This could be seen as 70+ years of failures…..from the proposals of Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 to the promises of peace from Donald Trump……the closest we came to an end was in 1978 Camp David Accords….and then we had an election that brought a warmonger to the White House and the downhill slide began and has only picked up speed in the years after.
We have been promised to hear a plan from Kushner, the leader of Trump’s ME peace team, for years….the promise is that we will finally hear this plan sometime this month.
Personally, I feel that this plan will be nothing more than a sideshow to help change the dialog of the day……
After two years of drum-rolling, Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal” for Israelis and Palestinians is about to enter what its architects claim is the pre-launch phase.
The US president has said the peace plan drawn up by his team – two former personal lawyers and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner – will be ready to unveil by the end of January.
Yet despite the anticipation surrounding Trump’s proposals for resolving one of the world’s most intractable conflicts, a more crucial plan for the region is already being implemented on the ground: an attempt to strengthen Israel’s hand while weakening that of the Palestinians.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/01/donald-trump-middle-east-peace-plan-israel-palestine
Sorry being a Jew does not necessarily qualify one to be the master of peace in the Middle East…..but that aside any plan (if one actually makes an appearance) will need Congress before anything…..
In recent days, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, has revealed certain key aspects of the long-touted White House Israeli-Palestinian peace plan that he and other senior administration officials say they will launch sometime after the April 9 elections in Israel. In normal times, these would be headlines. But America is currently so consumed with the Mueller investigation and the president’s declaration of a national emergency to fund his border wall that it is hard to find the bandwidth to discuss anything else.
The plan is said to be based on four principles—freedom, respect, security, and opportunity—with one key goal being “developing infrastructure” for “tremendous growth in … the West Bank and Gaza.”
The price tag for these investments, meanwhile, is reported to be in the tens of billions of dollars—a substantial sum, particularly for an administration that has slashed U.S. foreign assistance across the board and especially to the Palestinians. No doubt this is why Kushner and other senior administration officials are currently touring the Arab Gulf states: not just to “share … some of the details … especially on the economic vision” with leaders there, as Kushner described, but to ask them to foot most if not all of the bill.
Many American presidents have blundered in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, but Donald Trump’s personal involvement in the region has been particularly disastrous. President Eisenhower introduced the CIA to the world of covert action, when he ordered the overthrow of the legitimate government of Iran in 1953. President Reagan endorsed a U.S. troop presence in Lebanon in 1982 in order to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire there due to their war crimes in Beirut, offering proof to the Arab nations of Washington’s one-sided support for Israel. President George H.W. Bush went ahead with Desert Storm in 1991 although Soviet President Gorbachev had gained a commitment from Saddam Hussein to withdraw his forces from Kuwait. Worst of all, President George W. Bush used phony intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq in 2003 that has created sixteen years of disarray throughout the region.
The constant assumption that being Jewish means you can understand Israel is a fundamental error. Someone brought up in the UK or America in the Jewish religion has no more understanding of Israel and its politics than you or I. But the biggest danger is that such a person might be inherently biased against the Palestinians, and that will not help to reach any agreement.
Best wishes, Pete.
Letting religion lead a country is a sure fire way to bring about human rights violations….chuq