February 4, 2020

Jared Kushner’s Peace Plan Is Now Hated by Everyone

Jared Kushner has spent three years formulating his Middle East peace plan. He had one job: give Bibi Netanyahu everything he wanted and tell the Palestinians to pound sand. Apparently he couldn’t even get that much right:

Supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have grown increasingly frustrated at White House pushback over plans to immediately annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank as envisioned in President Trump’s peace plan, with their ire focused in particular on presidential adviser Jared Kushner.

….David Elhayani, the chairman of the powerful Yesha Council, which oversees more than 150 settlements…told The Washington Post. “Kushner misled the prime minister. He misled everybody. He knew for a long time that Netanyahu wanted to declare sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and northern Dead Sea — he said it many times over the last year. Gentlemen just don’t act this way.”

….Elhayani and other settler leaders also met with a senior U.S. official in Washington who told them that if the Palestinians did not accept the plan within 48 hours, Israel would be allowed to declare sovereignty over 30 percent of the West Bank. “But something happened after that; they changed their minds,” said Elhayani.

For those of you who want a map, here it is:

Israel has occupied the Jordan Valley along with the rest of the West Bank ever since 1967, and Netanyahu has long planned to annex it to Israel outright. Trump’s plan does just that. The Jordan Valley becomes Israeli territory, with a bunch of roads and tunnels connecting the various islands of a proposed future Palestinian state. Needless to say, this plan ensures that the Palestinians are completely surrounded by Israel.

For reasons unknown, however, apparently Trump got cold feet. So now the Arabs are mad at him for producing such a transparently pro-Israel plan in the first place, and the Israelis are mad at him for backing off his pro-Israel plan. Nice work, Jared. You really demonstrated a firm grasp of the history and passions governing this piece of the world.

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