Can Palestinians Play Off Europe Against the US as Peace Plan Looms?

- Can Palestinians Play Off Europe Against the US as Peace Plan Looms?
by James Reinl, https://mondoweiss.net/
Against the gloomy backdrop of repeated diplomatic setbacks under the Trump administration, talks on Israeli settlements at the UN this month offered a brief ray of sunshine for the embattled Palestinian officials who showed up in New York.
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Despite the hotly-anticipated release of a United States plan for Middle East peace that is widely tipped to favor Israelis over Palestinians, many diplomats at the UN meeting on May 9 rallied behind the goal that, one day, Palestinians should run their own country.
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That aspiration — a bedrock of negotiations for decades — is being put on the back-burner by US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser who says he does not want to get bogged down in such contentious terms as “two-state solution”.
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Jonathan Allen, the deputy UN ambassador for Britain, one of Washington’s stalwart global allies, called Israeli settlement-building in the West bank “illegal” and an “obstacle to peace” that threatened the “viability of a two-state solution”.
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Envoys from Belgium, Kuwait, Germany, France and elsewhere echoed these concerns at the meeting, which was organised by Indonesia to coincide with Israel’s national day and featured such prominent critics of Israel as James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute.
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Palestinian officials needed a fillip. For months, they have faced colossal setbacks under a Trump administration that has shifted the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and cut funding for Palestinian refugees.
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Palestinian officials view Kushner’s plan, dubbed the “deal of the century”, as a sop to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that will nix their plans to create their own state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip — all territory Israel captured in 1967.
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The Palestinian UN ambassador, Riyad Mansour, said Washington was trying to bully the Palestinians into accepting an unfavorable deal that was little more than a “pretext” for Israel to extend its borders by annexing swathes of the West Bank.
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The specter of annexation was raised by Netanyahu, who vowed in the final days of a re-election campaign he won on April 9 to annex Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a move that would kill off prospects for a viable Palestinian state.
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