How Trump's Mideast peace plan could actually matter

President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace proposal may be dead on arrival, as critics like to say. But the plan could also have the long-term effect of seriously circumscribing — at a minimum — future U.S. attempts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The proposal unveiled Tuesday, which was overseen by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, is heavily sided toward Israel. Although it does not rule out a future Palestinian state as some feared, it lays out tough conditions for Palestinians to meet before being granted statehood. And the vision for the state’s borders is highly unlikely to be accepted by the Palestinians.

Standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the president said Tuesday that the plan, titled “Peace to Prosperity,” was a “win-win” path for both sides. But he also warned that his proposal “could be the last opportunity” for the Palestinians to achieve their goals after more than 70 years of conflict.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, appeared ready to take Trump's proposal to the limit. He repeatedly praised the president for recognizing Israeli "sovereignty" over disputed lands and is reportedly planning to bring the idea of annexing those areas to a Sunday vote by his Cabinet.

The announcement of the plan follows an array of other pro-Israel moves by Trump, including shifting the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, shutting down the Palestinians’ office in Washington, and cutting off financial aid to the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority long ago cut off its communications with the Trump team.

Overall, Trump’s actions appear designed to pressure the Palestinians into some sort of peace deal, even if it’s a far cry from what they want. So far, the Palestinians have resisted; on Tuesday, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said his people were responding with “a thousand ‘nos’”.

In the long run, however, by creating certain “facts on the ground,” in the argot of the peace process, Trump may have dramatically redrawn the boundaries of politically acceptable terms for a U.S. administration – Democratic or Republican – to endorse if it wades into the conflict.

“It’ll change realities on the ground in a way that’s going to be harder to un-ring that bell,” said Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the conservative American Foreign Policy Council.

The traditional U.S. position has been that "final status" issues are best resolved between the two parties, meaning that Israel and the Palestinians should agree on the most sensitive topics. Each side has staked out non-negotiable demands, and U.S. officials have long sought to craft compromises on what are often utterly incompatible positions.

But now, future U.S. presidents might be hard-pressed, for instance, to reverse Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a diplomatic carrot Americans had previously withheld. Some Democrats running to replace Trump have already signaled they won’t negate the recognition nor move the U.S. Embassy back to Tel Aviv.

It’s unlikely, too, that future U.S. presidents will reverse Trump’s recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, territory claimed by Syria.

Future U.S. leaders also might find it hard to walk back Trump’s effort to limit who counts as a “Palestinian refugee.” Some might even find useful the Trump definition, which would not cover all descendants of original displaced Palestinians, because it could ease Israeli concerns about agreeing to a broad “right of return” for Palestinian refugees.

It could be difficult to unravel Trump’s promises to Israel in part due to the precedents they set within Israeli politics, which have shifted decidedly against the Palestinians in recent years. Another consideration: the domestic political price a future U.S. president might pay by provoking a fight with a close ally that retains strong support in Congress.

“In the American political context, the unfortunate reality is that Trump’s plan will shape U.S. domestic perceptions of what is politically possible,” a former U.S. official who worked on Israeli-Palestinian issues told POLITICO. "On refugees, Jerusalem, borders, it will almost certainly make it more difficult for a future president to support proposals that are more forthcoming for the Palestinians.”

Still another reason future presidents’ hands might be tied is that Israeli leaders have already signaled they will implement pieces of Trump’s plan even without Palestinian assent.

The plan envisions Israeli control over the Jordan River Valley and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Netanyahu on Tuesday vowed that Israel would start to “apply its laws” to those areas, a move critics said would mean a de facto annexation.

The Israeli prime minister faces an election in just weeks, as well as a raft of legal troubles — he was formally indicted on corruption charges hours before he met with Trump. Yet, according to Israeli media, Netanyahu plans to have his Cabinet consider a vote to start annexing parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley as early as Sunday. Such a move could face legal challenges.

Through land swaps, Trump says he’ll ultimately be putting in Palestinian hands twice the amount of territory they already control. But detractors said the lands that Palestinians would ultimately receive are not exactly useful.

“The swap areas they are giving the Palestinians is a bunch of desert entirely disconnected from the rest of their state while taking prime real estate in the middle of the West Bank,” Ilan Goldenberg, a former U.S. official and Democrat who follows Israeli-Palestinian issues, tweeted Tuesday.

The administration of Barack Obama tangled early and often with Netanyahu, including a first-year battle over settlements. The Obama team openly worried that Israel's actions were making a future Palestinian state impossible, and leaned on Netanyahu to freeze settlement growth to entice the Palestinian side to negotiate.

Israeli officials pointed to past commitments by the George W. Bush administration, including a letter Bush sent to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shifting the U.S. position on so-called natural growth of existing settlement blocs.

The Obama administration’s efforts to retract that promise generated harsh criticism from Israel’s allies in the United States, including current State Department official Elliott Abrams. The blowup over settlements deepened the mistrust between Obama’s team and Netanyahu's, and in some ways the relationship never recovered.

Last year, the Trump administration reversed decades of policy by deciding that the U.S. no longer views Israel’s West Bank settlements as inconsistent with international law.

