WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: So what, after a week of pro, con and mixed punditry, are we Jews to make of ‘The Deal of The Century,’ loaded as it is with both good and bad? I quote a few thoughts of some of our Good Guys, and conclude with conclusions of mine.
This Week: What a Few of our Good Guys Have To Say on The ‘Deal’
Everybody who has ever written a piece about Israel wrote one this week on the ‘Deal of The Century,’ and if not, will next week. We can’t read them all in trying to form our own assessment of whether, as our parents’ or grandparents’ generations would have framed their analysis, “Is it Good or Bad for the Jews?” The difficulty here is that there’s a good deal of both. Here are a few excerpts of pundits whom I respect, not all of whom have made up their minds.
But let me begin with two possible comparisons that occurred to me as I read ‘The Deal of The Century.’ [1] In the depth of detail of future developments (e.g., Section Thirteen, the Palestinian “Dead Sea Resort Area” inside the State of Israel) into which the ‘Deal’ delves in its non-orthodox approach, it seems a bit reminiscent of the naïvete of Herzl’s Jewish State. (But in the end that was that book that launched a thousand ships, albeit most of them British destroyers).
[2] And the ‘Deal,’ given President Trump as its driving force, might, alas, end up like Roman emperor Julian’s plan to rebuild the Temple, which came to an abrupt end with his death. Neither Trump’s predecessor nor any [n.b.] of his 2020 election Democratic rivals would entertain his ‘Deal’ for an instant.
Arlene Kushner
Arlene Kushner (www.arlenefromisrael.info) is an Israeli grandmother whose frequent emails I religiously read. Her take on ‘The Deal of The Century’ (From Israel: A Hurdle Too High, 2/6/20) is that “No approach will work,” that “there is no way to honor Israel’s rights to the land and Israel’s security needs, and attend to the demands of the Palestinian Arabs at the same time,” that Daniel Pipes is right that peace can only come when the Palestinian Arabs accept local autonomy and not a state.
Arlene does not believe that the ‘Deal’, which requires concessions that Palestinian Arabs will likely not make to get a state, and at that less of a state than in prior offers, will come to pass. She says just the issuance of the ‘Deal’ has benefits for Israel, and that “the primary one, by far, is the recognition that Israel has rights in Judea & Samaria and the Jordan Valley,” and that “this policy shift by the U.S. will resonate down the road regardless of what happens now,” that “the diplomatic dialog has shifted.” I agree, and believe this applies even more so to Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Kushner wonders whether Jared [presumably no relation] himself recognizes that the Palestinian Arabs will not sign on to get a state despite the enormous economic incentives, and whether the ‘Deal’ is “simply a way to expose them and then move on without them.”
Mitchell Bard
Mitchell Bard, Executive Director of the Jewish Virtual Library, writes in an Algemeiner article (Trump’s Impossibly Pragmatic Peace Plan, 2/2/20) that the ‘Deal’ “will fail, but it has reset the baseline for negotiations” by “putting the onus on the Palestinian Arabs” to make concessions. One interesting comment of Bard’s is that the king of Jordan “must feel relieved that Trump didn’t call for Jordan to become the Palestinian state.” [By me, it IS the Palestinian Arab state.]
Bard recognizes that while Trump’s plan is “sensible” in recognizing facts on the ground and stating terms that Israel can accept, it ignores the views of the Palestinian Arabs. He says “the UN and Europeans will try to sabotage it, and a Democratic president is likely to reverse it.” He concludes:
“As I wrote before the plan was released, it will fail, but it has reset the baseline for negotiations. Instead of working from the assumption that Israel will withdraw from more than 90% of the West Bank, the starting point for talks will be 70%; and instead of contemplating a mass evacuation of settlers, only those in small, isolated settlements are likely to be in play. Jerusalem is off the table as are the refugees. Most important, the Trump plan introduces a degree of realism missing from prior initiatives that will hopefully carry over into the future.”
Martin Sherman
Dr. Martin Sherman in the Jewish Press, The Trump Plan: The Good, the Bad, the Unknown and the Untenable, 2/7/20, agonizes over the ‘Deal’s’ “huge benefits” to Israel versus its potential for creating even a diminished Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan, which he acknowledges in the article is an eventuality to which he has long been “categorically opposed.”
