How the Trump Plan Makes Peace Possible

by Douglas J. Feith and Lewis Libby, MEF
Middle East Quarterly

President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan transforms longstanding official U.S. ideas about peace diplomacy and about the U.S. role in the region. In the past, U.S. peacemaking efforts aimed directly at a Palestinian-Israeli deal. The Trump peace plan, however, stresses that fundamental changes are required on the Palestinian side before such a deal can become realistic. The plan does not hold out the promise of a quick peace settlement. Rather, it has a more limited aim: to improve chances that peace will one day be possible.

A Warning

The plan’s most original element is a warning: If the Palestinian side continues to support terrorism and reject peace, its cause will suffer. For decades, Palestinian leaders, while refusing peace offers seen as reasonable by top U.S. officials, incited violence and demanded that the status quo in the territories be frozen pending a peace deal. The Palestinians are now being told that, if they continue on this path, Washington will not block Israel from advancing its own claims to areas in the West Bank that, in the administration’s view, would be left to Israel in realistic peace talks. Those areas, according to the peace plan’s “Conceptual Map,” include not just the major settlement blocs but also the Jordan Valley.

he Trump plan effectively tells the Palestinians that the sensible question is not whether a deal provides everything they think they are entitled to, but whether it is the best deal available, now and in the foreseeable future. A huge development program is promised as a reward for compromise. Obviously, the U.S government cannot force Palestinian leaders to accept a peace that they consider unjust, but if their demands for “justice” include the destruction of Israel, Trump warns that Washington will not support them and will not fight to preserve the West Bank’s legal status quo for their benefit.

The peace plan’s strong language and unequivocal conclusions reflect more than just this president’s personal talking style. They reflect the Trump team’s acquaintance with the long, exasperating history of U.S. diplomacy undone by Palestinian rejectionism and terrorism.

Installation of Arafat and the PLO

For nearly thirty years, Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy has been based on the 1993 Oslo accords. These agreements created the Palestinian Authority (PA), which Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed. Israeli officials empowered the PA so that it would end the intifada which began in 1987, promote peace, and negotiate in good faith a formal end to the conflict.

Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the accords, is often portrayed as the champion of the “two-state solution,” but, until the end, he opposed creation of a Palestinian state. In his last Knesset speech on October 5, 1995, a month before he was assassinated, Rabin said the conflict’s “permanent solution” would be a State of Israel and “alongside it a Palestinian entity,” which he envisioned as “less than a state,” which would “independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority.”^[1] Rabin promised in the same speech to preserve security through permanent Israeli control of the Jordan Valley.

Arafat disappointed expectations that he would use his new power and prestige as PA president to promote peace. Rather, he spoke of a “jihad to liberate Jerusalem,” comparing Oslo to a peace the Prophet Muhammad accepted before obliterating his enemy.^[2] PA schools and official media stoked hostility to Israel. In demanding an end to “the occupation,” they applied the term to cities within pre-1967 Israel—Haifa and Jaffa, for example—as much as to the territory Israel won in the 1967 Six-Day War. The PA honored terrorists that killed Israeli civilians, calling them heroes, naming streets for them, and urging children to emulate them. The PA enacted legislation that incentivized terrorism by providing official payments to terrorist prisoners held by Israel and to families of “martyrs” (i.e., terrorists killed in action). Critics call such legislation “pay-for-slay.”^[3] More Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks after the Oslo accords than before.^[4]

Nonetheless, U.S. president Bill Clinton tried for years to promote mutual Israeli-Palestinian confidence through agreements on practical problems such as water disputes, boundary issues, and local security arrangements. He hoped that diplomacy, by resolving misunderstandings and overcoming mistrust, could resolve the conflict.

A Most Generous Bid for Peace

With his term winding down, Clinton held a peace conference at Camp David in July 2000 to push for a deal to end the conflict. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made extraordinary concessions, offering the Palestinians control over an area at least 95 percent the size of the West Bank.^[5] Barak also agreed to divide Jerusalem and accept Palestinian sovereignty over most of the Old City, including on the Temple Mount.^[6] Arafat refused to make peace, however, angering Clinton.

Douglas J. Feith is a senior fellow and Lewis Libby is the senior vice president of Hudson Institute. During the first five years of the George W. Bush administration, they served as principal national security advisers to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, respectively. This article is adapted from a historical analysis of the Trump peace plan recently published by the Begin-Sadat Center of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University.