While the Arab states rejected the Trump Plan collectively after a vote of the Arab League on February 1, Western countries are still evaluating the plan.
Many Western countries and international bodies said they needed time to assess the plan, reiterating their support for the longtime international consensus favoring a two-state solution to the conflict on the basis of the pre-1967 borders.
Again we have the deliberate avoidance of any mention of the Palestine Mandate, and the territory, including all of the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, that it included. If “many Western countries” believe that the “two-state solution to the conflict” should be based on the “basis of the pre-1967 borders,” they haven’t been paying attention either to the Palestine Mandate, or to the meaning of U.N. Resolution 242 as set out by its author, Lord Caradon.
Article 80 of the U.N. Charter (known as the “Jewish People’s Article”) reiterated the continuing relevance, for the U.N., as the successor organization to the League of Nations, of the Palestine Mandate’s provisions and maps. Israel retained, and retains, its legal claim to the territory assigned to the Palestine Mandate. Further, U.N. Resolution 242 does not say anything about either a two-state solution or about an Israeli withdrawal “on the basis of the pre-1967 borders [sic for 1949 armistice lines].” Israel is permitted by U.N. Resolution 242 to make territorial adjustments that will ensure that it has “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognizable borders.”
And though the proposal provides for a Palestinian state, it falls far short of Palestinian hopes for a return of all the territories captured by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967.
Israel has a legal claim – or rather, two independent claims — to retaining control of the West Bank. The first is the Palestine Mandate itself. All of the territory from Mt. Hermon in the north to the Red Sea in the south, and from the Jordan River in the east, to the Mediterranean in the west, was assigned to the Mandate for incorporation into the Jewish National Home, which would then become the State of Israel. Jordan managed to seize the West Bank in the 1948-1949 war, and to hold onto it until the Six-Day War in 1967, as the military occupier, but without a legal claim. When Israel wrested the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, it was finally in a position a to enforce the legal claim to the West Bank that it had never relinquished.
The second claim is based on U.N. Resolution 242 (1967), which – as its chief drafter, British ambassador to the U.N. Lord Caradon, noted — allowed Israel to make territorial adjustments so as to retain territory it needed in order to possess “secure and recognized borders.” Lord Caradon explicitly rejected the Arab attempt to have Resolution 242 require Israeli withdrawal “from all the territories” occupied in the recent conflict; instead, he insisted, Israel was only required to withdraw from “territories,” based on its security needs. Israeli military men are in agreement that to have “secure and recognized borders,” Israel has to retain the Jordan Valley and some parts of the West Bank. In 1967 President Johnson asked the Joint Chiefs to send a military delegation to Israel to report on the territory that Israel would have to retain for its security; the American military men concluded that Israel would have to retain, in the West Bank, the Jordan Valley at a minimum. They also thought Israel should maintain control over other strategic parts of the West Bank, a sliver of the Sinai, Gaza, and the Golan. Israel decided, in the end, to return the entire Sinai to Egypt, amounting to 88% of the total territory Israel won in the Six-Day War, and to withdraw from Gaza to allow self-rule by the Gazan Palestinians. But the West Bank and the Golan were a different matter. Israel has annexed the Golan Heights, from which for almost twenty years the Syrians rained down fire on the Israeli farmers below. As for the West Bank, the IDF believed that retention of part of the West Bank, aside from the Jordan Valley, was necessary if Israel were to be able to control the invasion route from the east, holding off invaders and buying time until Israel’s reservists could be mobilized.
Egypt, the first Arab country to reach a peace deal with Israel, urged Israelis and Palestinians to carefully study the plan, and Saudi Arabia expressed support for a return to negotiations. The European Union said it needed to study the outline more closely.
The United Arab Emirates called it “an important starting point.” Qatar welcomed the initiative but stressed its support for a Palestinian state “including East Jerusalem” as its capital.
