Victoria Coates
The following is an edited excerpt from Chapter 1 of Victoria Coates’s forthcoming book, The Battle for the Jewish State: Winning the War Against Israel—and America.
The Palestinians like to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 as the “nakba,” or disaster. They considered the presidency of Donald Trump a second nakba. While his term had begun with a congenial visit to the White House in May 2017 by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, which left Abbas “hopeful” about the prospects for a deal with Israel, things rapidly went downhill.
Unable or unwilling to control Palestinian unrest on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that summer, Abbas eventually took the unprecedented step of cutting off the security cooperation with Israel that was critical for reducing violence in the West Bank after the Second Intifada, which raged from 2000 to 2005. By 2017, Abbas was ready to jettison that successful cooperation in order to retain his political control of the West Bank.
Then, in September of that year, Abbas traveled to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly and gave his boilerplate speech on Israel’s culpability for Palestinian attacks on Jews and America’s culpability for its support of Israel. Complaining about colonial occupation and calling on the International Criminal Court to prosecute Israeli officials, he said nothing he had not said before. But this time, there was a new member of the audience: Trump.
During their White House meeting, Abbas had persuaded the president that he was a legitimate partner for peace and that it was the Israelis, especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who refused to make a deal. But it was clear from his U.N. speech that Abbas was equally obstinate—if not more so. He also expressed no gratitude to the United States, » Read More
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/october-7-was-only-the-beginning