President’s peace plan pleases only Israel
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited Middle East plan Tuesday, winning immediate praise from a beaming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but a swift rejection from the Palestinians, who called it “nonsense.”
Trump’s plan calls for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state, but it falls far short of minimal Palestinian demands and would leave sizable chunks of the occupied West Bank in Israeli hands.
Netanyahu said he would move forward Sunday and ask his Cabinet to approve plans to annex West Bank territory — an explosive move that is likely to be met with harsh international reaction.
Trump called his plan a “win-win” for both Israel and the Palestinians, and Netanyahu called it a “great plan for Israel.”
At a speech in the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the plan as “nonsense.”
“We say 1,000 no’s to the Deal of the Century,” Abbas said, using a nickname for Trump’s proposal.
“We will not kneel and we will not surrender,” he said, adding that the Palestinians will resist the plan through “peaceful, popular means.”
With Netanyahu standing beside him, Trump presented the plan at a White House ceremony filled with other Israeli officials and allies, including evangelical Christian leaders and wealthy Republican donors but no Palestinian representatives.
The ceremony came amid Trump’s impeachment trial and a U.S. election year, and after Netanyahu was indicted on counts of fraud, breach of trust and bribery in three separate cases. The longtime Israeli leader, who denies any wrongdoing, also faces a March 2 parliamentary election, Israel’s third in less than a year.
The Palestinians seek all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem — areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war — for their independent state and propose the removal of more than 700,000 Israeli settlers from these areas.
But as details emerged, it became clear that the U.S. plan sides heavily with Netanyahu’s hard-line nationalist vision for the region and shunts aside many of the Palestinians’ core demands.
Under the terms of the “peace vision” that Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, has been working on for nearly three years, all settlers would remain in place and Israel would retain sovereignty over all of its settlements as well as the strategic Jordan Valley.
The proposed Palestinian state would also include more than a dozen Israeli “enclaves,” with the entity’s borders monitored by Israel. In addition, the areas of east Jerusalem offered to the Palestinians consist of poor, crowded neighborhoods located behind a hulking concrete separation barrier.
The only concession the plan appears to demand of Israel is a four-year freeze on the establishment of new Israeli settlements in certain areas of the West Bank. But Netanyahu clarified later that this only applied to areas where there are no settlements and Israel has no immediate plans to annex, and that he considered the plan to impose no limitations on construction.
Trump said he sent a letter to Abbas to tell him that the territory the plan has set aside for a new Palestinian state will remain open and undeveloped for four years.
Thousands of Palestinians protested in Gaza City ahead of the announcement, burning pictures of Trump and Netanyahu and raising a banner reading “Palestine is not for sale.”
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the plan’s release, said they expected negative responses from the Palestinians, as well as Turkey and Iran, but were hopeful that Jordan and Egypt, the only two Arab nations to have peace treaties with Israel, would not reject it outright.
Jordan gave the plan a cool reaction, saying it remained committed to a two-state solution based on Israel’s pre-1967 lines.
Egypt, the first Arab country to reach a peace deal with Israel, urged Israelis and Palestinians to study the plan. The European Union also said it needed to study it.
The Arab League chief, Ahmed Abuel-gheit said the Palestinian reaction would define the Arab response. He spoke after meeting with Palestinian official Jibril Rajoub at the Arab League headquarters in Cairo. The Palestinians refuse to even speak to Trump, and they called for support from Arab leaders.