“The implications of just publishing” President Donald Trump’s recent Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal “are enormous,” stated former Israeli ambassador to South Africa Alon Liel during a February 13 panel in Washington, DC. His comments, transmitted from abroad via Skype and phone, along with those of his fellow panelists hosted by the Gulf International Forum (GIF), indicated what a watershed the Trump plan presented for Israel and its Palestinian enemies.
About 60 audience members, including the Israel-hating imam Ali Siddiqui filled a basement conference room to attend a luncheon event moderated by former American diplomat and GIF advisor Patrick Theros. He noted that, unlike previous American Arab-Israeli peace initiatives, Trump’s “plan does not seek to persuade the warring parties to work out a resolution,” but only “allows the parties to work out some of the smaller details.” This “American-imposed settlement” includes a specific map for the first time since the 1947 United Nations General Assembly proposal to partition the British League of Nations Palestine Mandate.
Panelist Aaron David Miller examined the Trump plan’s novel nature on the basis of having been a policy expert under a half-dozen secretaries of state before retiring from the State Department in 2003. “We had our chance in 20-plus years of working on a single issue, without a lot of success,” he reflected upon his past peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians. Trump’s special envoy for the peace process, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, had sought Miller’s advice in recent years, but this Kushner “quite understandably, in my judgement, ignored, since, by my own account, we did not succeed.”
Like Theros, Miller noted that in previous Arab-Israeli peace initiatives American officials “have never, ever put out a document this long, this detailed” as the Trump plan’s 180 pages. Kushner had argued to Miller that everything “done in the past was too abbreviated.” Additionally, the Trump pro-Israel plan ran counter to his dictum that an American mediator “must lawyer for both sides” in order to achieve an “equitable and durable solution.”
Liel flatly concluded that the American “mediator didn’t speak with one of the sides,” the Palestinians. By contrast, the “dialogue with the Israeli side was very, very intensive.” As proof, he found that the plan contains typical Israeli spelling mistakes of Arab place names.
The plan’s Israeli influence is perhaps most evident in the plan’s map, under which Israel can annex 30 percent of the West Bank, including the strategic Jordan River valley and all Israeli settlements. Reflecting a broad Israeli political consensus noted by Liel, American and Israeli leaders are already proceeding with these territorial provisions, meaning “annexation is unavoidable.” “This is a new Israeli starting line in future negotiations,” he noted, as “you will need a [Nelson] Mandela to convince the Israeli public to get 29 percent” merely of the West Bank hereafter.
The Trump plan appeared to Liel as perhaps not a “mortal blow, but very close to it, to the idea of the two states,” the traditionally recommended solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Like others, he compared the various noncontiguous Palestinian territories surrounded by Israel under the plan’s envisioned Palestinian state to “South African Bantustans” under the former racist apartheid system. Thus henceforth Palestinians will shift their demands to an Arab-Jewish binational one-state solution and say “don’t give us the land, give us our rights.”
Anti-Israel Kuwaiti political science professor Shafeeq Ghabra was even more scathing towards Trump’s “hateful document” with its “colonial nature in the language.” Trump’s plan treats Palestinians “as on the other end of receiving the final decisions,” while territorially Israelis can say “this is our new bottom line now…we can squeeze you a little bit more.” In the plan’s text Israel and the United States “are now one party,” leading him to ask, “This is an American document? I can understand this is an Israeli document.”
Considering the plan’s map, Ghabra stated that “I don’t want to call it a state. It has no borders, it has no continuity,” rather only “limited lands, divided lands, a part here, a part there.” “We have passed the two-state solution altogether,” he summarized, and Trump’s plan “will take us to a constant state of conflict” around some sort of “apartheid situation.” Currently any suggestions by Liel of a single state will be “one state that has ‘haves’ and ‘have nots,’” with “people who have rights and people who have zero rights.”
Yet Ghabra’s various disturbing and questionable views placed in question whether Israel’s Arab neighbors could responsibly wield political power with peace and prosperity for all. He asserted that Palestinians were an “indigenous people,” but simultaneously referenced the historic Arabization that amalgamated various people beginning with the Middle East’s seventh-century Islamic conquest. He thereby objected to the plan’s statement that “Palestinians have never had a state” and noted that the “Palestinians were part of a larger Arab population, nation that has been in Palestine since 1,400 years.” However he did not explain why self-determination for such a regional Arab population foreordains any particular political territorial demarcation involving a Palestinian state.
