Pompeo's announcement that the US will recognize West Bank settlements as legal: an excellent move

A piece by David Harsanyi at National Review today  makes the important point that while Trump's foreign policy has been nearly uniformly dangerously reckless (well, Harsanyi's term is a little more understated; he calls it "mercurial"), the one exception is forthright support for Israel. We have seen this administration make good on the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem that every president has promised since 1995, as well as recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

And now comes this excellent move:

. . . yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused. 

At the very least, U.S. policy treating Jews who returned to their ancient homeland as occupiers should have been voided the day Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. Because the much-talked-about United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 does nothing to undermine the Jewish claim, no matter how often it’s misrepresented by Israel’s antagonists. In it, the U.N. established Israel’s legal right to negotiate a peace with defensible borders with existing states. Resolution 242 doesn’t mention the word “Palestinian” anywhere. Nowhere does the resolution call on Israel to withdraw to the pre–Six-Day War lines. Nowhere does it stipulate that Judea and Samaria should be Judenfrei.

As always, though, any decision that helps Israel is framed by many in the media as an effort to weaken “Palestinian efforts to achieve statehood.” This is myth. Fatah might have deluded its own people and the world for decades, but there’s no conceivable peace deal that includes a truly divided Jerusalem or a Right of Return or any indefensible border with a Palestinian state. No sane nation would consent to the creation of an antagonistic neighbor under those terms, much less allow the remnants of the Palestine Liberation Organization and their on-and-off political partners Hamas and their Iranian benefactors to set up shop. None of Trump’s moves undermine peace. They simply clarify the contours of a realistic deal. 

Something else to consider is that this puts the EU position on the matter in sharp relief. Its top court recently ruled that products imported from the West Bank must be labeled as such, rather than as being made in Israel.