"The Palestinian leadership have to ask themselves a
question: Do they want to have a state?
Do they want to have a better life? If they do, we have
created a framework for them to have it, and we are going to treat them in a very respectful manner.
If they don't, they're going to screw up another opportunity like they've screwed up every other
opportunity that they've ever had in their existence."
Jared
Kushner, architect of the Trump Administration Palestinian “Peace through
Prosperity” Plan, January 2020
On January 28th,
at the White House, President Donald Trump stood alongside Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces a criminal indictment, to present their
fleshed out offer to Palestinians to settle their conflict within Israel. 180
pages of details. No Palestinian officials were in attendance at the revealing
of a plan which, consistent with the Trump’s proclivity to label everything as
the “best” or the “worst,” was called a Trump-self-serving Deal of the
Century. But even a conservative Wall Street Journal label the proposal
obviously “pro-Israeli."
To Palestinian
Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, it was the Slap of the Century, rejected
that proposal the day before it was formally presented: "We reject it, and we
demand the international community not be a partner to it because it
contradicts the basics of international law and inalienable Palestinian rights…
It is nothing but a plan to finish off the Palestinian cause.”
Much of the broad scope
of this plan had been revealed in earlier administration outlines, effectively
an invitation for economic investment into Palestine, hardly guaranteed, in
exchange for a program – subject to total US and Israeli approval – that could
result in a limited Palestinian state. A bribe? We will pay you to give up your
hopes for true independence. And although Arab states ostensibly did not oppose
the proposal, not wanting to alienate the American President, behind the
scenes, no Arab state was remotely prepared to get behind this US/Israeli plan.
Effectively, this plan looks more like a domestic election campaign program
from two politicians: Trump and Netanyahu. Not a peace plan with a scintilla of
practical reality.
The February 2nd
Politico.com noted that this was a “a proposal for a potential
Palestinian state to be created four years down the road, with a section of
East Jerusalem as its capital. It
included a map that ceded some of the territory seized by Israel in the Six-Day
War in 1967 to Israel. That map also included land swaps that would shift
communities that have been within Israel’s borders since 1948 to the potential Palestinian
state… Plans for economic assistance for Palestinians were detailed as well.
“Critics of the plan noted
it placed extensive conditions on Palestinians that reduce the possibility that
they’d ever get a state — and would then limit the ability of Palestinians to
govern themselves going forward. Israelis, having seen previous peace plans
fall on deaf ears over the decades, countered that Palestinians could not hope
for a resolution if they treated every proposal as immediately dead in the
water.”
Reading Kushner’s above
lambasting of the very Palestinian leadership that is necessary to accept and implement
any peace plan, it appears clear that this is not a real attempt to secure a
genuine peaceful settlement to a very difficult regional conflict. It seems all
show for Netanyahu’s dwindling constituency in Israel and Trump’s pro-Israeli
evangelical base. No one expects that this plan has the remotest chance of
being implemented. No one.
Palestine has declared
that recent US actions – effectively siding with Netanyahu in the rejection of
the international notion of a genuine two-state solution, recognizing
religiously sensitive Jerusalem as the legitimate capital of Israel (moving our
embassy from Tel Aviv), recognition of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian-dominant
West Bank, formally accepting that the Golan Heights were now permanent Israeli
territory (a completely gratuitous statement that added nothing other than a
pro-Israeli statement), etc. – have effectively disqualified the United States
from functioning as a mediator in this Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas requested and got an emergency meeting of the Arab
League for Saturday, February 1st. At that Cairo gathering, Abbas threatened
“to cut security ties with both Israel and the U.S. in a speech at an Arab
League meeting in which he denounced the White House plan for ending the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict… The U.S. plan would grant the Palestinians
limited self-rule in parts of the occupied West Bank, while allowing Israel to
annex all its settlements there and keep nearly all of East Jerusalem...
“Abbas said he told Israel
and the U.S. that ‘there will be no relations with them, including the security
ties’ after the deal that Palestinians say heavily favors Israel… The
Western-backed Palestinian leadership has been under mounting pressure from
ordinary Palestinians and its rivals in the Islamic militant group Hamas to cut
off security ties with Israel and the U.S. or even dismantle the increasingly
unpopular Palestinian Authority…
“Under the long-awaited
proposal Trump unveiled Tuesday [1/28] , in return for concessions in the West
Bank and Jordan Valley, the Palestinians would be granted statehood in Gaza,
scattered chunks of the West Bank and some neighborhoods on the outskirts of
Jerusalem, all linked together by a new network of roads, bridges and tunnels… Israel
would control the state’s borders and airspace and maintain overall security
authority. Critics say this would rob Palestinian statehood of any meaning…
“The Palestinian leader
said he refused to take President Trump’s phone calls and messages ‘because I
know that he would use that to say he consulted us…. I will never accept this
solution,’ Abbas said. ‘I will not have it recorded in my history that I have
sold Jerusalem.’ He said the Palestinians remain committed to ending the
Israeli occupation and establishing a state with its capital in East Jerusalem.
He received long applause.
“Abbas said the
Palestinians wouldn’t accept the U.S. as a sole mediator in any negotiations
with Israel. He said they would go to the United Nations Security Council and
other world and regional organizations to ‘explain our position.’… The Arab
League’s head, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, said that the proposal “does not help achieve
peace and a just solution” and that the Palestinians reject it.” Los Angeles
Times, February 2nd.
Both Netanyahu and Trump
have their extensive cadres of “whatever we say” supporters, followers who find
deep satisfaction in hardlines, insults and ultimatums, however unworkable the
underlying programs might be. But these positions cater to the worst in us and
bait those most impacted into exactly the opposite of what the words suggest.
I’m Peter Dekom, and this appears to be a “peace plan”
that very likely will have a most opposite and violent actual result.
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