Why the Trump-Netanyahu ‘peace deal’ is a sham

The peculiar thing about the ‘‘peace deal’’ between Israelis and Palestinians announced this week was obvious at a single glance.

There was United States President Donald Trump and his good buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, together at the podium, and an audience of US and Israeli officials who clapped at every opportunity. They were talking about a ‘‘two-state solution’’ and one of those states would have to be Palestinian – but there wasn’t a single Palestinian in the room.

The after-life of the ‘‘two-state’’ principle has already been much longer than its real life. It was born in the Oslo Accords of 1993, which were based on the belief that although Israel had conquered all of historic Palestine by 1967, it could not go on ruling over millions of Arabs forever.

Peace and prosperity could only come, therefore, if the Palestinians had their own state too. So the Oslo principle was that there should be two equal and democratic states living side by side.

The Oslo Accords died because Palestinian nationalists didn’t want to accept a state that included only one-sixth of former Palestine and Israeli nationalists didn’t see why the Palestinian Arabs should have even that much land.

Yet even two decades later almost nobody admits publicly that the two-state solution is long dead, because to say that commits you to a discussion of the remaining alternatives – and none of them is good. That’s why even this bizarre sham deal still talks about two states.

At every turn of the wheel, the size of the imaginary state on offer to the Palestinians dwindles. With Israel on the brink of formally annexing all the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, it’s down to about 10 per cent of former Palestine, and it will never actually happen. Yet the fictional destination of a Palestinian state must still be maintained. Why?

A real two-state solution is politically unsaleable in Israel, partly because of the Jewish majority’s security concerns, but mainly because the Jewish settlers want too much of the territory a Palestinian state would be built on.

But the Palestinians are not going to go away and there are about 5 million of them. They have already lived under Israeli military rule for more than 50 years. Can you really defend leaving them under military occupation for another 50?

If not, then the remaining alternatives are a two-state solution or a ‘‘one-state solution’’ in which Israel annexes all the occupied territories. But if Israel annex them then those 5 million Palestinian Arabs will be able to vote in Israeli elections – and Israel ceases to be a ‘‘Jewish state’’, although it remains a democratic one. Or else you don’t let them vote, in which case Israel becomes an apartheid state.

The rest of the Arab world has largely lost interest in the plight of the Palestinians. That’s why there was no need to have Palestinians at the great unveiling of the TrumpNetanyahu ‘‘peace deal’’. Palestinian consent is not necessary and when they reject it they can be vilified for rejecting ‘‘peace’’.

Netanyahu understands this perfectly. Whether Trump understands it doesn’t even matter.