I’m a Veteran Middle East Peace Negotiator. Trump’s Plan is the Most Dangerous I’ve Ever Seen

• I’m a Veteran Middle East Peace Negotiator. Trump’s Plan is the Most Dangerous I’ve Ever Seen
  by Aaron David Miller, https://www.timesofisrael.com/
  We may have been too pro-Israel at Camp David, but at least we tried to engage both sides. Trump’s team didn’t bother to try
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  WASHINGTON (JTA) — Fifteen years ago, I wrote a piece for The Washington Post titled “Israel’s Lawyer.” The conceit was pretty simple, though in some quarters it was seen as highly provocative: For too long, too many senior U.S. officials working on the Arab-Israeli peace process, including myself, had effectively been serving as attorneys for one side instead of working to achieve a peace agreement that was in the best interests of the United States, Israel and the Palestinians.
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  A decade and a half later, I have come to realize that I was clueless as to how far an administration might actually go in furthering Israel’s narrative at the expense of Palestinians — and how much they could undermine U.S. interests in the process. While negotiation teams I have served on may have acted as a partial broker, the bias of Trump’s peace team makes our missteps seem trivial in comparison.
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  “Israel’s lawyer” was a term I found in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs and resurrected for Secretary of State James Baker during the nine months leading up to the Madrid Conference in October 1991. Baker loved the idea because he understood that to reach an agreement, he’d need to balance the requirements of both sides. Yes, the United States has a special relationship with Israel, but if that bond became exclusive, America would lose the credibility, leverage and trust it needed from both sides to raise the odds of reaching an accord.
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  It’s no coincidence that the U.S. has succeeded in the peace process only three times — Kissinger’s three disengagement agreements with Israel, Syria and Egypt, 1973-75; Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty 1978-79; and Baker’s Madrid Conference. In each case, the U.S. lawyered for both sides.
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  Watching the past three years of the Trump administration’s handling of the peace process, it has become clear that the team that put the “Deal of the Century” together (many of whom were real lawyers) had an additional client far more important than Israel — Donald Trump.
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  I have worked on teams for U.S. presidents, too — between 1989 and 2000 for George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton. But we genuinely believed in working toward an outcome tethered to the U.S. national interests, not merely anchored in the political advantage and personal ego of the occupant of the White House.
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  During the Clinton administration, we had a policy of clearing drafts and positions with the Israelis, and generally gave Israel a much wider margin to influence key issues in the negotiations — especially when it came to security-related matters — than we ever gave to the Palestinians.
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  This was no secret. At the Camp David summit in July 2000, I vividly remember PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat asking me on the fourth day of the summit what the holdup was in turning over a draft paper that the United States had prepared for the Palestinians review. Erekat added that I should please tell the Israelis to hurry up and review the document so that we could accommodate their changes and get the document (ostensibly representing the U.S. position) back to the PLO.
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  But whatever mistakes our team made — our pro-Israel bent certainly among them — we tried to honestly wrestle with the tough issues in a way that would allow both Israel and the Palestinians to engage on them.
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