No Golan? White House Video Shows Unprecedented Israel Map

By Dan Friedman May 20, 2017

A White House video designed to promote the first trip abroad by President Trump seemingly portrayed a shocking change in American policy and the Trump administration’s beliefs. But it was pulled almost immediately.

The video was intended to promote the trip to four countries. A slide in the video showed a map of Israel with 1967 borders and described the trip to Israel made three crucial diplomatic assertions.

The map excluded the Golan, annexed by Israel in 1981, seeming to discredit the annexation.
The map excluded the West Bank, a source of friction in Israel and the international community but generally considered to be Israel by the Trump administration. This would cast in doubt any U.S. help in shoring up Prime Minister Netanyahu’s support for settlements.
The slide included a visit with Mahmoud Abbas on the Israel slide, apparently showing that the White House believes that the Palestinian Authority is part of Israel.

The White House pulled the video and remained silent about the slide, and outlets have assumed that this was lower level incompetence that has angered both Israelis and Palestinians, rather than the dramatic shift in policy that it seems.

Dan Friedman is the former executive editor and whisky correspondent of the Forward, and is the author of a book about Tears for Fears, the ’80s emo rock band.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO