What’s New About Trump’s Mideast ‘Peace’ Plan? Only the Blunt Crudity of Its Racism.

President Trump listens to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their announcement in the White House of Trump’s Middle East peace plan on January 28. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Almost nothing of substance in the Trump-Kushner “peace plan” unveiled this week differs very markedly from the moldering heaps of plans, proposals, initiatives, road maps, visions, and other miscellaneous memos trotted out by one US administration after another since the original Oslo framework of the early 1990s; what’s different are the crude assumptions the document bluntly expresses.

The substance—such as it is—is essentially jerry-rigged from previous documents and drafts going all the way back to Oslo via Camp David. Like them, the most this plan countenances is a “two-state solution” that comprises one actual state and then a random collection of disconnected bits and pieces of territory dressed up as at most a potential proto-state. This precarious entity would have no control over its own water, airspace, borders, or even the tunnels and bridges supposedly stitching it together. It would be entirely disarmed except for a token “security” force, whose sole function would be protecting not itself but the other state (at whose sufferance alone it could continue to cling to its miserable existence). And it would have a kind of “capital” provisionally scrabbled together from a clutch of besieged suburban ghettos to the east of Jerusalem that could be called whatever the Palestinians like as long as it’s not “Jerusalem.” As an outline of a genuine peace between Palestinians and Israelis, this document amounts to little more than a badly written joke with a dud punch line.

What’s striking about it, then, isn’t the recycled substance, but the language in which the substance is couched. It’s stated more bluntly, with none of the attempts at equivocation, hair-splitting, and prevarication attempted by previous documents.