For Israel to endure in the long-run as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Sherman states, it must adequately address both its “Geographic and Demographic Imperatives.” He says that the ‘Deal’ does seem to “largely address” the Geographic Imperative. But it fails the Demographic Imperative because “the entire Arab population will remain in place west of the Jordan.” He says that whether or not the ‘Deal’ is actually implemented and a western Palestine Arab state created or not, “the new Mideast peace plan cannot effectively address Israel’s demographic menace, but only perpetuate it.” He says “there is no way to devise a scheme that can resolve this conflict by a division (however ingenious) of the land ‘from the River to the Sea’ between two inimical collectives with irreconcilable founding narratives.” So he continues to urge Israel “to launch a large-scale initiative for the incentivized emigration of the Arab population of Judea-Samaria, in addition to Gaza,” and suggests directing the ‘Deal’s’ billions to this effort.
Hillel Fendel and Chaim Silberstein
In a UnitedWithIsrael piece, Opinion: The Deal of the Century and Muslim Claims to Jerusalem, these stalwarts of www.keepjerusalem.org lead off by posing the ultimate question:
“The bottom line, so far, of what appears to be the most-hyped peace proposal in most of our lifetimes is that Jerusalem – all of it – is Jewish and Israeli, and will remain so. But will it, intolerably, lead to a Palestinian state?”
“It must first be made concretely clear,” these champions of the united Jewish Jerusalem cause continue, “that any form of another Palestinian state – in addition to Jordan – is totally intolerable.” They quote Aaron Lerner of IMRA that it’s one thing to agree to a “demilitarized” Palestinian state (which the ‘Deal’ calls for), and another to keep it as such. But this could be “neutralized,” they say, by making this inside-Israel Arab entity an “autonomy” and not a full sovereign “state.”
And they add: “The deal unprecedentedly recognizes the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria as totally legitimate.” And:
“In addition, it recognizes that the Jordan Valley is an essential part of Israel’s security needs. It also helps us realize the incredible folly of previous Israeli leaders, such as former Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert, who actually offered the Palestinian Authority more than 90% of Judea and Samaria on which to build a hostile Palestinian state. It is mind-boggling to think how close we were to such a calamity, and how far it now appears to be.”
Possibly the biggest danger of the Trump plan, they say, “is that the Arab world might actually accept it – possibly leading to an existential danger to Israel in the form of a Palestinian state.” However, they think this unlikely, given Arabs’ contrived history and feelings regarding Jerusalem. They end: “Jerusalem is ours forever – and let us hope that Judea and Samaria are as well.”
So Where Do We Come Out? My View:
This ‘Deal of The Century’ came out on the heels of the European Union, in its labeling decree, declaring Jews to be of “foreign” origin in “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem).”
Before that, nine leading American Jewish institutions, including the Reform and Conservative movements, rabbis and all, wrote an open letter to the American President, asking him to intercede against Israeli “annexation” in “the West Bank” and calling for a two-state solution including a new western Palestine Arab state with borders that “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders,” save for any agreed-in-writing “adjustments.”
Before that, the UN Security Council, with US abstention, adopted UNSC 2334, resolving that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace”; that the UNSC “will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations”; and that “the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution.”
Against all this, is it any wonder that Trump’s ‘Deal of The Century’ included a potential western Palestine Arab state, but at least reduced territorially and militarily far below that of previous plans, and bringing even that into effect only upon unlikely Palestinian Arab concessions, including that of “the right of return” and historic Jerusalem capital?
The ‘Deal of The Century’s’ great accomplishment is the blow that it strikes to the international consensus, backed by most American Jews, that “the 1967 borders,” the “green line,” really the 1949 Israel-Jordan exclusively military ceasefire lines, are among the Holy Land’s holy places. The ‘Deal’ declares that the Jewish people has legitimate homeland rights to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem. This is of immense existential significance to our homeland’s security and homeland meaningfulness. We cannot cavalierly reject it.
But neither must we endorse it without qualification. We should say that the ‘Deal’ does not go far enough, that through three thousand years’ continuous Jewish presence and the Palestine Mandate, the land of Israel in its entirety, the 22% left of the Mandate west of the River after the excision of Arab Jordan, is the Mandate’s Jewish national home, and that Israel, together with that 78% of Palestine excised from the Mandate as Jordan, is the two-state solution of Palestine’s division into Jewish and Arab states. If Jordan’s Palestinian Arab majority is not in charge of Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, the cure for that is to make Jordan “democratic and Arab,” not to redivide between Arabs and Jews the 22% of Palestine that Palestine’s first division between Arabs and Jews left for the Jews.