No one is holding their breath in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem or in the Palestinian Authority headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah ahead of the expected presentation of US President Donald Trump’s “ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians expected shortly after the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

The US deal is supposed to focus on resolving the status of the lands Israel captured in the 1967 Six Day War on its eastern front. But a schism lies between the opening positions of Israelis and Palestinians, which has widened during the long years of stalled negotiations between them. The Palestinians insist negotiations be based on the armistice line with Jordan drawn up in April 1949 following Israel’s War of Independence, to which the sides adhered until June 5, 1967. The Palestinians claim that after being forced to give up 78% of Mandatory Palestine to make way for the establishment of Israel, they should get the remaining 22% that Israel conquered in the 1967 Six Day War. Israel’s ruling party, the Likud, objects to the very idea of establishing a Palestinian state. The political center and the center-leaning left are willing to make do with “settlement blocs” in the West Bank that would remain in Israeli hands.

Reportedly, the term “settlement blocs” came up often in talks held by the Trump administration’s peace team, led by special envoy Jason Greenblatt, with Israeli politicians and experts. An array of plans can be found in newspaper archives and on the sites of various think tanks, suggesting the annexation to Israel of settlement “blocs” according to different permutations. The common denominator of all these plans is the disregard of Palestinian aspirations. For example, on May 25, Knesset member Eitan Cabel of the center-left Zionist Camp wrote an op-ed in Haaretz calling to jettison the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accord. Cabel wishes to impose Israeli law on East Jerusalem, the Etzion settlement bloc, the settlement town of Ma'ale Adumim, and the Karnei Shomron settlement bloc and town of Ariel in the heart of the Samaria region of the West Bank, and to maintain control of the Jordan Valley. No wonder Naftali Bennett, chair of right-wing HaBayit HaYehudi, embraced the proposal with alacrity.

Michael Bar Zohar, who represented Labor in the 10th and 12th Knesset (1981-1984 and 1988-1992, respectively), also opined recently in Haaretz that Israel should unilaterally annex the Jordan Valley, which constitutes almost 30% of the West Bank. Bar Zohar, a biographer and friend of the late President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, proposed “redrawing a de facto new border, which would be the new border of the State of Israel and will be defended by a wall or a fence.” Labor Party Chair Avi Gabbay dismissed the proposal to annex territories outside the framework of an agreement with the Palestinians but underscored that “clearly, the blocs will remain under our control.”