Thursday, June 27, 2019

Trump's Palestinian "deal of the century" tone deaf and doomed to fail

As someone who claims to be all about "deals", Donald Trump seems to have very little idea about which deals are likely to be acceptable and which not.
Letting his son-in-law Jared Kushner loose on as thorny an issue as Arab-Israeli relations seemed like a bad idea to most observers in the first place. His reputation hovers barely above the level of "bit of an idiot". When he started calling his plan (his? Trump's?) the "deal of the century", with typical Trumpian swagger, most people just rolled their eyes. But, hey, give the guy a chance, I guess, you never know. Pretty much everybody else, including men and women with much greater diplomatic reputations than Trump or Kushner, have had a go at it and failed, but you never know.
The "deal of the century", though, was a spectacular bust. Palestine didn't even attend the conference in Bahrain but, when you consider the Trump administration's recent actions towards them - withdrawing humanitarian aid funding, shutting down its missions in the West Bank and Gaza, ejecting Palestinian diplomats from Washington, opening up its Israeli embassy in contested Jerusalem, and its unalloyed support for anything Israeli - you can see why they might have been a little cynical.
The deal itself? An offer of $50 billion as a kind of start-up fund for Palestinians in the region. So, not really a deal at all, more of a bribe, with no mention of a political agenda, a two-state solution, illegal Israeli settlements, or any of those kind of tedious details. It was, unsurprisingly, rejected out of hand by Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and, as I mentioned, Palestine had no intentions of even considering it.
Now, $50 billion dollars is a lot of money, but money - which is really all Trump & Co really understand, if indeed they can be said to understand that much - is entirely redundant without a political settlement. As a senior PLO representative opined, "It is totally divorced from reality. The elephant in the room is the occupation itself." Even Tony Blair deadpanned, "It is absolutely foolish to believe you can have economics without sound politics". Pretty obvious really.
The "deal" was tone deaf, and dead in the water before it even started. I could have saved Mr. Kushner the airfare if he had asked. But no doubt Trump will spin even this in a positive light, claiming that they tried in good faith, but the Palestinians are just not interested in a solution. Even in the "deal of the century".

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