In the midst of Trump’s impeachment trial and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s indictment, comes a miracle: a Mideast “peace plan” from son-in-law and chief adviser Jared Kushner, doing what couldn’t be done in 80 years.
The timing is suspect, but so is the fact that this is Jared Kushner’s “ingenious” plan after three years. Three years? How hard is it to come up with a plan when you don’t need to involve or get the buy-in from the other side, or address any of the thorniest sticking points that have made true peace deals so elusive: Jerusalem, right of return, borders.
It is hardly a “deal” and scarcely a “vision” and certainly not a “peace plan” when it basically puts down on paper Israel’s wishlist without incorporating the Palestinians.
The most concrete thing it does, though, after years of suspecting Netanyahu and hardliners abandoned the notion of a Palestinian state in favor of a subjugated non-citizenry within Israel. Instead, the plan extends Israel’s borders deep into the West Bank and creates what the White House calls “a demilitarized Palestinian state” with Israel retaining control of security west of the Jordan River.
The shape of the Palestinian state resembles one of our gerrymandered congressional districts; there would be a tunnel across the whole of Israel to link Gaza with the West Bank. The Palestinian state would get $50 billion in funding – mostly from Arab states. Israel would immediately annex nearly all its settlements in the Jordan Valley.
Trump has never taken the long view, or even the next week’s view and certainly not the “national interest” point of view. Frankly, “the plan” is hardly ingenious – it just ignores all the thorny issues that have thwarted every past peace plan – Jerusalem, the right of return, West Bank settlements.
And it doesn’t take effect for four years.
“That provision defers all the hard questions for several years of negotiations — with their inevitable breakdowns and crises. But it gives Mr. Trump the campaign-trail talking point that he has fulfilled a 2016 promise and proposed an actual solution, rather than just a process,” writes David E. Sanger in the New York Times.
This “deal” could have been done 50 years ago if there were no care for international norms or support, but only Trump has the audacity, amorality, and ignorance to disregard all of that. The plan reads like a set of conditions dictated to a conquered foe and would have made more sense after the 1967 war.
Today is another story. (Pause to be reminded of what most commentators ignore, that Israel acquired the territory after wars initiated by the Arabs with the objective of driving Israel into the sea and that over the decades, every true and fair peace plan was rejected with renewed terrorism and hostilities.)
“Donald Trump’s Middle East ‘deal of the century’ offers the Palestinians a state. They have rejected it and threatened instead to ramp up violence against Israel,” writes the group called Jews for Trump. “No one can be surprised. They have rejected every offer of a state previously made to them in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2008, and 2014.
But what Trump has done with this “deal of the century” is erased any prospect of the United States being perceived as an “honest broker.” Russia, with a goal of becoming the power player in the Mideast, may well fill that vacuum.
More significantly, it harms the bipartisan support in Congress that Israel has depended upon. And it destroys the U.S. credibility as a protector of international law and human rights (Trump ended that a long time ago). Israel has already been branded an outlaw nation but by giving a blessing to the annexation of disputed territory it cements that and makes the U.S. an accomplice.
“By endorsing Israeli sovereignty over vast portions of the occupied West Bank, the president, and his team appear to be empowering Israeli leaders to carry out unilateral annexations that would flagrantly violate international law, trample on the rights of Palestinians and grossly endanger Israel’s future as a democratic homeland for the Jewish people,” writes J Street, a political lobbying group, in a press release.
“They are discarding decades of bipartisan US policy in favor of a destructive effort that is certain to exacerbate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, empower the most dangerous extremists on both sides and destabilize Israel’s already tenuous relationship with Jordan,” the group added.
Ironically, with the European democracies being swarmed by populists and progressives, each with little care for Israel, the deal depends on the support of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. So now that we have seen what Trump is willing to do as a quid pro quo to win the election, what will he give to Saudi Arabia?
The plan is unlikely to go anywhere and almost certainly will not bring peace. But that is not the point. Like demanding Ukraine’s public announcement of a Biden investigation with no real care for an actual investigation, or the hand-shake photo-op with Kim Jong-un without actual de-nuclearization, it’s all for show in the primetime of impeachment and election campaign.
