Opinion: The Trump administration’s long awaited and ill-named peace plan has many objectives, but making peace isn’t among them
Robert Malley is president and CEO of the International Crisis Group. He was the White House coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Region under President Obama.
Neither is jump-starting negotiations, or nudging the parties toward compromise, or even enshrining implicit, private understandings in the hope Israelis and Palestinians might eventually publicly espouse them—each one of which, as we know from successful and unsuccessful experience, has been featured as the goal of past American plans.
Whether this ends up really helping either Netanyahu or Trump is unclear, although that too is beside the point. The Trump team believes the plan will help their and Netanyahu’s campaigns, whether they are right in that regard or not. Some right-wing constituencies may balk at the suggestion that this could lead to a Palestinian state—although that would only occur well into the future if and when the Palestinians meet a series of unrealistic conditions.
The ideas put forward by the administration may not tell us anything much about the future of Middle East peace, other than to make more plain what was already manifest—that the notion of a viable two-state solution increasingly is a thing of the past, and that the de facto annexation of West Bank territory may soon become de jure.
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