The US president’s recognition of the holy city as Israel’s capital reveals an administration out of its diplomatic depth

“Today,” asserted Donald Trump, marking the formal recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital: “I am delivering.” The question in the aftermath of a statement that has upended decades of carefully crafted diplomacy is: what has he delivered?

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While his linked decision to begin the process of moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is one of the few campaign promises Trump has managed to fulfil, more pressing is what it means for another of the US president’s boasts: to negotiate the “ultimate deal” of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

After Wednesday, one of the world’s most intractable issues appeared more impossible than ever, as Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas described the US decision as “a declaration of withdrawal from the role it has played in the peace process”.

The reality is that the Trump team tasked with restarting a peace process has long seemed out of its depth, play-acting at the business of negotiating.

While the main negotiators – led by the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, one of Trump’s former lawyers – have given the appearance of plenty of “shuttling” (in the words of Henry Kissinger, who invented shuttle diplomacy), far less in evidence has been diplomacy itself.

Q&A Why is recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital so contentious? Show Hide Of all the issues at the heart of the enduring conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, none is as sensitive as the status of Jerusalem. The holy city has been at the centre of peace-making efforts for decades. Seventy years ago, when the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Jerusalem was defined as a separate entity under international supervision. In the war of 1948 it was divided, like Berlin in the cold war, into western and eastern sectors under Israeli and Jordanian control respectively. Nineteen years later, in June 1967, Israel captured the eastern side, expanded the city’s boundaries and annexed it – an act that was never recognised internationally. Israel routinely describes the city, with its Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy places, as its “united and eternal” capital. For their part, the Palestinians say East Jerusalem must be the capital of a future independent Palestinian state. The unequivocal international view, accepted by all previous US administrations, is that the city’s status must be addressed in peace negotiations. Recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital puts the US out of step with the rest of the world, and legitimises Israeli settlement-building in the east – considered illegal under international law. Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP

Months of silence were broken on Sunday by Kushner to articulate a thin, often incoherent and contradictory vision at the Saban Forum in Washington. In a softball Q&A, Kushner delivered a single giveaway: that the much-vaunted policy of “outside-in” the Trump administration had been pursuing – the idea of a regional peace process between Arab states and Israel before an Israeli-Palestinian deal – had been abandoned.

Instead, Kushner suggested vaguely, wider stability in the Middle East needed the precondition of an Israel-Palestinian peace deal, predicated on building trust between the two sides through honest mediation – the default position of the Obama era and other presidents before.

While Kushner and Trump officials have boasted of the lack of leaks around their plan, critics have suggested that reflects nothing more than an absence of any real substance. “A lot of it has been about giving the impression of looking busy, as far as I can see,” said one diplomat.

‘They have given the impression of being good at listening,” said a Palestinian official. “We’ve been told there will be a plan. The message communicated to us is that when it emerges, we should listen. That’s it.”

We’ve been told there will be a plan. The message is that when it emerges, we should listen. That’s it Palestinian official

Among those baffled by the Trump’s moves is Peter Welch, a Democratic congressman who has organised briefings with Greenblatt on Capitol Hill and who had thought the original Kushner-Greenblatt initiative appeared to be showing promise.

“I thought a trust-building process was underway that was having positive impacts,” Welch told the Guardian after the speech.

“The president has been going over there establishing good ties with the Sunni states; he obviously has close relationships with the Israeli government; he was making progress even with the sceptics in the Palestinian Authority – and with a single announcement he blows it all up.”

Equally scathing was the Israeli anti-occupation group Gush Shalom, which found one reason to describe the speech as historic: “In the person of President Donald Trump, the United States today officially, ceremoniously and with a bang abdicated its role as the mediator between Israel and the Arabs.”

If Trump’s decision is hard to understand in terms of the history of the Middle East peace process, it is easier to understand in terms of his own career and personality, and that of his officials, who have treated the issue – as they have made clear – like a Manhattan real estate negotiation divorced of political, historic and cultural sensitivities.

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Kushner suggested as much himself in leaked comments from a talk to congressional interns last summer. “Everyone finds an issue, that ‘you have to understand what they did then’ and ‘you have to understand that they did this’. But how does that help us get peace? Let’s not focus on that,” he told them.

“We don’t want a history lesson. We’ve read enough books. Let’s focus on: how do you come up with a conclusion to the situation?”

Beyond an explanation tied to Trump’s psychology, the only alternative rationale is that Trump and his team – having abandoned all conventional approaches – may have somehow internalised one of the most controversial prescriptions for achieving a deal.

That is the one proposed by Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, who has suggested peace is possible only with Israel’s defeat of Palestinian national ambitions.

One thing, however, is quite clear. On Wednesday, history, expert warnings, a body of diplomatic knowledge and experience were comprehensively ripped up, along with any imminent prospects of a deal.