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By Dr. Yehuda Mirsky
Professor of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies
Brandeis University
January 28, 2020, is a date that will be remembered in Middle Eastern history – but it will take some time before anyone knows for sure how it will be remembered.
The day didn’t start well for Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister also became the country’s first prime minister to be indicted while still in office. He faces multiple charges of corruption.
But Netanyahu didn’t have much time to sulk. Just a few hours later, he was standing alongside Donald Trump as the pair unveiled the U.S. administration’s long-anticipated plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace, written in no small part in coordination with – and deeply in tune with – Netanyahu’s policies.
The fact that the plan’s unveiling came as both men face intense domestic scrutiny – the press conference interrupted coverage of Trump’s impeachment – should not be overlooked.
I have been following developments in the Middle East for a long time as a U.S. State Department official, a lifelong student and now a professor of Israeli history, and as a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel. I know how complex the issues are and how past attempts at peace have fallen well short.
In black and white …
Trump’s plan comprises two different goals.
The first – fostering Israeli-Palestinian peace, or at least coexistence – is there in black and white for all to read.
The second – tying Trump and Netanyahu’s respective domestic critics into knots – is everywhere between the lines.
While the Trump administration worked on the plan in coordination with Israel and “friendly” Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it crucially did not involve the Palestinians. Palestinian resistance to the very development of this plan – out of suspicion, weakness and resentment – was met not with a carrot but a stick, with the U.S. cutting all aid to Gaza and the West Bank in February 2019.
As a result, positions in the plan that might have been viewed as difficult compromises, had they been negotiated, are instead rightly seen as terms of surrender. Yes, the plan gives Palestinians a path to limited statehood, but only after ceding on the core issues of Israeli settlements, refugees and control of much of Jerusalem.
The plan was successfully kept behind the curtains while being drafted, but it now steps out onto a complicated stage.
Relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have for some years been in utter political stalemate, even as the two have maintained working-level security cooperation. In Hamas-run Gaza, Israel has been in a long war of attrition, mixing ongoing less-than-total violence with tacit mutual understandings aimed at managing the conflict.
Meanwhile, Israel’s ties with several Sunni Arab states, especially in the Gulf, have been deepening, united by a desire to ward off Iran and its Shia proxies in Lebanon and what remains of Syria. Jordan, structurally weak but strategically important due to its location and links to Arab and Islamic actors, balances contending forces with skill and jitters.
Internal Palestinian politics are riven by the bitter rivalry between the nationalist Palestinian Authority and the Islamist group Hamas and by discontent with the Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas’ hold on power amid claims of corruption and mismanagement in the Palestinian semi-government.
Israeli politics is stalemated, too, and headed for its third round of parliamentary elections in less than a year, spurred by fallout from Netanyahu’s corruption scandals and a fragmented opposition.
Many Israelis are alienated by Netanyahu’s endless legal troubles and divisive politics, but others are kindled by his attacks on political opponents. Meanwhile the Israeli left has failed to recover the credibility it lost on security issues following the collapse of 2000’s Camp David talks and the ensuing Second Intifada.
As for Trump, he remains popular in Israel – including among centrists, who don’t necessarily follow day-to-day U.S. politics and look unfavorably on former President Barack Obama’s handling of the Middle East.
At home, Trump’s policies on Israel do not reflect that of the majority of American Jews, who tend to be politically liberal and supportive of a mutually negotiated two-state solution. Rather, Trump’s views chime with that of the smaller but more fervent American Jewish right, and above all with the millions of evangelicals who are a key plank of the president’s base.
Into all this drops the 180-page peace plan – whose heart is creating a legally recognized but geographically tiny and fragmented Palestinian state without full military powers – something that falls way short of Palestinian aspirations. Some parts of the plan are not unreasonable, and the many failed attempts at peacemaking to date call for fresh thinking. But the problems in this plan are very real.
It stakes out strong positions on the three hard issues that have bedeviled negotiations time and again: Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The Trump plan leaves all Israeli settlements in place and proposes a networks of roads and tunnels to help Palestinian move around the cantons that would make up their state.