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.
