On Tuesday and Wednesday, delegates from across the Middle East met in Bahrain to discuss, among other things, the “economic portion” of the Trump administration’s proposal for Israeli-Palestinian peace; its political complement remains under wraps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), boycotted the meeting and rejected the plan even before it was made public, while most foreign-policy experts have been sharply critical of its contents. Comparing this plan with those that preceded it, Jonathan Tobin writes:
All previous administrations have paid some lip service to economic issues, with many issuing their own plans that were not dissimilar to the one President Trump just proposed. They have all taken the approach the Palestinians say they prefer: [to attempt] to strong-arm Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution. Yet that strategy never succeeded, no matter how much pressure presidents like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama put on the Jewish state, and no matter how many times Israel said “yes” to two states as they did a number of times in the past twenty years. . . . At some point, the foreign-policy professionals should have figured out that the old approach was never going to work.
That is, in essence, what [Jared Kushner], [Jason] Greenblatt, and company have done by attempting to restart the conversation about peace in a different way. . . . Trump was right to try to end his predecessors’ coddling of Palestinian fantasies of defeating Israel, which is what their policies of non-recognition of Jerusalem and refusing to condition aid on ending support for terror amounted to.
The problem is that the Palestinians’ century-old war on Zionism has become inextricably linked to their national identity to the point where it is impossible for anyone inside their political structure to imagine normal life alongside a Jewish state. . . . If Trump’s plan is going to fail—and it will—[failure] can be attributed to these reasons. It’s not because previous administrations understood the conflict any better, or that the focus on economics is wrongheaded. If this latest approach doesn’t work, then the blame should fall on those responsible—the Palestinians—not on the ideas behind the plan itself.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/what-the-trump-peace-plan-cannot-accomplish/