Three years after he said that peace in the Middle East was “not as difficult as people have thought,” President Donald Trump unveiled a lopsided plan that gives Israel much of what it has long sought and imposes daunting requirements on the Palestinians before negotiations can even begin. The President described his plan, orchestrated by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as “the last opportunity” for a Palestinian state. Yet it fails to address many of the problems that led to the collapse of earlier peace initiatives. The plan calls for a two-state solution, but largely in name only. It grants Israel’s long-standing demands on settlements and borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees. Israel will have the right to annex parts of the West Bank that it now occupies, significantly reducing and further dividing Palestinian territory. It gets control of Jerusalem as its “undivided” capital. And it will assume security control over the entire West Bank, the Jordan River Valley, and Jerusalem. The Palestinians will be left with a proto-state that is physically divided, economically challenged, and possibly not viable as a modern country. Trump’s plan also lacks diplomatic energy—with no formal mechanism to get the two sides together—or any sense of urgency, since it offers a vague four-year window for the Palestinians to complete a long list of preconditions just to talk with Israel.
Netanyahu called the Trump plan “the deal of the century.” Paul Salem, the president of the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C., and the son of a former foreign minister of Lebanon, called it the “giveaway of the century”—or “apartheid on steroids.” Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, called the plan “the latest example of this administration’s snake oil diplomacy—packaging useless ideas and trying to market them as innovative. Having spent three years punishing Palestinians and distancing U.S. policy from any realistic positions that might lead to peace, the administration has unveiled a plan that Palestinians will justifiably reject, thus giving the administration an opportunity to support annexationist actions by Israel.”
The dim prospects for Trump’s long-delayed peace plan were reflected in the rollout, in the White House East Room, during a noon break in the impeachment hearings. The President was flanked by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who praised the “brilliant” proposal as a “realistic path to a durable peace.” But no Palestinians were present. In September, 2018, Trump ordered the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.) diplomatic mission to close and its diplomats to leave Washington, on the grounds that Palestinians had not done enough on peace. A tattered flag still flies over its red-brick mission near Georgetown, but a big yellow banner underneath declares that the “embassy-style” building is for sale. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has participated in previous peace talks, flatly rejected the new plan. “I say to Trump and Netanyahu: Jerusalem is not for sale, all our rights are not for sale and are not for bargain. And your deal, the conspiracy, will not pass.”
The only Arabs present at the White House on Tuesday were the Ambassadors of Oman, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates—three out of the twenty-two members of the Arab League. The League is due to meet this weekend to discuss the plan, but most states still firmly back the Palestinians’ core demands—and are likely to say so. Two hours after the plan was rolled out, Netanyahu’s office announced that the Israeli Cabinet will vote on annexing parts of the West Bank on Sunday. Neither event is likely to move the plan forward.
Martin Indyk, a former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told me that Trump’s proposal isn’t viable because the Palestinians will not accept what amounts to a “Bantustan”—a term for a small black enclave in apartheid South Africa—on just seventy per cent of the West Bank, with only a sliver of East Jerusalem as their capital, and Israeli sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, the third holiest site in Islam. “It will also be opposed by the right wing in Israel,” Indyk said, “which is vehemently opposed to a Palestinian state and giving up even one inch of Area C in the West Bank.”
The Trump plan calls for a remapping of the West Bank, including a land swap that would give the Palestinians desert territory disconnected from much of their state in exchange for prime real estate in the middle of the West Bank, according to Ilan Goldenberg, the former chief of staff to the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations at the State Department. Refugees who fled the wars in 1948 and 1967 would be granted some form of compensation, “wrapped in very condescending language,” but not even a symbolic number would be allowed to return, Goldenberg, who is now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, noted. Because the plan has security criteria set by Israel, Israel will decide when the occupation ends. “That is a recipe for a permanent occupation,” Goldenberg said. “If you put it in Israel’s hands, it will never happen.”
Trump’s proposal also calls for the demilitarization of Palestinian areas, including the total disarming of Hamas, which currently controls the Gaza Strip, and all extremist movements. Given the history of conflict in the area, getting all Palestinian factions to surrender weaponry despite Israel keeping all of its arms will be extraordinarily difficult. A long-standing problem in peace efforts has been the division among Palestinians, with P.L.O. politicians running the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza since the 2006 elections. (The polls were urged by the Bush Administration as a step toward consolidating the Palestinians into a more unified political whole to facilitate peace. It only further divided the Palestinian rivals.) The Trump plan’s long list of demands also includes an end to all “malign activities” among Palestinian groups, including eliminating the “culture of incitement” in textbooks. To create incentives, the fifty-page plan offers a thirty-page annex of economic plans for the West Bank and Gaza that was unveiled last summer. But it too was rejected by the Palestinians.
“The Trump proposals released today were formally presented as a basis for negotiations, but that’s not in fact how they are structured. They are structured as a diktat,” Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs who is now at the Brookings Institution, told me. “The Administration has made it clear that it plans to recognize Israeli sovereignty over all the land indicated for the Israelis in Trump’s map, whether the Palestinians accept it or not. That makes the Trump plan an imposed peace.”
Wittes noted that the timing of the plan conspicuously aids Trump and Netanyahu politically. Both men face tough reëlection bids this year, and also perilous legal challenges. The Israeli leader has been indicted on three corruption charges. He is now competing for his political life in the third election in a year. The last two polls failed to produce a government. Benny Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White Party and Netanyahu’s main rival, also endorsed Trump’s plan after he met separately with the President. But Israel faces its own divisions on peace. Naftali Bennett, the former head of the right-wing Jewish Home Party and the defense minister in Netanyahu’s coalition government, said on Tuesday that he and his party would “not allow the government of Israel to recognize a Palestinian state in any eventuality” or cede even a centimeter of land to the Arabs.
