Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Wednesday visit to the White House, the administration signaled a potentially dramatic shift in U.S. policy, backing away from the two-state solution as the bedrock principle of any peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During a preview of the coming visit, a senior White House official told reporters that achieving peace was the ultimate goal “[w]hether that comes in the form of a two–state solution if that’s what the parties want, or something else.”
Netanyahu has interpreted Trump’s victory and vocal support during the campaign as a mandate to jump-start the construction of highly controversial settlements in Palestine. The Trump administration has since qualified its support for settlement expansion, which remains a highly popular policy on the far right of Israeli politics. “Trump’s position that peace isn’t dependent upon creating two separate nations in the Holy Land could provide political cover to Netanyahu, who faces challenges from his country’s right wing,” Bloomberg notes. “It also could be seen as a seismic shift in U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
The implications of such a shift would likely reverberate far beyond the Israeli-Palestinian issue and impact a wide array of American foreign policy objectives. “Failure by a U.S. president to explicitly back a two-state solution would upend decades of U.S. policy embraced by Republican and Democratic administrations,” Reuters points out. “It has long been the bedrock U.S. position for resolving the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has been at the core of international peace efforts. Any sign of a softening of U.S. support for eventual Palestinian statehood could also anger the Muslim world, including Sunni Arab allies, which the Trump administration needs in the fight against Islamic State and to back efforts against Shi’ite Iran.”
