Trump’s pathetic plan for Palestine
President Donald Trump’s long-promised “peace plan” for the Middle East, supposedly devised by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, has finally been delivered three years into his presidency. The result? Further proof of this administration’s ineptitude in dealing with foreign affairs.
To be fair, I could have just as easily described the plan as emblematic of “America’s ineptitude” in the Middle East and Israel/Palestine, in particular. The history of successive American presidents banging their heads against the wall trying to solve the conflict backs up that argument.
But Mr. Trump clearly sees the Israel-Palestine conflict, as he sees so many things, as fodder for scooping up more money and votes.
Like Ukraine, which I wrote about last week, the Palestinians made another easy target for Mr. Trump. He could manipulate their pinched position to help himself politically without much blowback. After all, relatively few Americans are overcome with concern for the stateless Palestinians.
Mr. Trump’s “plan” for the Palestinians is a joke. Mr. Kushner’s team did not even meet with the Palestinians. Instead, the United States, under Mr. Trump’s inept leadership, has continually stuck its fingers in the Palestinians’ eyes.
The administration moved the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a city the Palestinians hoped to one day call their capital. The administration also acknowledged Israel’s claim to an occupied portion of the Golan Heights. Now, just in time to help Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu avoid jail time for corruption charges and possibly secure re-election in
Israel’s March 2 elections comes the Trump administration’s peace plan, which would endorse Israeli plans to annex Palestinian settlements in the West Bank.
The administration’s map of its proposed Palestinian state, chopped into noncontiguous pieces, looks familiar to me, having watched the white South Africans try to sell the nonwhite South Africans and the world on tribal “homelands,” as opposed to agreeing to majority rule. These areas included Bophuthatswana, Ciskei and other pieces of generally undesirable land — no diamonds, no gold, no water, etc. — that the Africans were supposed to attach themselves to in place of a whole South Africa. President Ronald Reagan liked the idea. The Africans and many Americans did not, and it eventually got scrapped after a vigorous opposition (some of which came from within the vicious, depraved “deep state”).
Now it’s the Palestinians who are being offered a raw deal by an American administration devoid of both a sense of justice and a reasonable comprehension of Middle Eastern politics.
The Palestinians have already rejected the plan. The Americans and Israelis had hoped the Sunni Muslim Arab states of the area would buy into the plan as the Sunnis’ ally with Israel in the struggle against Iran. No luck with that, though. The Arab League has also already rejected the Trump proposal.
Who knows how the plan will impact the U.S. presidential election later in the year. If I had to guess, I would say its impact will be minimal. The Israel-Palestine issue is probably far too complicated, with far too much history behind it, for it to serve as a frontline American electoral issue.
But that won’t stop most Americans from recognizing that Mr. Trump’s plan for Israel and Palestine is not going to work, just as they can recognize the seamy motivation behind its structure.