The 'ultimate deal'? Trump's Middle East peace plan is actually 15 years old
By: Ian Black
Source: The Guardian
If Donald Trump is going to pursue “the ultimate deal” between Israelis and Palestinians after his brief visits to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the occupied West Bank, the effort looks likely to be based on a 15-year-old peace plan that was barely noticed at the time, has been gathering dust ever since, but remains a rare green shoot in the arid landscape of Middle Eastern diplomacy.
That plan was the Arab Peace Initiative (API), unveiled by the then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at a summit in Beirut in March 2002. Its launch was soon overshadowed by a far bigger, bloodier drama: a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed 29 elderly Israelis celebrating the Passover holiday. The worst attack of the second intifada triggered Israel’s direct reoccupation of the West Bank, which it had partly turned over to the PLO after the1993 Oslo accords.
But talk of the API has increased recently. The idea is simple: Arab states will recognise Israel in return for a Palestinian state, its capital in East Jerusalem, in line with the pre-1967 war borders. So far, only Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with Israel, without any linkage to the Palestinian question.
And interest now appears to be reviving – at least in Washington.
Diplomats report that the Trump administration has been urged to revisit the plan by Egypt, Jordan and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who sounded unusually upbeat after visiting the White House last month. Abbas and the US president met again in Bethlehem on Tuesday, but Trump made no mention either of Israel’s occupation or an independent Palestinian state.
Along with the Saudis, the states that are keenest on the API are its neighbours the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The entire Arab League reaffirmed support for the initiative in 2007 and repeated that at the last summit in Amman in late March. Syria and Iraq are of course preoccupied with their own grave crises.
Now the Saudis and their allies are reportedly offering incentives – dangling the prospect of access for Israeli companies, direct communications and over-flight rights in exchange for freezing West Bank settlements and easing the blockade on the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas. The ideas were outlined in a paper shared among Gulf countries, according to the Wall Street Journal.
These ideas build on significant below-the-radar trade and cooperation between Israel and those states, including discreet intelligence and security links. Diplomats describe a winning combination of Israel’s technical capabilities with Arab human intelligence assets.
Hebrew markings have been seen on Israeli-manufactured ordnance used in the Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen. The UAE is known to have bought military equipment from Israel.
Israel’s announcement of greater freedoms for Palestinians to build in the part of the West Bank dominated by settlements was intended as a confidence-building measure. But that was overshadowed by tensions over hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners.
Palestinians suspect that what looks like the dilution of the original API is designed to turn it into another “roadmap” for the incremental progress they have come to distrust since Oslo. Abbas’s unpopularity and the debilitating split between his Fatah movement and Hamas are further barriers to progress.
Palestinians were suspicious of Arab states pursuing their own interests even before Israel’s creation in 1948, and the raison d’etre of the PLO from the mid-1960s was to boost Palestinian independence – not rely on others.
Binyamin Netanyahu likes to boast that Israel gets on well with the Sunni Arab gulf states, which also oppose Iran – the standard bearer of the Shia world – and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, which are both helping shore up Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Saudi Arabia and Israel both opposed the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump’s adoption of the same anti-Iranian narrative on his visit to Riyadh delighted the Israelis.
Netanyahu has said in the past that he could support the API with “modifications”. The Palestinians have always rejected revisions – and are likely to fear that the Saudis and their Gulf allies may be prepared to settle for less than independence. Still, openly improved relations remain unlikely without significant progress on the Palestinian front.
“Ending the occupation of our country will pave the way towards implementing the Arab Peace Initiative, and would aid efforts spent on fighting off terrorism and extremism in both the region and the world,” as Abbas put it.
It remains to be seen whether, 15 years on, the API can become an active element of the search for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
