Amid difficulties, let’s forge new Middle East peace path

This week marks the

40th anniversary of the Camp David accords — the high-water mark of Middle East peacemaking. How far we have fallen since then.

Rather than a breakthrough, Israelis and Palestinians seem to be inching closer and closer to a total breakdown. Without some dramatic advance, there is a real chance that whatever Palestinian governance exists will crumble, and Israel will have to take full responsibility for the health, education and welfare of the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel would then have to decide whether to govern the West Bank with one legal authority or two, which would mean Israel would be choosing between bi-nationalism and apartheid, both disasters for a Jewish democracy.

So many people are acting badly. Hamas is pursuing a strategy of human sacrifice in Gaza — throwing wave after wave of protesters against the Israeli border fence to die without purpose or even much notice anymore. It is shameful.

Hamas has been a curse on the Palestinian people. Hamas, with its relentless tunnel-digging into Israel and border assaults — unaccompanied by any offer of a two-state solution — does everything to make Israelis feel strategically insecure and morally secure about holding territories.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel uses all his intelligence to find ways to make sure the Palestinians get blamed in the U.S. for any absence of progress — without offering any ideas on how to separate from the Palestinians to avoid the terrible choices of bi-nationalism and apartheid.

President Donald Trump is the first U.S. president to have not just a pro-Israel strategy but also a pro-right-wing Jewish settler strategy. Seeking to please evangelical Christians and far-right Jewish megadonors, Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — without asking Israel for anything in return. Now he’s eliminating U.S. aid for Palestinian development, hospitals and education programs as punishment for Palestinians not negotiating on Jared Kushner’s still-undefined peace plan.

Meanwhile in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority is refusing to negotiate with the Trump team out of anger over Trump’s ridiculously onesided approach and his moving of the embassy and out of frustration for receiving no credit from Israel or the U.S. for its security cooperation in the West Bank.

May I make a suggestion? Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, should go to America’s four key Arab allies — Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and propose that they collectively say “yes” to engaging Trump and Kushner if the U.S. plan includes two criteria: It calls for a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank and it grants Palestinians some form of sovereignty in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, where 300,000 Arabs already live. (The authority will also have to agree that its state will be demilitarized.)

This would say to

Trump: If your plan does not include the bare minimum of a Palestinian state and some Palestinian sovereignty in Arab districts of Jerusalem, don’t bother bringing it out.

We’re again at a fateful moment. For the Palestinians, it’s choose nihilism or pacifism. For Israel, it’s choose separation from the Palestinians or get bi-nationalism or apartheid.

For Kusher and Trump, it’s either be serious — and be ready to take a tough stance with all parties, including Israel — or stay home.