United States officials have said that the President Donald Trump’s plan for the Middle East will cause discomfort for both Israelis and Palestinians.
The White House team charged with drawing up the plan is led by Trump’s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and the president’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
“When reading through the plan, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) will be unhappy on some pages and happy on others just as Israelis will be pleased with some pages and uncomfortable on others,” one senior Trump administration official explained to Israeli journalists.
A number of sources outside the administration said that the White House is currently polishing a document which is several pages long.
“Much longer than some previous plans of this kind,” said one diplomatic source involved in the discussions.
A senior administration official refused to confirm the length of the document, but said that the plan is “fairly detailed and lengthy,” adding that “we need to explain to both sides a realistic way to resolve the conflict, not just to debate unhelpful, calcified talking points.”
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) returned from a trip to Washington in May with reports that the Trump plan would call for partitioning the country into two states and internationalizing the ancient city of Jerusalem.
The Trump plan has been a work in progress since mid-2017, when Greeenblatt made his first official trip to the region as envoy.
Sources who had been in contact with Trump’s envoy during this period revealed that his main takeaway from that first trip was the close alignment of interests between Israel and many of Washington’s Arab allies in the region, which he felt presented a rare opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough between Israelis and Palestinians.
“It’s obvious that the region has changed from just a few years ago,” a White House official said this week. “The Arab world and Israel have many common interests and goals, as well as common threats in the malign activities of Iran, in the region.”
Sources outside the administration involved in discussions over the plan told journalists that Trump’s team believes its plan could be the first ever to receive a positive answer from both Israel and major Arab states, regardless of the Palestinian Authority’s position.
But while the Fatah-led PA might no longer be representative of the Palestinian people, Washington’s arrogance is trying to completely bypass their official leadership is likely to offend many Palestinians.
Trump and his team are clearly counting on bully tactics to get the PA to the table, isolating the Palestinians diplomatically and applying pressure from all angles to force Fatah to accept the plan.
As mentioned above, Trump’s people acknowledge that their plan will likely to force both Palestinians and Israelis to accept difficult compromises to our aspirations and national narratives, adopting one of the major errors underlying all previous attempts at ending the conflict.
Peace can’t be achieved by forcing each side to concede on issues vitally important to us but rather 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 the 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.
