(Bloomberg Opinion) -- On June 25th, the United States will convene an economic conference in Bahrain whose ostensible purpose is to raise a large sum of money to help the Palestinian economy. To shore up support for the effort, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Mideast envoy, is leading a delegation to the region this week.
The Palestinian Authority has announced that it will not accept any of the money raised. It is planning to boycott the summit and calls on friendly Arab countries to do the same. In a recent article in Haaretz, Nabil Shaath, senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, denounced the conference as an American attempt to bribe the Palestinians into relinquishing their “inalienable rights” to statehood. On Monday, Abbas himself put it more colorfully, saying the plan would “go to hell”; a diplomatic solution, he insisted, must come first.
The Trump Administration’s Middle East strategy does, indeed, reject the belief that the Arabs living in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem have an inalienable right (or even an alienable one) to an independent state. And he is right that the conference in Bahrain is aimed at moving that strategy forward.
But he is wrong to take the conference at face value. What happens there is just the opening act of a more elaborate and sophisticated plan.
The Trump administration has known from the start that their economic conference would be met with irate Palestinian refusal to participate. This wasn’t hard to figure out. Refusal to compromise has been the Palestinian diplomatic default for a century. The Trump team realized early on that it would be no different this time.
The difference is that this time they are not negotiating over the future of Palestine with PLO revolutionary leaders in European hotels or with Hamas commanders via the Egyptian Intelligence. The administration is preparing to go over the heads of the old guard and take its case directly for a settlement directly to the people of the West Bank via a two-day media presentation from Bahrain. On TV and the internet, the U.S. will offer a vision of a new Palestinian future as a modern and autonomous entity but not quite an independent state.
The show will include scenes from a better life. Tourists flooding into Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, crowded markets in Nablus and Jenin, a Silicon “wadi” extending from Ramallah to Tel Aviv, refugee camps transformed into middle-class neighborhoods, mosques filled with worshipers, smiling children in the park and someday even a glorious Mediterranean Riviera in Gaza.
The Palestinian old-guard will scoff at the gross American idea that the people will give up their national patrimony for economic security and creature comforts. “Only a political solution that ends the Israeli occupation” can bring real prosperity, writes Shaath. “There can be no prosperity without freedom.”
That is the notion that will be tested in Bahrain and after. And many of the old guard are concerned that this time revolutionary slogans and Islam as a panacea are not going to win the hearts and minds of the Palestinian middle class.
It won’t happen overnight. “The infrastructure projects coming out of the conference can take years,” a senior American official who was not able to go on the record told me recently. “We know that credibility for the big picture will begin with small, tangible steps.”
For example, the U.S. would like to see fewer and more user-friendly checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank. One suggestion is to replace military guards with civilians. “Israel doesn’t have to give up its security, but at least keep the guys with the machine guns in the back room.”
But quality of life gestures won’t work without a sharp and widely felt rise in the standard of living. The West Bank is badly underdeveloped, a condition for which Israel and the Palestinian Authority share blame. But it has potential. A recent World Bank study found that PA economic growth could triple under the right conditions.
First among these is the Trumpian mantra, “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Unemployment in the West Bank is around 20%. There are now an estimated 125,000 West Bankers working in Israel, mostly in construction, agriculture and food service. Pay in Israel is roughly double West Bank rates for comparable employment, and workers are often paid in cash.
Foreign donors are not needed to create new jobs. Israel, with its booming economy, can do it alone by allowing more Palestinian workers in. Another hundred thousand or so West Bank bread-winners would go a long way toward convincing the working class families that personal prosperity in an autonomous “state-minus” beats Shaath’s “inalienable” but unattainable national rights. It’s worth a try.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Zev Chafets is a journalist and author of 14 books. He was a senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and the founding managing editor of the Jerusalem Report Magazine.
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