We Must Resist the Trump Plan

United States President Donald Trump released his long awaited two-state “Deal of the Century” plan on Tuesday.

Announcing the plan from the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) at his side, the president thanked Netanyahu for “having the courage” to make the concessions that would allow for the Trump plan’s implementation.

The plan, which aims to divide the country into two separate states – each dependent on Washington for survival, calls for significant portions of the West Bank and even small parts of the Negev desert to be ceded to the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.

It also calls for most of Jerusalem to remain unified under Israeli sovereignty but turning some of the city’s more peripheral Palestinians neighborhoods into the capital of a Palestinian state.

Like previous Western plans to partition the country into two states, the Trump plan superimposes on Palestinians a strong desire for a nation-state, despite the fact that much of the Palestinian street tends to view the nation-state as a European social construct imported to the region by British and French colonizers a century ago.

Even worse, the Palestinian state being offered by Trump could barely even be called a state, as it comprises minimal non-contiguous territories and would have no real sovereignty or defensive capabilities. In an era when so many Palestinian activists have shifted from a national struggle for political independence to a civil rights struggle for equality within a single state, Trump’s plan offers nothing attractive to the Palestinians – just a demilitarized American-backed regime with no significant power to do anything beyond oppressing its own people (the plan’s demand for disarming Palestinian militias could easily be used by Fatah to brutally crack down on political opponents).

The Trump plan is actually being branded as highly beneficial to Israel, with Netanyahu and much of the Israeli right buying in despite the fact that the details being proposed strongly resemble what the late Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin (Labor) was working towards in the early 1990s. At that time, Netanyahu led much of the popular resistance to Rabin and the Oslo Accords.

While many nationalist Jews have disappointedly expressed support for the plan and even mentioned the “need for gratitude” in response to Trump’s “generosity,” we say that only a slave shows gratitude for a master letting him keep more of his land than the previous masters. No US leader has the right to dictate Israel’s policies or tell us what land we must surrender or get to keep. Our politicians need to stop accepting this imperialist paradigm and start behaving like leaders of an independent nation.

In short, the Trump plan is offensive to both peoples of this land; to Palestinians for superimposing the desire for a nation-state yet offering no signifiant territory or independence for that nation-state and to Jews for demanding that Israel surrender portions of the Samaria, Judea and Negev regions for the creation of this new Palestinian nation-state.

The “Deal of the Century” must be understood within the context of Trump’s experience as a ruthless negotiator skilled at stacking the deck in his own favor. From this perspective, the plan very much appears to be the culmination of the president’s strategy over the years to make Israel feel indebted and therefore unable to say no while beating the PA leadership into submission so they think twice before walking away from his deal. The plan contains many “punishments” for Palestinian non-participation and Trump’s record should be enough to convince the PA he means business.

What makes this new version of Washington’s traditional two-state program so imminently dangerous is that both Netanyahu and his main political rival Benny Gantz (Blue & White) have endorsed it and are polling to each receive over 30 mandates in the upcoming election, giving them enough seats to put together a 61 member majority coalition without including other factions that might oppose the plan. Chances are high that Trump has already instructed both party leaders to form a unity government to implement the plan, which they’ll likely try selling to the public as a major Israeli diplomatic triumph. The question remains how gullible the Israeli public can be after so many decades of American-imposed two-state plans only exacerbating our conflict.

We must resist the Trump plan just as we resist any attempts to divide our land. Most importantly, we need to free ourselves from the very notion that it’s normal or healthy to allow any foreign ruler so much power over our policies and borders. The most damaging part of the plan is actually not in the details but rather in the very idea that a US administration should feel entitled to present the peoples of our land with any program for peace (especially given that the US weapons industry materially benefits so much from our conflict continuing).