Kushner’s plan recycles failed past proposals and will clearly not succeed. But was it meant to in the first place?
By Ibrahim Fraihat | Aljazeera | June 29, 2019
Kushner’s ‘deal of the century’ has by far surpassed all others in this regard by completely decoupling politics from economic solutions.
Proposing an economic approach to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is nothing new and it was definitely not pioneered by President Donald Trump and his adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. It was put forward many times in the past by both the Israeli side, most prominently represented by Israeli leader Shimon Peres and his New Middle East vision, and by various international mediators, including the Quartet on the Middle East, which was created by the UN, US, EU and Russia after the Second Intifada.
Needless to say, all past proposals have failed for one simple reason: They all suffered from an imbalance between economics and politics. Kushner’s “deal of the century” has by far surpassed all others in this regard by completely decoupling politics from economic solutions.
Since the 1990 Madrid conference, the peace process had been built on the principle of “land for peace”, where Israel withdraws from Arab land it occupied in 1967 in exchange for peace and the normalization of relations with the Palestinians and Arabs. This was also the core of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative proposed by Saudi Arabia.
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