Trump must honour Bush-Congress deal with Israel

President Trump's historic visit to Israel on 22 May presents the perfect opportunity for him to deliver on the promises he made to Israel during last year's Presidential election campaign.

Trump's broad-ranging foreign policy speechon 27 April 2016 highlighted the disgraceful way Israel had been treated by the Obama Administration:

Israel, our great friend and the one true democracy in the Middle East has been snubbed and criticized by an administration that lacks moral clarity.

President Obama has not been a friend to Israel.

Trump's claim was certainly justified.

Obama – aided and abetted by his two Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry – had deliberately undermined the written commitmentsmade to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by President Bush on 14 April 2004 and subsequently endorsed overwhelmingly by the Congress by 502 votes to 12 ("Bush/Congress Commitments").

Trump promised:

To our friends and allies, I say America is going to be strong again. America is going to be reliable again. It's going to be a great and reliable ally again. It's going to be a friend again. We're going to finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies.

The shared interests of Israel and America became inextricably entwined after the Bush/Congress Commitments had:

• secured Israel's total disengagement from Gaza and a part of Judea and Samaria (West Bank) in 2005
• promised President Bush's stalled 2003 Roadmap proposing the two-state solution a real chance of coming to fruition.

The Bush/Congress Commitments were also crucial to Israel's agreement to resume negotiations with the Palestinian Authority as publicly declared by Israel's then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the international conference called by President Bush in Annapolis in 2007:

In the course of the negotiations, we will use previous agreements as a point of departure. U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, the road map, and the letter of President Bush to the prime minister of Israel dated April 14, 2004.

Obama's treachery in derogating from the Bush/Congress Commitments was compounded when he refused to veto Security Council Resolution 2334 passed during the dying days of Obama's Presidency on 23 December 2016.