Rock, Paper, Scissors in the Middle East
On the Israel front, Trump nullified the 1967 lines, the cornerstone of the Arab rejectionist position that Obama had attempted to enshrine in UNSCR 2334. He did this by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and then by recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The latter move eliminated the 1967 framework altogether with regard to Syria and Lebanon. As far as the United States is concerned, there are no more disputed territories: The land is Israel’s.The two-step solution
The current plan extends that same approach to the Jordan Valley, in addition to existing settlements. “If the State of Israel withdrew from the Jordan Valley, it would have significant implications for regional security in the Middle East,” the president’s vision states, expressing a positive desire for Israel to remain there. An extension of Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley would therefore serve U.S. regional security interests. Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ acceptance of the Trump plan as the basis for any future talks between Israel and the Palestinians indicates that the United States’ regional allies have accepted the president’s nullification of the 1967 lines framework. The significance of this is that the Saudis and the Emiratis have accepted that the starting point for any movement going forward is not the so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which the Saudis originally sponsored almost 20 years ago, and which has subsequently been loaded with additional rigid language, especially regarding the so-called right of return for Palestinian refugees, by rejectionists led by the Assad regime. The Trump peace plan is the new starting point.
The truth is, none of these frameworks matter anymore. Trump has made it clear that he is not bound by the fantasies of previous American peace processors—who today show contempt for the president’s plan even as they admit their own decades-long failure. Trump’s deal is designed to underscore Israel’s special relationship with the United States—and it slams shut the rusty gates of the peace processing factory for good. It doesn’t much matter how the Palestinians respond. The American position is not dependent on the outcome of future negotiations.
Israel’s political class now has a clear window in which to determine its own fate. Israel can then live with the consequences of its own choices.
Let us imagine that Jordan changes its mind and agrees to become the Palestinian state in place of the one that fails to materialize pursuant to the Deal of the Century. This change of mind can come about either through the King's agreement or by his giving over the reins of leadersihp to someone who will.
Were this to happen, all Palestinian Arabs in both sides of the Jordan R. would become full Jordanian citizens. without restrictions. The two roads connecting the proposed “state” to Jordan would be completed facilitating transportation between the Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Jordan R.
Jordan would take over the administration of Areas A and B and Gaza in place of the PA and Hamas. Jordan would also fulfill the role of UNRWA in providing education, welfare and health care to all the current day refugees.
Rather than build the tunnel connecting Gaza to the rest of the “state”, pursuant to the vision, at a cost exceeding $15 Billion, Jordan can invite all residents of Gaza and Judea and Samaria (aka West Bank) to relocate to Jordan to receive these benefits. Also immigrants could be offered free housing in Jordan with international aid to sweeten the deal. It is not too far-fetched to believe that 2 million Arabs living in these areas could be incentivized to relocate to Jordan which is only 100 miles away or to any other country prepared to accept them.
It would not be necessary for Israel to give up any parts of its territory.
Israel would extend its law to all the lands west of the Jordan R including Gaza and the Arabs would become foreign residents in Israel with Jordanian citizenship.
The $50 Billion pledge in support of this vision could be provided to Jordan to enable it to become the home for all Palestinian Arabs and to provide them with jobs, education and healthcare.
Instead of investing in industrial parks in Area C in Israel to benefit the Arabs as proposed by Min Bennett and PM Netanyahu, these zones will rightly be created in Jordan thereby incentivizing Arabs to emigrate to Jordan.
This is a two step solution.
The first step is to change the vision as above set out.
The second step is to make Jordan, Palestine.
The New York Times Dreads Peace
When President Donald Trump’s peace plan was released, assuring Israel of sovereignty along the Jordan River, the security of settlements in Biblical Judea and Samaria, and the entirety of Jerusalem including the Old City under Israeli jurisdiction, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (and Israelis in general) had every reason to exult.
But The New York Times had every reason to lament. Reporter Megan Specia, a story editor based in New York with little evident familiarity with the Middle East, Israel, or Palestinians, reported on the plan and its deficiencies (January 29). Her conclusion, that the proposal “strongly favors Israeli priorities,” is indisputable, as is her perception that it is “a sharp departure from decades of American policy.”
Worst of all, as the Times has repeatedly complained, “is American recognition of Israel’s claim over the Jordan Valley and all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” After all, she writes in an endlessly reiterated Times cliché, “Most of the world regards the settlements as illegal.” They have “steadily encroached” on land, by implication, that is Palestinian — unidentified by Specia as the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people.
In their familiar duet of complaints about Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and settlements, Jerusalem Bureau Chief David Halbfinger and his colleague Isabel Kershner sadly concluded that a viable Palestinian state is now “quickly slipping away.” Rather than focus on the decades of Palestinian intransigence that have obstructed that possibility, they predictably (for the Times) blamed President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu for imposing their will on beleaguered Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas, they suggested, should “try to weather the storm” in the hope that Trump and Netanyahu will be defeated in forthcoming elections. That is also the Times’ endlessly reiterated hope.
The Times drumbeat continued. On the Opinion page, Nathan Thrall, widely praised for his plea (in The Only Language They Understand) to force compromise on Israel and the Palestinians, offered his own laceration of the Trump plan. It “gives Israel cover to perpetuate the status quo of occupation and sovereignty,” he complained, thereby “depriving millions of stateless people of basic civil rights and dispossessing them of their land.”
Thrall, clearly not enthralled by Zionism or Israel, refers to an “indigenous Palestinian population” whose rights to the Biblical Land of Israel have been ignored. He does not acknowledge that this “indigenous Palestinian population” did not assertively define itself in national terms until after the Six Day War in 1967, when the Jordanian land on the West Bank where they lived was returned to the Jewish people. He is convinced, without offering a shred of evidence or confronting evidence to the contrary, that Israel “illegally established settlements” in Biblical Judea and Samaria.
When the NYT says that Abu Mazen's life work has been to forge a peaceful 2 state solution with Israel do you think they're including his graduate school work blaming Jews for the Holocaust, his fundraising for the Munich massacre, & his decades working for terrorist PLO? pic.twitter.com/qnsQ0JevuE
— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) February 2, 2020