I've been reporting on and following the Middle East for decades – nearly 40 years.
In that time, no president has had a better perspective on what we call the "Arab-Israeli" conflict than Donald Trump. It's not even close. Ronald Reagan was good, but some of his closest advisers did not share his views – and that's always a problem that leads to mistakes.
The rest of the pack – from Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – all took Arab oil money in the form of lavish gifts and donations to their foundations. That tells you pretty much where their bread was buttered and where their loyalties lie.
In particular, what impresses me about Trump is his attitude toward the low-life pirates of the so-called "Palestinian Authority," professional profiteers from the exploitation of Arabs living in and out of their fiefdom who were never properly resettled and cared for by Arab nations responsible for their refugee status going to 1948 – 70 years now!
When World War II ended in 1945, there were about 100 hundred million refugees who needed to be resettled – none in the Middle East, by the way, where many of the Arab powers were allied with the Nazis. Within a decade, all were resettled. So, how can we justify the continued refugee status of an original 400,000 Arab refugees growing to millions a generation later? Did the Arabs not have enough land and money? Of course, they did and do. But it was a calculated decision not to resettle them anywhere but in a "liberated" Israel. That was never going to happen, and they knew it. Everyone knew it. It would mean the end to the one Jewish state, the one self-governing, free country in the entire Middle East.
Many of those refugees and their descendants still live in squalor, in camps, without opportunity to work and prosper and make new lives for themselves. Israel has done more for the Arabs living in its territories than all the Arab nations combined.
Trump did something unprecedented when he called out the Palestinian Authority for its deceitful strategy to use its own people as bargaining chips, all the while using U.S. and other foreign money to radicalize its children, to make their highest calling jihad and martyrdom. It's inhuman. It's unconscionable. It's cruel beyond words.
Trump simply told Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Arafat's anti-Semitic successor, that the jig was up. The gravy train was over. Unless he got serious about negotiating peace with the Israelis – real peace – the money flow from the U.S. would stop. And he's already cut it substantially.
Speaking to reporters during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump touted his decision to officially move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and he slammed the Palestinians for their ongoing disrespect of the peace process.
"What I did with Jerusalem was my honor," Trump said. "We give [Palestinians] hundreds of millions of dollars of aid and support. Tremendous numbers. Numbers nobody understands. That money is on the table and that money's not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace. Because I can tell you, Israel does want to make peace and they're going to have to want to make peace too or we're not going to deal with them any longer. We took Jerusalem off the table so we don't have to talk about it anymore. They have to respect the process, and they have to respect the fact that U.S. has given tremendous support to them over the years ... respect has to be shown to the U.S. or we're just not going any further."
It's a huge breakthrough – a gamechanger.
Trump, as a businessman, realized doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results was insanity.
He's so right. U.S. taxpayer dollars should not be going to fund terrorism and promote hatred. Period. End of story.