Trump's peace plan

Those even casually following news of the recent Palestine-Israel peace proposal issued by the Trump White House have likely picked up on the global lack of excitement. One need only skim the headlines to get an accurate read on how underwhelmed the international community is. The plan's biggest supporters are its sponsors—President Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and defenders of each leader. After that, it seems to drop off. Some polite favorable comments have come in from Europe (UK, France) and the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar).

The "Vision," as the plan refers to itself, doesn't merit much attention. The proposal, entitled "Peace to Prosperity," lays out a framework for negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with US oversight. It was authored by the White House, with Netanyahu's office kept in the loop. The Palestinians were not involved. Furthermore, having read the writing on the wall (see my Dec. 8, 2017, blog post "Jerusalem"), Palestine's leadership rejected the proposal before it was even published. Correctly, as it turns out.

The essence of the the plan is a Palestinian "state," confined to a few islands of land surrounded by Israeli sovereign territory. No international border with Jordan. No coastal sovereignty for Gaza. No capital in East Jerusalem; the Palestinians can claim as a capital the areas east of East Jerusalem, on the other side of the wall, and get to pick the name. No military; the Palestinian Authority will tend to internal security, administrative concerns, and little else. Like Gaza, the West Bank will become (or continue to be) a self-superintended set of enclaves for all intents and purposes occupied from the outside.

Then there are the maps included in the Vision document.

The maps basically indicate everything one needs to know about the nature of the proposal. Previous chapters of the diplomatic history have been closer to realistic. For example, the Taba negotiations that followed Camp David II (2000) and were based on what were called the Clinton "parameters," envisioned the Palestinians living on 94-96 percent of the West Bank. Moreover, this territory would have been contiguous, not divided up into islands or cantons. The Trump plan instead allows Israel to keep the Jordan River Valley bordering Jordan (a third of the West Bank), and appears to break up the areas designated as part of West Bank Palestine.

However, the Vision's maps obscure with graphical treatments the details of where parts of the territory might be contiguous and might not (see map below). A serious and sincere peace proposal would not play such games with the cartography. One can well imagine the authors laughing as they did it.

The rest of the Vision is largely a mix of boilerplate, inaccurate or selective history, and the stuff of glossy literature. Weighing in at 181 pages, there are only about four or five pages that address core diplomatic issues. And then do so to suit Israel's longstanding priorities: a weak Palestinian state, annexation of the Jordan Valley, and retention of Israeli West Bank settlements.

Like its principal sponsors, the Vision lacks substance and diplomatic seriousness. It is a document of the moment, released in the context of impeachment (Trump) and indictment (Netanyahu), and will go the way of the other cynical proposals before it.

The Palestine-Israel conflict is a solvable conflict. It requires honest diplomacy based on international law. Realistic frameworks have been proposed in the somewhat recent past: the Clinton parameters, the 2002 Saudi plan, and the independent initiatives People's Voice and the Geneva Accord, both in 2003. In this latest installment, both international law and previous accomplishments were altogether dismissed.

Trump Plan, Appendix 1, Palestine