Those were their initial remarks. But four days later, in Cairo, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Oman had changed their minds, or pretended to, and voted with the rest of the members of the Arab League to reject the Trump Plan. That plan was no longer “an important starting point,” but needed to be rejected.
Iran and Turkey had [immediately] both rejected the proposal. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called the plan “satanic” and vowed that it would never be implemented, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared it as “absolutely unacceptable.”
It is fascinating that while many Arab states (though not Jordan) had initially praised the Trump peace plan as a “starting point” for further negotiations, two non-Arab states – Turkey and Iran – were virulently opposed as soon as the plan was announced. And their opposition put those Arab states that had first praised the plan in a bind. If they continued to be seen as favoring the Trump Plan, the Iranians and Turks would undoubtedly have carried on a propaganda campaign against these “Arab sellouts and collaborators with Trump and Netanyahu.” That was something the Arab leaders wanted to avoid. Hence they decided to go along with the group, whatever their inner reservations, and voted to reject the plan.
Regionally, Arab states in the Gulf have moved closer to the Jewish state in recent years amid shared hostility to Iran.
It is not only that the Arab states of the Gulf – Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain (Qatar is the odd man out, being shunned by the other countries precisely because of its friendly ties with Iran) – share with Israel a “hostility” toward Iran. It is that Israel is their most useful and potent ally against Iran. It is Israel that launched Stuxnet, that startlingly successful demonstration of cyberwarfare, which caused Iranian centrifuges to speed up and self-destruct; it is Israel that assassinated key Iranian nuclear scientists; it is Israel that smuggled out of Tehran to the West thousands of Iranian nuclear records; it is Israel that has repeatedly bombed Iranian bases in Syria and, so far, prevented Iran from establishing permanent sites in that country; it is Israel that shares intelligence on Iran with Saudi Arabia and the UAE (and possibly with Egypt, too). Finally, Israel’s steady anti-Iran voice in the corridors of power in Washington is recognized and appreciated by the Gulf Arabs.
Must the Trump Plan, over which a half-dozen people labored for 2½ years, after this Arab League rejection, be relegated, as Abbas claims, “to the dustbin of history,” or can it be revived? Despite voting as they did, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Bahrain, Egypt, and Oman still have to face an implacable Iran, making trouble through its proxies, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Shi’a militias in Iraq. Therefore, they still have need of Israel. Their security ties with the Jewish state will remain in place. Abbas has perhaps been fooled by this Arab League vote into assuming that the “Palestinian cause” is still as important to his fellow Arabs as it once was. We’ll see if his assumption is correct or if, as I think, the Arab League vote against the Trump Plan was the last gasp of the Palestinian rejectionists and those they blackmailed — “do you want to be seen to care less for us than the Iranians?” — into supporting them.
If Abbas’s own people – those he holds in thrall and whose economic distress, which the Trump Plan would so greatly alleviate, is a matter of indifference to him — begin to read the Trump Plan online, some of them, realizing what a fantastic deal they had in fact been offered, they will not be pleased with Abbas’s hysterical rejection of a plan that convincingly promised the Palestinians much better lives. The Trump Plan has now set the standard for all future efforts at Middle East peacemaking. That Plan can’t be cast aside, ignored, or forgotten by those who come after. They will have to take the plan, and all its careful detail, into account. It was, and remains, whatever the fanfaronade by Abbas in Cairo, a magnificent effort. It has changed everything.
Beverly says
Stop the flow of money to these terrorist sponsors. Cut them off at the knees and see how long they last. Why we haven’t already done this is a mystery to me.
jewdog says
These “Palestinian” peace plans are the mistake we keep making while expecting a different result.
Rarely says
Who was it who said: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.?
Rueben_Singh says
Palestinians Are “Disappointed”
Let me correct that for you all
Palestinians Are “Disappointment”
gravenimage says
Palestinians Are “Disappointed” In Initial Arab Response — Arab League Then Rejects the Trump Plan (Part 3)
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Just angry that other Muslims were not quick enough in rejecting Americans and Jews…