly denounced as premeditated assaults on international law and the international political consensus. Claims that such measures form a radical departure from traditional US policy are less persuasive, however. Since 1967, Washington has systematically aided and abetted Israel’s colonial expansion in the West Bank. Annexation, the ripe fruit of US as much as Israeli policy, is a formalisation rather than transformation of the resulting reality.