Kushner's Proposal May Help Israel Annex West Bank
Even Trump Peace Plan That Fails May Help Israel Annex West Bank
(Bloomberg) -- Skepticism about the Middle East peace plan drawn up by U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law abounds, but even a failed effort may play into the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The prime minister won his latest election partly on promises to extend Israeli sovereignty to Jewish settlements in the disputed West Bank, a move that would see Israel taking another unilateral step away from decades of international consensus on how to resolve the crisis.
While Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner has revealed little about his long-awaited proposal, it’s widely expected to include increased Israeli control over the West Bank. For the hard-liners in Netanyahu’s coalition, the time is ripe with their ally Trump in the White House to seize more of the disputed territory regardless of whether the broader peace plan -- which the Palestinians have rejected in advance -- succeeds or fails.
“Netanyahu’s view is that between now and 2020, this is the time to extract from Trump whatever is extractable,” said David Makovsky, director of the project on Middle East peace at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Netanyahu is going to try to get selective acquiescence for annexation inside the barrier, using President Abbas’s refusal to talk as a justification. If Netanyahu gets a green light for that, he will push for the plan.”
Highlighting the one-sided nature of Kushner’s effort, the Palestinian Authority on Monday said it will boycott an economic development conference in Bahrain next month that was announced as a first step in the peace plan. U.S. officials said the June 25-26 meeting will focus on an economic framework for the Palestinian people and the region, including the potential for private-sector growth, with a political proposal coming later.
“This is the first stage of a process that we want to begin to showcase what could be -- how, if we can achieve a political solution to the conflict we can also transform the lives of the Palestinians,” Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s envoy for peace negotiations, told the United Nations in New York on Wednesday. “It would be a mistake for the Palestinians not to join us. They have nothing to lose and much to gain if they join us. But it is, of course, their choice.”
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said his government, which has long ruled out talks with the Trump administration, was “not consulted on such a conference.” Shtayyeh added that “any economic solution will be a result of a political solution.”
Trump has called reaching a peace agreement the “deal of the century,” and announced Kushner’s lead role in it soon after his election in 2016. And while he’s said any peace proposal would require sacrifices from Israel, there’s been little sign of U.S. pressure on the Jewish state and the administration hasn’t deferred to Palestinian concerns in its moves so far.
Netanyahu doubled down on his call to extend sovereignty, saying on Twitter on Tuesday that West Bank lands “are not only a guarantee of Israel’s security -- they’re our patrimony.”
The American president angered Palestinians and drew criticism from U.S. allies for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv and recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Administration officials have largely stopped using the phrase “two-state solution” to describe a resolution to the conflict.
Trump has also cut off funding to groups aiding Palestinians refugees, saying in February, “Why would we pay somebody that’s not saying nice things about us, and not really wanting to go to the peace table?”
Those moves and comments have undermined expectations for the Kushner proposal.
“The U.S. has adopted nearly every position espoused by this very right-wing Israeli government, and is even encouraging it to break international law,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, said in an interview in New York. “There is a clear global consensus on how to achieve peace. So why turn everything upside down and try something that can never work?”
1967 War
More than 400,000 Jewish settlers and almost 2.9 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war. The settlements have been ruled illegal in repeated UN resolutions and, while ceding some portions of the West Bank to Israel has long been part of previous peace proposals, a takeover would risk turning Israel into a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world.
So although annexation of the entire West Bank has long been advocated by the staunchest Jewish nationalists, Israeli leaders including Netanyahu have historically held back on moves well short of that, aware of the firestorm of criticism it would draw.
Despite Netanyahu’s pre-election vow to assert sovereignty over Jewish settlements, a senior Israeli official suggested the pledge may have been an election gambit that’s not likely to materialize soon.
‘Judea and Samaria’
Expressing concern that future U.S. administrations may not be as pro-Israel as Trump’s, David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and a former benefactor of West Bank settlements, said his team is doing everything it can to help Israel.
“Can we leave this to an administration that may not understand the need for Israel to maintain overriding security control of Judea and Samaria?” Friedman asked at the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee meeting in Washington last March, adopting Israel’s use of the West Bank’s Jewish biblical name.
Complicating any decision by Netanyahu to pursue annexation is that he’s facing an impending indictment by Attorney General Avihai Mandelblit. As a result, the far-right settler movement is demanding that Netanyahu commit to annexing some Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for support for legislation that would grant the premier de facto immunity from prosecution.
“There’s pressure,” Yigal Dilmoni, chief executive of the pro-settler Yesha Council, said in an interview. “We have to act on sovereignty even regardless of whether they say yes or no.”
Arab Support
Another hurdle for any U.S. peace plan is that Arab nations counted on to provide financial and political support may be reluctant to do so after the Golan Heights and Jerusalem embassy moves, both of which were widely unpopular in the region.
And as the 2020 U.S. presidential race gets underway, the incentive for Trump to turn his plan into a political wedge issue will also grow, Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. Trump has sought to paint the Democratic party as anti-Semitic, using Representative Ilhan Omar’s criticism of U.S. support for Israel to suggest the party is moving away from its traditional support of the Jewish state.
White House officials declined to comment on the peace plan.
Trump and Kushner could still prove their detractors wrong. Administration officials have said one reason not to stick closely to previous proposals is that those earlier efforts all failed. And the Palestinians could still surprise Israel and the U.S. by deciding to enter into talks, calculating that they have nothing to lose and potentially something to gain.
Karen Pierce, the U.K.’s ambassador to the UN, urged them to come to the talks with an open mind. “We encourage the Palestinians to engage, but for all the historical reasons, they find it hard to engage without reaffirmation of” some key tenets from earlier peace proposals, she said in an interview last month.
Gaza Withdrawal
Unilateral Israeli actions to solve the Palestinian conflict aren’t new. In 2005, Ariel Sharon pulled out of Gaza. This time, if the Palestinians refuse to engage, Netanyahu may go for the opposite scenario, expanding frontiers with Trump’s backing, said Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Former Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, who’s now a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party in Parliament, suggested as much. “We should annex parts of the West Bank anyway regardless of their plan." He added, “One could take it as an opportunity.”
To contact the reporters on this story: David Wainer in New York at dwainer3@bloomberg.net;Ivan Levingston in Tel Aviv at ilevingston@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, ;Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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