Trump’s Plan for Israel and Palestine: One More Step Away From Peace

• Trump’s Plan for Israel and Palestine: One More Step Away From Peace
  by ZAHA HASSAN, https://carnegieendowment.org/, 11 Dec 2018
  Seventy years since the UN affirmed the right of return for Palestinian refugees, Middle East peace is further away than ever. The Trump administration’s new plan is unlikely to help.
  –
  With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition in peril, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration must carefully consider whether and when to release its parameters for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Netanyahu, who is critical to selling the plan, is in no rush. Those to his right think it’s a waste of time and the vast majority of Israelis don’t believe it will lead to peace. On this, most Palestinians agree. Over time, U.S. peace parameters have moved further away from international law and a peace agreement Palestinians could accept.
  –
  The last iteration of U.S. parameters came two years ago, during the waning days of president Barack Obama’s administration. Then secretary of state John Kerry’s aim was to contextualize the president’s decision not to veto a UN Security Council resolution that reaffirmed the illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution. Though largely a restatement of the previous administration’s parameters, there was an innovation: a call for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
  –
  By contrast, Trump’s reported plan will depart from long-standing U.S. policies on several points. On the negotiating table that Trump is setting, the status of Jerusalem and refugee claims have been removed, and with those files, Palestinians argue, any possibility of an agreement they could sign. Trump’s Middle East peace team is moving forward with a Gaza-plus plan: a statelet in Gaza enlarged by annexing part of the Sinai. U.S. General David Petraeus has described the idea as a “Sinai Riviera.” The apparent aim is to coax Palestinians into swallowing the bitter pill of indefinite Israeli occupation and eventual annexation of the West Bank. In exchange for Gaza-plus, Palestinians must accept what Netanyahu has dubbed “a state-minus.”
  –
  With a healthy infusion of donor money and the easing of movement and access restrictions, Trump and Netanyahu believe that Palestinians can be lulled into trading sovereignty or political and civil rights for an upgrade to their quality of life. While not an entirely novel approach, the administration’s new parameters seem likely to further push the idea that Palestinian agreement to any plan is optional.
  –
  Israel’s recent passage of the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, together with U.S. parameters requiring Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, has now foreclosed any chance for a negotiated two-state solution. The U.S. Middle East peace team appears to understand this and is moving on. But U.S. negotiators might not grasp that requiring Palestinian recognition of Israel as an ethno-religious state guarantees that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be transformed into a potentially lengthy anti-apartheid struggle.
  –
  EVER-EVOLVING U.S. PARAMETERS
  Regardless of which political party has held the presidency, U.S. engagement on Israeli-Palestinian peace since the Oslo Accords has tended to weaken the Palestinian negotiating position by moving away from the requirements of international law. Though the United States can neither unilaterally change Israel’s legal obligations as an occupying power nor erase decades of UN Security Council resolutions that make Israel’s acquisition of territory by force inadmissible or its settlements illegal, almost every new U.S. pronouncement of parameters has chipped away at international resolve in ways detrimental to Palestinian rights and sovereignty.
  –
  read more.

end