Foreign Policy

Trump’s Mideast Peace Plan is Dead on Arrival

Written by SK Ashby

Reuters reported this week that the peace plan drafted by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner will focus on economic development in Gaza and the West Bank rather than political reconciliation.

Now, I don't think you have to be an expert to guess that this plan would be dead arrival, but now we know for certain that it is.

The Palestinian Authority says they will not attend an economic development conference organized by Kushner because they weren't even consulted before it was scheduled.

From Bloomberg:

A U.S. official said the June 25-26 meeting will focus on an economic framework for the Palestinian people and the region, including the potential for private-sector growth, with a political proposal coming later.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said his government, which has long ruled out talks with the Trump administration, was “not consulted on such a conference.” Shtayyeh added that “any economic solution will be a result of a political solution.” [...]

“The U.S. has adopted nearly every position espoused by this very right-wing Israeli government, and is even encouraging it to break international law,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, said in an interview in New York. “There is a clear global consensus on how to achieve peace. So why turn everything upside down and try something that can never work?”

Experts who spoke to Bloomberg speculate that this peace plan is not actually intended to work and no one has a realistic expectation that it will. They speculate that this plan is being unveiled with the expectation that the Palestinian Authority will reject it and the Netanyahu government will use that to justify annexing more land in the West Bank.

I don't know know if that's true, but I think we can say there will be no peace. Netanyahu's political survival depends on there being no peace.