The Jan. 28 ceremony at the White House provided an opportunity for the American right to meet the Israeli right. They came together to listen to President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talk about the “deal of the century,” which the former initiated and the latter adopted. It was all very strange. A host of commentaries tried to work out into which category, if any, the plan could be included in the library of efforts at peace in the Middle East.
What the deal effectively turned out to be was an American-Israeli agreement that presented the Palestinians with an established fact. Since no other Israeli-Palestinian peace plan has ever been presented as a fait accompli, the US Trump administration produced a booklet after three years of secrecy in an effort to paint their effort as a legitimate continuation in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. The authors claim to have gone far in adhering to the path, at least from their perspective, even complimenting the Oslo process, with special emphasis on vital security coordination between Israel and the Palestinians. A naive reader might mistakenly think that the deal was nothing more than an extension of Oslo, but they would be wrong.
The Oslo Accords were the first important agreement in the history of the two people’s relationship. It was reached between them alone and then concluded and signed between their nations and the world.
Until 1993, the Palestinians had never agreed to try to reach any agreement whatsoever with Israel, and the Israelis had never agreed to speak with the PLO, which was recognized by the Arab world and the international community as representing the Palestinian people. Unlike the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt (1979) and the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan (1994), the main problem in the Israelis' eyes was identifying an authorized partner with whom to reach an agreement. As it eventually turned out, all previous efforts by Israel to find other partners failed. Thus, it was left with a partner that made no effort to conceal its involvement in acts of terror and whose official map depicted Palestine on both banks of the Jordan River.
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