Syed Qamar Afzal Rizvi
PRESIDENT Trump released his long-awaited Middle East peace plan on Tuesday as he has currently briefed Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief political rival, Benny Gantz, at the White House. The said plan or so-called deal of the century, which specifies a map— outlining proposed new Israeli borders — unjustifiably granting Israeli sovereignty over much of the Jordan Valley, albeit a strategic area on the eastern frontier of the West Bank—abutting the Jordanian Vale. “We have the support of the prime minister, we have the support of the other parties, and we think we will ultimately have the support of the Palestinians, but we’re going to see,” Trump said on Monday while talking to the news reporters at the White House. According to some Israeli media reports, it will pave the way for Israel’s annexation of virtually all settlements in the West Bank, which Israel has controlled since the Six-Day War of 1967, endorsing ‘Israel’s full sovereignty over Jerusalem, and making no major provision for returning Palestinian refugees.
On 19 January 2017, a night before his inauguration as the 45th US President, Donald Trump stood on a stage in Washington and praised Jared Kushner. “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” he told his son-in-law at the VIP reception. Trump added that the deal he was going to ask Kushner to present – peace between Israel and the Palestinians – was the “toughest deal” to get. Three years later, the Trump Administration has presented Kushner’s document, widely known as “the deal of the century.” But with a jaundiced eye, Trump’s son-in-law Kushner decided to deal with the problem of history intruding on talks by engineering a proposed settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis without negotiating with the Palestinian leadership. “He said flat out, don’t talk to me about history,” said Aaron David Miller, a US peace negotiator for previous administrations who was consulted by Kushner. “He said, I told the Israelis and the Palestinians not to talk to me about history too.” A settler leader who spoke with confidentiality to The Times of Israel last week said the so-called Deal of the Century would endorse Israeli sovereignty over all West Bank settlements. While the Jordan Valley mayor spoke to The Times of Israel on Monday, saying he was unable to sleep because he was worried about the plan, which he deemed as horrible for settlements.
And yet seemingly, the Israeli right-wing blesses Trump’s deal because they believe the Palestinians will reject it — as they’ve already said they would, and as they’ve done to different and more generous US plans in the past. After they reject it, the right-wingers claim, the Israeli government will receive a green light enabling them to go ahead with annexation. Others on the right say that the plan, according to the details that have already been published, is good for Israel and it will give it the opportunity to assert its status in the areas under discussion. For the Israeli left-wing, however, the real issue seems to be what the deal and the timing of its release mean for the potential immunity of caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They ask why the American Administration is in such hurry and can’t wait five more weeks before publishing the deal, until after the upcoming election on 02 March.
Foreseeably, there are some fundamental elements that have to be used to judge the Trump team’s proposal. Understandably, the basic parameters are very clear. Whatever plan anyone proposes, it must be evaluated based on them. And these principles also argue some technical solutions that will be required to be part of any peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Firstly, there will need to be formal mutual recognition of the Jewish people’s attachment to the Land of Israel and the Palestinian people’s attachment to the Land of Palestine. Yet without that realisation on both sides, neither side could ever believe that the other is giving up on the conflict.
Secondly, an agreement on two states—Israel and Palestine—for two peoples must also include full rights for Israel’s 1.7 million Palestinian citizens and any Jewish settlers who choose to stay behind in a sovereign Palestinian state. And thirdly, the future Palestinian state will need to have clear borders based on the pre-1967 armistice lines that end Israel’s military occupation. There can be mutually agreed one-for-one land swaps where in exchange for Israel receiving territory inside the West Bank, it gives Palestine unpopulated land on its side of the armistice line. This could technically allow most Jewish settlers to be incorporated into Israel, but only if the Palestinian State would remain contiguous and viable.
Palestinian officials have rightly threatened to withdraw from the Oslo Accords signed in 1993 with Israel if United States President Donald Trump announces his Middle East peace plan. The Palestinian leadership was not invited and has already rejected Trump’s initiative amid tense relations with the US President over his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital. The Palestinians hold occupied East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state and argue Trump’s plan kills the two-state solution, the cornerstone of international Middle East diplomacy.
Trump said, ‘’Jerusalem will remain Israel’s undivided capital’’. But he also said under the plan, eastern Jerusalem would serve as a capital of a State of Palestine. But the demarcation of east Jerusalem is not clear. “We reject it and we demand the international community not be a partner to it because it contradicts the basics of international law and inalienable Palestinian rights,” Palestinian PM Mohammad Shtayyeh said. Nevertheless, whatever Trump attempts to do, whatever plan he has been supposed to release, as long as there remains a lack for a measure of equality of freedom, security and prosperity for both the Jews and the Palestinians in the Holy Land, any such partisan deal—fostering a unilateral approach which truncates the Palestinian land in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem—is certainly doomed to fail.
—The writer, an independent ‘IR’ researcher-cum-analyst based in Pakistan, is member of European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on IR, Critical Peace & Conflict Studies, also a member of Washington Foreign Law Society and European Society of International Law.
