After two years of murmurings of a new peace plan in the Middle East, U.S. President Donald Trump stood alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the 28^th of January to announce his “deal of the century”.

Brewing in the background of Jared Kushner’s (the president’s senior advisor and son-in-law) diplomatic meetings with Middle Eastern leaders, the latest proposal presented more of the same. It drew on exhausted diplomatic solutions to the decades-old conflict – supporting the continued expansion of the Israeli state and further curbing of Palestinian rights with the blessing of the international community (or rather, U.S. hegemony).  

The main stipulations of this new peace plan are, but not limited to:

• The formal annexation of land that were illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank (settlements that have been under constant construction since 1967, breaching UN resolution 242).
• Recognition of a demilitarised Palestinian state compromised of non-contiguous enclaves that has drawn parallels to Apartheid-era South African Bantustans.
• The establishment of Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel with a potential Palestinian capital in the Eastern outskirts.
• The formal stripping of the right of return for Palestinian refugees in the diaspora.

The “deal” was met with unified rejection by the Palestinian leadership. “Our rights are not for sale and are not for bargain. And your deal, the conspiracy, will not pass” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated in a televised address from Ramallah in the West Bank. The architect of this ingenious peace plan, Jared Kushner – bolstered by the mighty knowledge of twenty-five books and no diplomatic experience – berated the Palestinian rejection of the plan, suggesting “they’re going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every other opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.”. The complete bias of the plan to Israel’s interests is apparent in explaining the Palestinian rejection and does not require an in-depth political analysis. Kushner’s statement, however, is quite telling to how we’ve got here. When did Palestinians get placed in this position of having to address “opportunities”?

Turn the clock back to the 1920s. After the colonisation of the Arab world along the Sykes-Picot agreement, Britain gained control of historic Palestine and established it as a transitory Mandate – claiming that Palestinians were not yet fit to govern themselves. Despite the Mandate system claiming to function as a provisional government, designed to eventually return the reins of the state to the local population, the British administration facilitated the mass migration of European Jews following Zionist lobbying in London. The British Mandate of Palestine then saw itself embroiled in tension between the European Jewish population and the indigenous Palestinian population due to the latter’s fear of Zionism’s settler colonial aims overriding the promises of the Mandate. The British administration was forced to step in to diplomatically quell the tension by geopolitically terraforming the Mandate, assisting Zionist factions with land acquisitions to actively separate them from Palestinians. Framing themselves as an honest broker, the British administration relieved itself of its implicit role in creating the conditions of the conflict through this moral apolitical stance of diplomatic negotiator, despite setting up the political situation for the conflict to fester.  

With the Zionist presence in Palestine growing, and with it Arab anxieties over their promised independence, the British administration in a last-ditch effort to curb the growing tension passed the White Papers of 1939, instating a cap to Jewish migration. However, it was too little too late. The result of British rule in Palestine saw the entrenchment of the Zionist political movement in the Mandate. Feeling betrayed by the British, the Zionist movement turned to the sympathetic Truman administration in the U.S. for support. As a result, Britain and the United States, in a joint effort to examine the dilemma, established the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (AACI) to draft proposals for the Mandate and its future regarding land, economy, immigration, and government. However, the proposals for the AACI would be entertained neither by the Zionists nor the Palestinians.

With violence escalating further, the British would abdicate the Mandate of their creation and pass the issue of Palestine onto the United Nations who would set up the Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Truman would send U.S. delegates to the UN to ensure Zionist interests were preserved in the solution to the crisis of the mandate. On November 29, 1947, UNSCOP would pass the 1947 partition plan that would create independent Arab and Jewish states of the mandate. The Palestinians would outright reject this – the first of Kushner’s “opportunities” – plunging Palestine into the 1947 civil war which would then escalate into the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that sees the birth of Israel, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians, subsequent decades of war, and the continued oppression of the Palestinian population remaining in the newly formed Israeli state. From the inception of the mandate, historic Palestine and its indigenous denizens were subject to geopolitical forces not of its making; expected to bear the brunt of it and make concessions to ameliorate it.

Let us go forward to 1993. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin stand on the White House lawn as they sign the Oslo Peace Accords. The Palestinian Authority (PA) attains partial sovereignty over the West Bank, with the land demarcated into ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ zones with growing Israeli security presence and economic control in descending order. 27 years on, despite the acquiescing of the PA to their historic land claims in the accords, Israel continues to break the terms of the treaty as well as UN law in their constant expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Again, as in the 1920s and 1947, imposed diplomacy saw Palestinian sovereignty further eroded (both within the stipulations of the accord and Israel’s continued active ignorance of it). Instead of the AACI and UNSCOP, Bill Clinton and the U.S. government filled the role of the honest apolitical broker that gave continuing Israeli occupation the ethical green light in the global political landscape.

It appears that regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, diplomacy has been used to attain consent from the global community for continued Israeli expansionism. Through its brinkmanship in the constant building of settlements and sustained, brutal military occupation in the Palestinian territories, Israel exploits this immunity from international scrutiny to normalise the erosion of Palestinian sovereignty and rights. When Jared Kushner warns the Palestinians against “screwing up” another opportunity, he is evoking the chronophobia that fueled the Palestinian leadership’s acquiescence to Israeli expansionism in 1967 and 1993. To halt the continued building of more illegal settlements, the Palestinians are better off legalising the existing ones – or so the logic entails. However, if Israel did not honor the Oslo accords, why would they honor the deal of the century?

The deal of the century reflects the continued historic utilisation of diplomatic frameworks to redress Israel’s illegal occupation by granting legal reification for the continued erosion of Palestinian sovereignty. From the mandate system to the UN partition plan, to the Oslo accords and now the deal of the century, Palestinians are forced to make concessions to amend actions that are not of their own making. The diplomatic framework facilitated by the “honest” broker in the U.S. allows Israel to reframe the terms of the debate in which Palestinians must decide their fate, when a contemporary historical review reveals that their fate has never truly been theirs to decide even when presented as such; perhaps that’s why Kushner has called for critics of his peace plan to “divorce [themselves] from all of the history that’s happened over the years”. Jared Kushner attempted to position himself as this honest apolitical broker as Britain, Truman, the United Nations, and Clinton before him, but the heavy-handedness he shares with his father-in-law caused his peace plan to fall flat, with media outlets and politicians lamenting the audacity of the proposals. This farce of a peace plan is another example of the long history of exploiting diplomatic frameworks to advance joint US-Israeli interests in the region.

It is safe to say that the two-state solution is well and truly dead. However, despite its continued framing, the conflict in Israel-Palestine has never been fundamentally about land, but about Palestinian civil rights. Since its inception, whether it be Arab-Israelis, Palestinians in the West Bank or Palestinian refugees, Israel has continuously impeded their ability to engage in the political and public sphere as Palestinian – and that is where Palestinian angst has stemmed from since its colonisation by Britain in 1920. Therefore, a future solution to the conflict must see the formation of a single democratic nation that grants suffrage and the right of return to Palestinian refugees to live peacefully alongside Israelis as equal citizens. However, getting Zionists in the Israeli government to relinquish their dreams of an ethnostate and the PA to step down as the sole hegemonic representative of Palestinians will be a grueling task left to activists on the ground. When facing such dire odds, it is important to recall that the impenetrable character of the now-defunct Apartheid regime in South Africa eventually yielded to the voices of popular demand. To achieve this, Israelis, Palestinians and members of the international community that truly seek a just end to the conflict must make their voices heard over the Kushners and Netanyahus in the room.