President Donald Trump has been gloating about his long-awaited Middle East peace plan. The plan he announced last week, and touted as " a win-win" plan for Israel and the Palestinians, would give Israel most of what it wants. It gives the Palestinian people a death certificate.
This peace plan has no peace in it, or even a plan. It is full of fanfare for two people who are in deep trouble at home and on a suicide mission to divert attention from their personal problems.
Trump is losing political clout amid the impeachment spectacle. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gasping for survival back home, where he has been charged with bribery, fraud, breach of trust and corruption.
The Middle East has not merely provided America raw materials and oil. It also has been a place where American leaders can divert attention when they are in trouble, a place to launch rockets and bombs — and peace initiatives. It's been that way since President Richard Nixon dispatched Henry Kissinger on his frenetic mission to the Middle East, which was dubbed "shuttle diplomacy" in the 1970s.
These so-called Middle East peace plans never brought peace to the area — they only brought more land to the apartheid state of Israel and more misery to the Palestinians. With every peace initiative, the map shrunk more for Palestinians, until they have lost most of the land (90%) they called home in 1917.
The peace plan tradition from troubled presidents didn't stop with Nixon and Kissinger, but was carried on by Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — and now Trump.
But the Trump plan in particular has taken off the mask, showing plainly what's been in the making for decades. It ends the Palestinian people's hopes and aspirations, and instead offers them a sliver of scattered lands on which to build an anemic state surrounded by Jewish settlers and occupation armies. Jared Kushner, senior adviser to the president, says the White House's Middle East plan is "a great deal" and if Palestinians reject it, "they're going to screw up another opportunity, like they've screwed up every other opportunity that they've ever had in their existence."
This is in keeping with the line attributed to Abba Eban, Israeli foreign minister line a few decades ago: "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."