Trump's Plan for the Middle East Has Nothing to Do With Peace

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled their Middle East peace plan on Tuesday. While it’s more substantive than many expected, it doesn’t amount to a peace plan at all.

First, the fact that the Palestinians played no role in negotiating or vetting the document means, by itself, that this is an imposition—something like the surrender terms handed down by a victorious army—rather than an accord reached by two parties.

Second, it declares the existence of a Palestinian state with a capital on the outskirts of East Jerusalem and the prospect of a U.S. embassy—but it also prohibits this state from forming an army, meaning it is not really a sovereign state after all.

Third, it freezes the expansion of Israeli settlements for the next four years—but it sanctifies all the settlements erected to date, allows more houses to be built on land already held, and annexes all occupied land, including all the holy sites in all of Jerusalem, to become officially part of Israel. If any other state pulled such a move unilaterally, it would be widely denounced as a violation of international law. Until Trump, every U.S. president since 1967—Republican and Democrat—has refused to recognize the occupied territories as part of Israel: in part for moral reasons, in part to nudge Israel into a treaty that would involve trading space for security. However hard to reach, that is the precondition for a lasting peace, and it is now off the table.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-s-plan-for-the-middle-east-has-nothing-to-do-with-peace/ar-BBZrCkx?ocid=msn360

Jared Kushner, architect of Trump’s Middle East peace plan, still doesn’t get it

Senior White House adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner spent three years working on the Trump administration’s newly released Israel-Palestine peace plan. Yet the main talking point he’s using to sell the proposal reveals the fundamental problem at the heart of the plan itself: the administration’s tacit endorsement of Israel’s continued illegal settlements in Palestinian territory.

In multiple interviews right after the administration released its proposal on Tuesday, Kushner said Israel’s rapid growth — in other words, the settlements — are precisely why Palestinian leaders should make a deal now.

“If we don’t do this today, at the rate at which Israel is growing, I think that it will never be able to be done,” Kushner told Al Jazeera. “So we see this as the last chance for the Palestinians to have a state.”

He didn’t misspeak, which we know because he repeated this same talking point over an hour later. “This is something that we inherited, the situation where Israel continues to grow and grow,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/jared-kushner-architect-of-trump-s-middle-east-peace-plan-still-doesn-t-get-it/ar-BBZpYio?ocid=msn360

Trump’s Israel-Palestine “peace plan” is a con

Donald Trump’s “peace plan” isn’t a plan for advancing Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. It’s a plan for scuttling them.

The president released the long-awaited political framework of his “Peace to Prosperity” plan on Tuesday afternoon after a White House ceremony featuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The proposal is missing a signature feature of every prior peace plan: a path to a viable Palestinian state. It divides up the Palestinian territories and surrounds them by Israel, and gives Israel total control over Palestinian security — allowing a future Palestinian government to exercise full control over its own land only when Israel deems it acceptable. It’s a kind of state-minus: a Palestine without much of its land and subservient to Israel for basic functions.

“Trump can try to make this a Palestinian state by calling it a state. But it ain’t ever gonna whistle,” writes Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-s-israel-palestine-peace-plan-is-a-con/ar-BBZpO45?ocid=msn360