United States President Donald Trump’s team for drafting a new American plan for partitioning Israel into two states issued a joint statement on their work Wednesday, cautioning that “no one will be fully pleased” with the contents of their proposal.
The Trump team charged with drawing up the plan is led by the president’s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, the president’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner and Nikki Haley, the administration’s envoy to the United Nations.
The statement was issued amid intensive discussions within the administration over when to release the plan to the public.
“No one will be fully pleased with our proposal, but that’s the way it must be if real peace is to be achieved. Peace can only succeed if it is based on realities,” said the team.
Greenblatt, who is primarily responsible for day-to-day work on the plan, disseminated the statement on Twitter in Hebrew, Arabic and English.
White House officials have said that the plan is essentially complete and could be released to the public once the team feels the timing is right.
Trump’s people have also acknowledge that their plan will likely to force both Palestinians and Israelis to accept difficult compromises to our aspirations and national narratives,
By pushing a plan Trump’s people acknowledge”no one will be fully pleased” with, the administration is adopting one of the major errors underlying all previous attempts at ending the conflict. Forcing Israelis and Palestinians to accept compromises to our aspirations and national narratives simply can’t succeed.
What no American administration has understood or wanted to understand until now is that Israeli-Palestinian peace can’t be achieved by forcing each side to concede on issues vitally important to us. Peace can only come through reaching a solution that allows Israelis and Palestinians to fully experience victory according to how victory is defined in each of our respective narratives.
For this to take place, we all must resist Washington’s top-down solutions and examine the core aspirations and grievances of each people, which would ultimately allow for the creation of a larger narrative inclusive enough to encompass both ostensibly rival narratives.
The goal shouldn’t be to meet in the middle, with each side continuing to feel justifiably suspicious of the other, but rather winning together through a solution that allows us to transcend the conflict’s destructive either/or paradigm.
The new American plan isn’t different from previous imperialist attempts to partition our country into two states. The significant difference may lie in Trump’s belief in his own ability to bulldoze it through Israeli and Palestinian opposition.
The president has spent months positioning all the parties for a successful implementation of his plan.
By moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in such an ostentatious and divisive manner that played in the international press as a major Israeli diplomatic triumph over the Palestinians, Trump and his team have fostered a political atmosphere in which Israel owes Washington big.
By diplomatically indebting Israel to his administration and beating the Palestinian political leadership into submission, Trump seems to believe he can succeed where his predecessors have failed in pushing through Washington’s traditional two-state agenda.
