The ‘Deal of the Century’ as a Deliberate Deception

• The ‘Deal of the Century’ as a Deliberate Deception
  by Ibrahim Fraihat, https://www.aljazeera.com/
  Kushner’s plan recycles failed past proposals and will clearly not succeed. But was it meant to in the first place?
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  Proposing an economic approach to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is nothing new and it was definitely not pioneered by President Donald Trump and his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. It was put forward many times in the past by both the Israeli side, most prominently represented by Israeli leader Shimon Peres and his New Middle East vision, and by various international mediators, including the Quartet on the Middle East, which was created by the UN, US, EU and Russia after the Second Intifada.
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  Needless to say, all past proposals have failed for one simple reason: They all suffered from an imbalance between economics and politics. Kushner’s “deal of the century” has by far surpassed all others in this regard by completely decoupling politics from economic solutions.
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  Since the 1990 Madrid conference, the peace process had been built on the principle of “land for peace”, where Israel withdraws from Arab land it occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace and the normalisation of relations with the Palestinians and Arabs. This was also the core of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia.
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  Regardless of its shortcomings, the 1993 Oslo Accords provided a political vision for Peres’s plan – a two-state solution – which was followed by the 1994 Paris Protocol which established rules regulating economic relations between the Palestinians and Israelis.
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  Kushner decided to replace this principle with his idea of “peace to prosperity”, which effectively reduces the conflict to an economic problem that can be resolved by improving the living standard of the Palestinians.
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  The absence of a proposed solution for major political issues, particularly Palestinian statehood, the status of Jerusalem, and the right of return, render his proposal nothing more than an attempt to bribe the Palestinians into giving up self-determination.
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