ICEJ COMMENTARY
A march in Iran
Palestinians in Jerusalem
The Trump administration has continued to tighten sanctions on Iran, targeting 80 percent of its economy and reducing the 2016 JCPA economic boon to inflationary recession.
were built on the assumption that Israel was illegally occupying the West Bank and must, therefore, relinquish it to the Palestinians for there to be peace.
There is no doubt that President Trump has fulfilled his campaign pledge to leave the Iran Deal and has backed that up with crippling sanctions. He gets full marks on this point.
Trump’s plan invites Israel to relinquish part of its inheritance—about 70 percent of the West Bank—in return for peace, with the caveat that the Palestinians must agree to the terms to actually receive a state in the areas outlined. But either way, Israel retains her rights and sovereignty.
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Principle 5: Reject third-party solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict not negotiated by the two parties On January 28, 2020, President Trump unveiled his long-awaited peace plan. Presented as a take-it-or-leave-it option, the plan certainly differs from previous attempts at negotiating peace between the two sides. For example, when President Obama attempted to reignite negotiations between the two sides in 2011, he took the previously unseen position that the starting point for any deal would be a return to the pre-1967 borders. In other words, Israel was left with almost nothing to negotiate and would first have to agree to give up East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (the so-called West Bank)— areas illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.
So how should we score Trump on this point? To be honest, there has been little progress on the plan itself to date. Prime Minister Netanyahu was recently considering annexation of the Jordan Valley as part of the plan, but in the end, that move was put on ice as a deal sweetener for the United Arab Emirates to sign a historic peace accord with Israel, potentially signaling that more Arab states could follow suit. What’s important to note is that President Trump’s plan has laid the groundwork for peace because it is built on truth, foregoing the lie perpetuated through the decades by diplomats the world over that Israel is an illegal occupier in the ancestral homeland of the Jews. The world has now been put on notice that Israel is here to stay, and her rights and sovereignty are not up for sale.
Trump’s Conceptual Map
The essential difference in approach can be distilled to this: Trump’s peace plan recognizes the rightful claim of Israel under international law to all of the territory west of the Jordan river, while previous approaches, such as Obama’s,
Importantly, the Palestinians were given the option of setting up a capital for their state on the outskirts of East Jerusalem but would receive no sovereignty over any part of biblical Jerusalem, commonly known as the Old City—the epicenter of the struggle between the two sides.
Notably, the plan does not offer anything to the Palestinians that Israel has not already offered in the past, and Israel’s leadership accepted the plan without reservations. 6 | SEPTEMBER 2020
President Trump may not have followed our principle to the letter, but he deserves credit for a unique approach that is already producing positive results for Israel and the region. How can he not receive full marks on this point too?
