Moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem didn’t kill the peace process or motivate Hamas to sacrifice more Palestinians in Gaza.

The mainstream media’s prevailing narrative about the Trump administration is that of an arsonist on the loose. President Trump’s contempt for experts and anything that can be perceived as the work of the political establishment is assumed to always be wrongheaded, and therefore anything that goes wrong can be safely pinned on him. It’s a line of argument that feeds into the contempt that liberal elites feel for Trump and his voters — it provides a convenient way to understand the world. But it fails to help them understand what’s going on in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, the talking heads on CNN and MSNBC were out in force this week, furiously blaming the president not only for the dozens killed in violence at the border between Israel and Gaza but also for killing the peace process. His decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital in Jerusalem was slammed not merely as an obstacle to peace but for setting in motion a series of events that led to Palestinians’ getting killed.