RAMALLAH, West Bank — Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, finally lost it this month. After a year of bamboozling signals from President Trump, including a cordial White House meeting last May followed by a blowup in Bethlehem weeks later, Abbas dismissed Trump’s peace efforts as the “slap of the century.” He ruled out American mediation.
He called the American ambassador to Israel an “offensive human being” and pronounced the Oslo Accords dead. His tirade was as much an expression of Palestinian impotence as resolve. All Abbas has left is words. Still, it was a striking requiem for the Israeli-Palestinian “ultimate deal” that Trump promised.
So it goes with a president whose foreign policy watchword is “incoherence,” when it’s not outright indecency of the “shithole” variety. Trump has honed offensiveness to a fine art. A diplomatic deal is built with stubborn persistence, not conjured through insult. Only the genius in chief can know how it made sense, a year into Jared Kushner’s Middle Eastern diplomatic labors and before they had yielded a peace plan, to torpedo his efforts.
That is what Trump’s recognition last month of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and subsequent tweeted boast that he’d taken Jerusalem “off the table,” achieved. It was a provocation. To address Jerusalem, city of passions, with such truculence was to invite disaster, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis tried to impress on a president captive to his impulses.