The son of Arab refugees from Israel’s 1948 independence war, Ghabra rejected the Trump plan’s comparison of them with Jewish refugees who fled Arab states (and later post-1979 Iran) in the decades following Israel’s creation. While the Arabs had not wanted to become refugees, the “Jews who came from the Arab world, Israel wanted them to come, worked very hard to make sure they come, and it was part of building that state.” Yet Mizrachi Jews oppressed by Muslim backlash to Israel hardly engaged in voluntary immigration to Israel (or places like Europe) any more than Ashkenazi Jews who fled Nazi persecution in Europe.
Contrary to the Trump proposal, Ghabra also had little appreciation of Israeli self-defense, as he, for example, fantasized that Israel’s preemption of manifest Arab aggression in the 1967 Six Day War “was not a defensive war.” He dismissed the plan’s emphasis on Israel’s security by saying that “there is no way the Palestinians, a disarmed population, can threaten Israel.” This might surprise Israelis who have suffered under Hamas rockets or terrorism like Fatah’s “first militant action” in 1965, but then again, he wondered why the proposal listed only Hamas, and not Israel, as a terrorist group.
Likewise Ghabra rejected the Trump plan’s stipulation that the Palestinian Authority (PA) end its “pay for slay” terrorist support program. He dubiously asked why Palestinian “prisoners’ and martyrs’ families should not be receiving any payments” similar to past support for the Irish Republican Army and African National Congress. Such support for jihadists made his claim ring hollow that “everything Kuwait stands for is international legality,” given Kuwait’s 1991 liberation from Iraqi occupation.
The Trump plan appeared to Ghabra as a “wakeup call up for the Palestinians…to put their act together” and “reactivate their national liberation movement.” In pleasant, politically correct terms, he called for Palestinians to “be very democratic in their approach” in forging diverse global coalitions and for “more nonviolent resistance.” Therefore “reviving the Palestine Liberation Organization” and “reinjecting life into the Palestinian diaspora and its ability to organize can happen.”
Ghabra’s fellow panelists, including Miller, saw less possibility of the Palestinians mustering international support for a community fractured between Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. This “looks like Noah’s Ark,” with two of everything and colored Arab state reaction to the Trump plan. This “is a mixture of exhaustion, frustration, anger with Palestinian incompetence and dysfunction, animosity against Hamas, and a desire, frankly, to keep the lines of communication with Washington open.”
“If there ever was a balance of power that was somehow arrayed to support Palestinians, it has virtually disappeared,” Miller concluded. In recent years Arab states had become preoccupied with domestic instability, and Iranian and jihadist threats, he observed, while Ghabra called the Arab world a “soccer field for different states” like China, Russia, or the United States. Miller noted that the Arab world’s “silence was deafening” in response to Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge Gaza military campaign with at least 800 deaths, excepting Qatar along with Turkey.
Liel concurred that the international community lacks “any serious leverage on Israel,” which “is a strong country today, has succeeded tremendously” in all realms of military, economic, and technological power. Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States particularly want to strengthen strategic and business relations with Israel. Internationally “no individual government, by the way, even the big ones, wants to quarrel with Israel, especially when it is backed by the United States.”
The Trump plan thus marked decisive Israeli strength in relation to the Palestinians, even though the panelists such as Miller predicted the plan would quickly fade into obscurity. Given the plan’s largely negative reception internationally, particularly among the Palestinians, he claimed that the plan had already had its “proverbial 15 minutes” of fame. Moreover the plan appeared to him unworkable, as the Israeli military would oppose having Israel’s borders run 1,700 kilometers around Palestinian enclaves.
The Trump plan nonetheless heralds a well-deserved Israeli victory over its Palestinian foes. American approval in the Trump plan for Israeli annexation of large West Bank areas, with the possibility of even more future extensions of Israeli sovereignty, forecloses for Palestinians a traditional nation-state, and with good reason. There is even less evidence that Muslim-majority Arabs in a Palestinian state would externally contribute to peace, particularly with Israel, and internally benefit Palestinian domestic prosperity than among the other 22 existing Muslim-majority Arab states.
Palestinians will have to seek other long-term avenues for self-determination. This could involve outright inclusion in Israel as loyal citizens, or the development of polities similar to Europe’s microstates such as Monaco that are integrated into larger, more powerful states. Prerequisite for any such future peace will be that Palestinians and other Muslims worldwide accept defeat in their longstanding jihad to destroy Israel.