https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-05-21/jason-greenblatt-trump-envoy-poisons-israel-palestine-peace

Twitter insults will make it harder to say yes to a soon-to-be-delivered White House proposal. It’s a blame game.

The most significant social media account in the U.S. presidential administration belongs to the tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump. But the Twitter feed of Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s negotiator on Israel-Palestinian issues, is a close second.

Greenblatt’s tweets sound frivolous and naive, but they’re clearly calculated to poison the atmosphere before the publication of the administration’s promised peace proposal.

He’s emerged as a troll against a bewildering array of Palestinian individuals and institutions, not just key interlocutors like negotiator Saeb Erekat.

Greenblatt has browbeaten the entire spectrum of Palestinian political and civic life, from senior officials to random journalists, school districts and even the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Nothing is too ordinary to escape his badgering.

His tone is self-righteous and arrogant. He speaks to Palestinians as if he were dealing with wayward children or hopeless maniacs.

He occasionally criticizes Israelis, such as a settler rabbi who called Hitler “the most correct person there ever was.” But his embrace of the settlers’ perspective appears total, and he evinces no understanding of any aspect of the Palestinian experience.

In his telling, Israel is under attack by fanatical Arabs brainwashed with hatred. He has never acknowledged the impact of the Israeli occupation or Palestinian dispossession, disenfranchisement and exile. He often sounds most like a spokesperson for the Settlers’ Council, whose propaganda he routinely cites.

Greenblatt’s tone-deafness on the occupation was recently demonstrated by his celebration of a Ramadan dinner held in Hebron by Israeli settlers and a few local Palestinians.

It was an astounding choice because Hebron is the epicenter of some of the worst abuses meted out by settlers and the Israeli authorities, which often go beyond segregation and repression.

Greenblatt’s sanctimonious tweets are oblivious to the essential feature of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in the occupied territories, especially places like Hebron, which is the methodical subjugation of millions of people by an army that is systematically taking land from one group and giving it to another.

Greenblatt should study an important new book, “Freedom and Despair,” by the Israeli peace activist David Shulman, who has been trying to help Palestinians resist cruelty, abuse and land theft by settlers and the military in the South Hebron hills for decades.

Shulman’s powerful moral interrogation of himself and others stands in stark contrast to Greenblatt’s self-satisfied certainties.

Astonishingly, Greenblatt’s tweets also frequently engage with marginal Palestinian figures such as random Hamas members, not senior leaders, and fringe terrorist groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

He doesn’t seem to realize that being directly addressed on Twitter by the chief U.S. negotiator is a major achievement for such extremists. He’s doing them an enormous favor. They must love him.

So why is the chief U.S. negotiator wasting his time hectoring random Palestinians, disseminating settler narratives and promoting extremists?

Greenblatt’s campaign is part of a calculated effort by the Trump administration to ensure that relations are so bad that there’s no chance Palestinian leaders can possibly engage with any new U.S. proposal.

The administration is instead counting on them to say “no” and then accuse them of recalcitrance.

The most recent example of other actions with the same purpose is the refusal of the State Department to grant a U.S. visa to Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian leader who has an unblemished, decades-old track record of advocating nonviolence.

Along with recognizing Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, cutting off all U.S. aid, shutting the Palestinian embassy in Washington and the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem, Greenblatt’s Twitter feed is obviously intended to deny Palestinian leaders political wiggle-room.

Palestinians shouldn’t oblige him by just saying “no,” and they need to formulate a sophisticated response.

But Greenblatt is doing an excellent job of making any constructive reply as difficult as possible. His Twitter feed has been a key tool in that insidious project.