Trump’s defenders argue he is making hard calls that past presidents have dodged and stripping away illusions that have long prevented the conflict from being resolved.

“Mere opposition to this vision is simply a declaration of support for the hopeless status quo that is the product of decades of stale thinking,” the White House said in a document released Tuesday that echoes past remarks by Kushner.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute acknowledged that Trump “forces some hard questions for the Palestinians” but said he also is pushing some hard choices on the Israelis.

“Look at Bibi talking about a Palestinian state — that's important,” Pletka said, using Netanyahu’s nickname. The Israeli prime minister has long downplayed the possibility that such a state could exist.

In comments reported by the Israeli press, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said this week the top priority of the plan’s architects “was always the national security of Israel. We knew that we couldn’t do anything that was going to compromise the security of Israel. But we also knew that the Palestinians deserve a better way of life.”

To that end, the Trump plan tries to coax the Palestinians to the table by promising them billions of dollars in economic assistance. And while it recognizes many existing Israeli settlements in Palestinian-claimed land as part of Israel, it also calls for a four-year freeze on settlement construction, though it was not quite clear when that freeze would take effect.

Trump’s plan also insists that Jerusalem will be the undivided capital of Israel, but at the same time, it calls for a future Palestinian state with a capital in parts of East Jerusalem. Former U.S. officials said Trump is engaging in word play that could in the long run undermine talks.

“There are a lot of parts that Israel calls ‘Jerusalem’ that Palestinians don’t consider ‘Jerusalem,’” Goldenberg noted. He added that “many key Arab neighborhoods” of the city may not wind up in a future Palestinian state as envisioned by Trump.

That state, as envisioned by a map included in the plan, would for the most part be encircled by Israel, and is not contiguous. The plan also appears to give Israel control over security affairs in that state, noting: “A realistic solution would give the Palestinians all the power to govern themselves but not the powers to threaten Israel.”

The White House’s peace plan envisions the Gaza Strip as a part of a future Palestinian state. That area remains under the control of the militant group Hamas, however, and is the source of rocket fire and other attacks on Israel. Israel also worries about aggression from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group in nearby Lebanon.

The White House has said the Palestinians can assume more security responsibility over time, but analysts say it’s unlikely Israel will allow for Palestinian control of security anytime soon.

The plan repeatedly talks about giving the Palestinians a better life and creating more prosperity in the region. But Palestinian leaders say they cannot be bribed into accepting an agreement that does not offer them genuine political autonomy.

“After the nonsense that we heard today we say a thousand ‘nos’ to the Deal of The Century,” Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said Tuesday in the West Bank city of Ramallah, mocking past descriptions of the plan.

The Palestinians have support from some U.S. lawmakers, including Democrats who say they are mindful of Israel’s security needs.

“Any claim that this plan envisions a Palestinian state is just false,” tweeted U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “The plan allows Israel to control all security matters inside the Palestinian ‘state’, and thus it's not a state at all.”

But the fraught topic of Israel has often divided Democrats in recent years, with some in the party pushing for a more critical line toward Israel.

The emergence of loudly pro-Palestinian voices in Congress, including Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), has led at times to open clashes on Capitol Hill, with House leaders rebuking Omar for her comments on Israel.

The fault lines also have emerged in the 2020 presidential campaign trail, with one front-runner for the Democratic nomination — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — defending Omar.

The cracks in once-solid Democratic support for Israel are one reason that some former U.S. officials and analysts argue that Trump’s moves now may give more space for Democrats to maneuver on the Israeli-Palestinian issue by making it clear past playbooks are not binding.

For example, some Democrats say the U.S. should go ahead and open a U.S. diplomatic mission – perhaps an embassy – in parts of East Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinians. And some Democratic presidential candidates have expressed openness to the idea of conditioning U.S. military aid to Israel on whether it keeps building settlements.

Palestinian leaders have avoided contact with the Trump team for many months and none were present for Tuesday’s announcement. On Monday, during a separate appearance with Netanyahu, Trump alluded to the seeming oddity of announcing a peace plan where only one side was on board.

“So people have been working on this for many, many years, and I think we’re relatively close,” he said, “but we have to get other people to agree with it also.”

There were, however, a handful of officials from Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates, at Tuesday's event — underscoring how much the region’s dynamics have changed over the past decade.

The Palestinian cause is not the motivating issue it once was for Arab leaders.

Many of those leaders now view Iran’s rise and aggression in the region a more pressing concern, and they’re willing to stay quieter about the Palestinians if it means they can get cooperation from the United States — and Israel — in containing the Islamist regime in Tehran.

But notably, in a sign that Trump’s team still had more diplomatic spadework to do, neither of the region's two Arab heavyweights — Egypt and Saudi Arabia — sent officials to the White House rollout. Another key player, Jordan, also stayed away.

And those Arab countries present made it clear the road to Mideast peace remains a long one.

“This plan is a serious initiative that addresses many issues raised over the years,” the UAE Ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba said on Twitter. He added, however, that the plan “offers an important starting point for a return to negotiations within a U.S.-led international framework.”