\u00a9 Omar Ashtawy\/IMAGO\/APA images\/Reuters<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn the history of Trump\u2019s interventions in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which spanned a comparatively peaceful four years during his first term, and are now resurfacing during a shaky ceasefire, a clear pattern emerged.<\/p>\n
Where Trump could overturn long-standing US positions by edict alone, that was done quickly. In 2017, he recognised Jerusalem as Israel\u2019s capital, and in 2019 accepted Israeli claims to the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied since 1967. Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank \u2014 long admonished as obstacles to peace, and violations of international law \u2014 were suddenly rendered legal under US law.<\/p>\n
But ideas that required working with Palestinians to build consensus, and forcing Israelis to make concessions, died on the vine. It was this genre of grandiose proposals, like the \u201cpeace to prosperity\u201d plan, that Trump appears to have fallen back on this week.<\/p>\n
This time, however, it comes after 16 months of the most devastating war in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel\u2019s ferocious offensive on Gaza, which followed Hamas\u2019s October 7 2023 attack, has left much of the strip in ruins and triggered a humanitarian crisis that is far from over, even as the first phase of a ceasefire went into effect last month. <\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s idea, which builds on his calls last month to \u201cclean out\u201d Gaza, threatens a repeat of what Arabs call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes during the 1948 war that birthed Israel. It is an outcome that war-weary Gazans are determined to avoid repeating.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the end, the biggest strength of Palestinians is the right to say no [to a bad peace deal],\u201d said a person close to the Palestinian leadership, who had spoken to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas about Trump\u2019s surprise announcement this week. \u201cWe said no to Trump before. We will say it again.\u201d<\/p>\n
That did not prevent Trump from outmanoeuvring the ageing and unpopular Palestinian leadership before. During his first term, he cut aid to Palestinians and closed their Washington mission, punishing them for refusing to enter negotiations.<\/p>\n
And after he revealed his map in January 2020, the threat that Israel would unilaterally annex vast swaths of the West Bank helped prompt the United Arab Emirates to abandon decades of official enmity with Israel and sign the Abraham Accords six months later. (It later emerged that Trump had also agreed to fast-track the sale of F-35 jets to the UAE as a sweetener.)<\/p>\n
That cracked open the prospect that Israel could make peace with its Arab and Gulf neighbours without making peace with the Palestinians, ending a decades-long taboo and undermining a cornerstone of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah\u2019s 2002 \u201cArab Peace Initiative\u201d.<\/p>\n
Trump is now determined to normalise relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which considers itself a leader of the Sunni Muslim world. In Tuesday\u2019s press conference he said the US takeover of Gaza would ease that goal, which eluded him in his first term.<\/p>\n
Saudi Arabia immediately disagreed, saying in a statement hours later that it rejected any attempts to \u201cdisplace the Palestinian people from their land\u201d.<\/p>\n
The real estate developer who spoke to the person at the White House said the questions he was asked appeared to bypass the immediate issues in Gaza and seemed theoretical. \u201cLet\u2019s see,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a serious discussion. But it was serious [five years ago] too.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he said he was surprised to see the discussions jump from possible future development in Gaza by foreign firms to Trump proposing the expulsion of Palestinians. \u201cAll of that is politics, I am not involved,\u201d he said, distancing himself. \u201cBut this is Trump, everything is negotiations, high level.\u201d<\/p>\n
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian lawyer who worked with Abbas during a failed round of negotiations in the early-2000s, suggested the same \u2014 that the threat of the hugely destabilising displacement of 2.3mn Palestinians into neighbouring countries was a precursor to talks over other, perhaps equally unpalatable, options for the future of the strip.<\/p>\nPalestinian president Mahmoud Abbas holding a placard in September 2020 showing maps of Palestine from 1937 to Donald Trump\u2019s proposal in 2020<\/span> \u00a9 Alaa Badarneh\/Pool\/AFP via Getty Images<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cI think that this is directed at the Arab states and saying to the Arab states: \u2018Put pressure on Hamas to accept whatever it is that we want to see done\u2019,\u201d she said.\u00a0\u201cIf you don\u2019t accept our terms for what is coming next, then the alternative is that you\u2019re going to be kicked out and sent to the Sinai [in Egypt] and into Jordan.\u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, Trump made clear his expectations for Hamas in the immediate future \u2014 the successful completion of the staggered Israeli hostage-for-Palestinian prisoner releases, now in its third week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019d like to get all of the hostages out, and if we don\u2019t, it will just make us somewhat more violent,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Additional reporting by Malaika Kanaaneh Tapper in Beirut<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few days ago, a European-Israeli real estate developer had a surprise call from an old friend, now…\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":15997,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","cs-entry","cs-video-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financialrush.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Palestinians](\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/__origami\/service\/image\/v2\/images\/raw\/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fb90845f3-e568-48ce-b0c7-ea1eef1aaecd.jpg?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1\")
<\/picture>![\"Palestinian](\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/__origami\/service\/image\/v2\/images\/raw\/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2F2b427f38-459a-4d3a-bb7f-587472c67f9a.jpg?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1\")
<\/picture>