Mark Perry

Jared Kushner’s two-day ‘Peace to Prosperity’ workshop in Bahrain, the administration claims, was the first step in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians sent delegations. The roll-out of the strategy paper that preceded it was met with near silence. America’s regional partners provided only lukewarm support to Kushner’s efforts and, not least, the workshop was amateurishly misnamed. Kushner believes it’s actually ‘prosperity to peace’ — not the other way around. The workshop’s results, or lack of them, were predictable. But criticism among those who have been down this road before has been muted, partly because of Kushner’s quiet but focused effort to solicit their views.

Donald Trump says that America could ‘end’ Iran, and no doubt we could. The US could launch an air campaign that would destroy the Islamic Republic’s most important military assets. But it’s hard to see exactly how. With a diminishing number of useful allies, not to mention a military exhausted from 18 years of war on terror, America is not in the position it once was to exert great force in the Middle East. Ever since the push to invade Iraq, the US has been shedding allies. We have become increasingly dependent for help on an unimpressive handful of wannabes. Turkey sat out the Iraq War: so did France, Germany and Canada, three of our most potent military supporters.

On the late afternoon of September 29, 2000 (nearly 20 years ago now), I took a cab from Jerusalem into Bethlehem to visit with an old friend and his family, the owners of a well-known Bethlehem hotel. The streets were bustling; buses filled with tourists roared up the main Jerusalem-to-Bethlehem road towards the Church of the Nativity (the reputed birthplace of Jesus), and the city’s gift shops were jammed. My plan was to stay the night, but my friend (a Palestinian Christian who’d moved to Bethlehem from Philadelphia), shook his head: ‘No room at the inn,’ he said, and smiled at his joke. ‘In fact, you won’t find a room anywhere in the city.’ I was surprised. In all of my years traveling to the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, I’d never had trouble finding a place to stay.