About a month before Israeli elections scheduled for March 2, President Donald Trump dropped a bombshell with his “deal of the century,” unveiling his diplomatic plan for peace on Jan. 28. The economic components had been presented at a “workshop” convened by the Trump administration in Bahrain last June.

Trump's plan has resurrected words in the Israeli discourse that had disappeared from the local political lexicon in recent years, among them “diplomatic negotiations,” “peace,” and “Palestinian state.” With the subject of peace once again on the table, however, instead of the Israeli left, for whom peace with the Palestinians is to a large extent its raison d’être, leave it to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finds ways to derive usefulness from this turn of events.

In the days since the public presentation of Trump's plan, the left has made no effort to challenge it, to promote a real peace agenda, to offer new, alternative ideas or unfurl a peace-directed diplomatic vision while simultaneously rejecting the dangerous, hallucinatory ideas in the so-called deal of the century. Knesset members of the center-left have limited themselves to vague generalities that mean little to the Israeli voter despite many of them being given an open mike to speak their minds and promote a peace agenda. They did not call on the public to come out and reject the plan. Only a few hundred people participated in a Feb. 1 protest organized by the anti-occupation group Peace Now against the initiative. Meanwhile, only members of the Arab public participated in a demonstration in the town of Baka al-Gharbiya, revealing that there is little to the notion of a Jewish-Arab “partnership.”

The Trump program calls for a Palestinian state annexing the Israeli cities of the center-north Triangle region, where mostly Arab villages are located, along with the Arab Israelis living there. Blue and White — seeking to draw a clear line between itself and the left-wing parties committed to a resolution of the conflict on the basis of “two states for two peoples” — has embraced the US plan. Amir Peretz, leader of the center-left Labor-Gesher-Meretz alliance — instead of objecting to Trump’s plan and underlining support for a two-state solution — limited himself to a few vague words in which he called for a resumption of direct negotiations with the Palestinians and thanked Trump for his efforts. It was as if Peretz represented a ruling party and not a mere “technical bloc” predicted by the polls to garner only nine Knesset seats.