On Monday, President Donald Trump, who is hosting at the White House today both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his leading political foe at the moment, former Israel Defense Forces Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz, confirmed that he will unveil tomorrow his administration’s much-anticipated “Deal of the Century” peace plan proposal for Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs.
“It’s something they should want,” Trump said following a meeting with Netanyahu, Fox News reports, while adding that Trump confirmed he will announce the plan on Tuesday. “They probably won’t want it initially. I think in the end they will. I think in the end they’re going to want it. It’s very good for them,” Trump continued.
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump speculated. “Without them, we don’t do the deal. That’s OK. … We think that there is a very good chance that they’re going to want this.”
“This is an opportunity for peace,” Trump also said while standing alongside Netanyahu, as noted by The Jerusalem Post. “We’ll show a plan that has been worked on by everyone. We’ll see if it catches hold. If it does, that’d be great. If it doesn’t, it’s okay.”
Trump “said he invited Gantz to the White House so that the timing of the plan’s release wouldn’t be seen as political, in order to help Netanyahu win the upcoming election,” the Post reported. “He called Netanyahu and Gantz ‘two good competitions, fighting it out.'”
The Post, which is very well-sourced on this issue, also speculated on the contours of the soon-to-be-rolled-out plan: “The plan is expected to include the annexation of all Israeli settlements to Israel, along with most of the Jordan Valley, in a way that would allow for maximum territory with minimum non-Israel residents, such that the Palestinians would live in their own, demilitarized state.”
As reported by the Jewish Press over the weekend, some so-called “settlers” — otherwise known as Jews legally living in the biblical Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria — have already launched a preemptive pushback against the fact that the “Deal of the Century” is reputed to include an independent Palestinian-Arab state.
“Samaria Regional Council Chairman Yossi Dagan left for Washington, D.C. Saturday night to meet with members of Congress and GOP officials who are close to President Donald Trump, as well as with evangelical leaders he has befriended in recent years,” the Press wrote. “His goal is to present to these allies of the settlements enterprise the red lines of the Jewish settlements which must not be crossed in any future arrangement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
“[W]e should also pay attention to the asterisks and small print [in the plan],” Dagan said, as the Press noted. “We must be careful not to allow the words ‘applying sovereignty’ become a smokescreen that covers our eyes from seeing the true meaning of the Deal of the Century, according to the spirit of those parts of the plan which have already been published. The plan is also rife with danger.”
In a Daily Wire op-ed last August, I wrote strongly against the creation of any new, independent Palestinian-Arab state:
The “two-state solution,” the misbegotten Oslo Accords-initiated process by which the liberal Jewish state of Israel is expected to carve an Iran/Muslim Brotherhood-funded stronghold out of its tiny New Jersey-sized nation-state, has always been nothing other than a left-wing Ivory Tower fairy tale. According to the (legally meaningless, under settled international law) “1967 borders,” around which Oslo is effectively based, the Jewish state is to be nine miles wide at its narrowest point — a wildly indefensible result that has led many in Israel’s military and political establishment to deride it as “Auschwitz borders.” Moreover, Judea and Samaria — the biblical Jewish heartland which would be transferred to the terrorist PLO (and thereby made fully Judenrein), pursuant to Oslo — is geographically indispensable for the Jewish state’s security. The hilly terrain of Judea and Samaria provides a direct means to look down upon Jerusalem and Israel’s Tel Aviv-centric coastal plains alike.