Summary: Trump not yet focused on Palestine, but some US anti-Palestinian moves. Occupation pressure increases. A new kind of Jewish joke.
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Yesterday 6 March the Israeli defence minister Avigdor Liberman, replying to a Knesset member who had called for annexation of the West Bank, told a Knesset committee “We received a direct message – that application of Israeli sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria would mean an immediate crisis with the new [US] administration… We have no intention of doing so. Applying sovereignty over Judea and Samaria means accepting an extra 2,700,000 Palestinian] citizens, and that is before I get into [consequences of] international law, the political implications and the international community’s reactions that would not accept the fact that we are not granting them the right to vote.” Liberman left for Washington later yesterday.
The “direct message” was probably conveyed in a telephone call from Donald Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu, which embarrassingly interrupted an interview in which Netanyahu was being questioned for the fourth time by the Israeli police over suspicions of corruption.
This is a new position for the Trump administration and a setback for the Israeli right wing, to which Liberman belongs although he is not associated with the settlement movement. It remains to be seen whether it will block the annexation bill for the Ma’aleh Adumim settlement.