Wednesday, January 29, 2020
Elder of ZiyonEvery other "peace" plan had a goal of two states, as if that would magically produce peace. Once two states was achieved, then the job was done. Terrorism, the Palestinian economy, overcrowding in Gaza - none of those were addressed. Day Two after the plan would be implemented was always essentially ignored.
Every other plan was written with the myth that two states is the solution itself, not a component. Because every other plan was written from the perspective that Palestinian leadership wants an independent state above all.
But they don't. History has shown that their desire has always been the ultimate destruction of Israel, which is why they rejected every previous plan that was an obstacle to that goal.
It is inconvenient, and politically incorrect, to point out that there is nothing that Mahmoud Abbas has ever done for "peace" that is inconsistent with Yasir Arafat's 1974 "stages" plan for the destruction of Israel. But that plan is the guiding principle of Palestinian politics, not an independent state. Insistence on "right of return" to Israel is the most obvious proof of that - what kind of nascent independent nation demands its people live in another country, let alone an enemy country that they tell the world is an apartheid state against its people?
The other "experts," to one degree or another, accepted official Palestinian lies of the "red lines" towards a state. And none of the Palestinian demands had the interests of their own people in mind.
After all, why would a leadership that has willingly used its own people as pawns and cannon fodder for 71 years suddenly care about their welfare?
Since Palestinian leaders who don't give a damn abut their own people listed "return" and Jerusalem and release of terrorist prisoners as their red lines, the "experts" happily went along with them and also ignored the actual Palestinian people's welfare. They accepted the false idea that a Palestinian state was the definition of peace when there is no evidence that real peace would follow a state.
The US plan, for the first time in history, is written from the perspective of what would be best for Palestinians, not for corrupt Palestinian leaders. And no one has ever done that before - not the Saudi plan, not the Quartet, not the Obama parameters, not Olmert, not Clinton.
Just a look at the Gaza portion of the map in the Trump plan shows this to be true. While previous plans mentioned a road between Gaza and the West Bank, this plan actually asks Israel to give up significant amounts of "pre-1967"land (in exchange for the Jordan Valley, an Israeli security demand) to help Gaza become viable rather than a powderkeg.
Gaza is too small to accommodate its two million people. This is not news. While some Israeli think-tanks have suggested that Egypt somehow be cajoled into giving up part of the Sinai to Palestinians, no other international peace plan even addressed this obvious issue - an issue that not only had the potential but the virtual guarantee that Day Two of "peace" would fail.
This plan, almost unbelievably, triples the size of Gaza at Israel's expense in order to provide Gaza's millions with space for living, agriculture and industry - as well as a corridor to the West Bank where many would undoubtedly prefer to be.
This plan does more for ordinary Gazans, by far, than any other previous plan.
And it also happens to do more for Palestinians in the West Bank as well.
Ultimately, peace is meant for the people, not the politicians. That simple fact has been ignored in the Middle East for decades because the Palestinian people have no say. Privately they can cheer something like this, but their very lives are in danger for speaking out publicly in support for it. Previous wanna-be peacemakers might have realized this basic fact but they never internalized it because they only negotiated with "leaders" who ignored the welfare of their own people.
It took non-professional outsiders to put together a plan that is better for Palestinians than the Palestinian leadership would ever accept. Because these outsiders have a "naive" view that peace actually means helping people, not corrupt and selfish politicians. And this plan actually has a path to a Palestinian state that is more realistic than any that came beforehand.
The almost unanimous rejection of the plan by so-called "peace" and "human rights" community shows, starkly, that they never had the best interests of the Palestinians in mind. It took some Orthodox Jewish Zionists to come up with a plan that does more to help Palestinians than the "peace"and "justice" crowd ever would.
Of course, Palestinian rejectionism, backed up by leftist groups that pretend to call for "peace" and "justice," guarantees that the Trump (really Kushner/Greenblatt) peace plan is a non-starter.
Congratulations to Mahmoud Abbas and his partners in the "peace" community for throwing away the single best chance to improve Palestinian lives that there will ever be. The only reason is that the plan is also good for Israel, and that one fact is what makes it completely unacceptable to them.
