The report this morning that the Trump administration intends to close the Washington office of the Palestine Liberation Organization suggests that a new realism is emerging in respect of the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal reports that President Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, is also planning to warn as early as today against meddling by the International Criminal Court.

No doubt these moves will be protested against by the Democrats. They are already upset that Mr. Trump is cutting off aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which for decades has stoked the furnace of hatred against the Jewish state that emerged from the United Nations’ partition of Palestine. The New York Times, in an editorial, has called that a “vengeful and shortsighted act.”

Yet what have UNRWA, the PLO, and the ICC achieved in the Middle East? UNRWA has been around since 1949 and hasn’t solved a single problem. The PLO was founded in 1964 to make not peace but war. The ICC wasn’t founded until late in the Clinton administration, which inked the treaty with but three weeks left in office. America abandoned the idea of ratifying it in 2002. So for us, it’s a dead letter.

The Sun has opposed the Trump administration’s pursuit of a peace deal in the Middle East. It’s not that we lack for confidence in Mr. Trump or his emissaries. Rather it’s a sense, built up over decades of covering this story, that the very pursuit of peace by our side is itself part of the problem. It incents the adversaries of Israel and America to hold out. Better, we’ve felt, that they do the suing for peace.

That is clearly not the plan of either the Relief and Works Agency, the PLO, or the international court. Each of them has had decades to make a positive impact. So the logic is to give the Trump administration a chance to try new approaches, to work with or create new institutions, and to try a different kind of diplomacy. And to move with dispatch, given what the Democrats are saying.

We gained a glimpse of that in January, when the Israeli daily Maariv reported on a meeting in London between a former secretary of state, John Kerry, and a close associate of the ostensible leader of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Kerry was quoted as relaying a message to Mr. Abbas to “hold on and be strong” and to “play for time” and “not break” and not “yield to President Trump’s demands.”

It’s hard to remember any senior official in a prior administration so directly encouraging an adversary to hold out against American policy. Breathtaking. So good for Messrs. Trump and Bolton. It’s way past time for new approach to the Middle East, to steer our funds and support away from the failed, or hostile, institutions. Everyone in the region, particularly our friends, deserves better.

________

A “vengeful and shortsighted act” is the phrase with which the Times described the Trump administion plan to curtail funding to UNRWA; the phrase was misquoted in an earlier edition of this editorial.