President Donald Trump said on Thursday that he is prepared to unveil his long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan in a manner of days, shortly before his upcoming meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the prime minister’s main political rival Benny Gantz. President Trump evidently has no intention of waiting until the Israeli election this March. “It’s a great plan. It’s a plan that really would work,” the president said. “Look, Israel wants peace, Palestinians want peace. They all want peace. Not everyone wants to say it.”
President Trump said that his administration has spoken briefly to the Palestinians and expects that there will be additional discussions. He believes they “will react negatively at first, but it’s actually very positive to them.”
Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, previewed the Palestinians’ likely response to what most observers predict will be a peace plan that the Palestinians and their supporters will feel leans too much in Israel’s favor. “We warn Israel and the US administration from crossing the red lines,” Abu Rdeneh declared. The red line would be anything in the peace plan that recognizes Israeli control over any territory – including in any part of East Jerusalem – beyond the pre-June 1967 lines. Virtually all of the so-called international community is on the Palestinian side. This is demonstrated repeatedly at United Nations forums where anti-Israel bias is a regular staple.
At an open meeting of the United Nations Security Council last Tuesday, the Under-Secretary General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, Rosemary DiCarlo, used the bulk of her remarks to criticize Israeli settlements. She decried what she described as Israel’s plans for 1,900 settlements in Area C and its announcement of tenders for 2,200 units, both there and in East Jerusalem. Ms. DiCarlo repeated the tiresome meme that “all settlements are illegal under international law.” If that were so, why haven’t Turkey’s settlements in northern Cyprus been declared illegal?
Under-Secretary DiCarlo also criticized Israel’s withholding of some revenue that it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, as a measure to counter the Palestinian Authority’s “pay-for-slay” stipends to terrorist prisoners and the families of terrorists who were killed in the act or upon arrest. Notably, she did not call on the Palestinian Authority to stop the payment of this blood money.
The Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, Ursula Mueller, was even more critical of Israel. Most of the Security Council members joined in the criticism of Israeli settlements, with the notable exception of the United States.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, sought to balance “the continued criticisms of Israel that is unfairly one-sided” with praise for “Israel’s contributions to the international community.”
“Israelis have won 13 Nobel Prizes, including in chemistry and economics,” Ambassador Craft added. “They have improved drip irrigation technologies, which allow countless individuals in the desert environments around the world to be fed. They enhanced surgical technologies that improve the success of medical operations. Indeed, while the world criticizes Israel, Israel is making the world a better place. The Council should not lose sight of this fact.”
Then Ambassador Craft pivoted and pointed to the Iranian regime as the prime instigator of violence, division and hatred in the region. She criticized the Security Council for being silent in the face of “Iran’s malign behavior” that “has been well documented by the UN or is simply out in the open.”
Just to remind her fellow Security Council members, Ambassador Craft recited a few examples. These included the regime’s funding, training and equipping militants; threatening Israel with destruction; attacking tankers in the Persian Gulf and energy facilities in Saudi Arabia; seeking to interfere with Iraq’s fragile democracy; propping up the Assad regime’s brutal repression of the Syrian people; and the gunning down its own citizens protesting the Iranian regime’s corruption, lies, and mismanagement. “Our failure to address Iran’s central role in destabilizing the region sends a powerfully damaging message to those seeking lasting peace and prosperity in the region,” Ambassador Craft said. “It only encourages further instability, which puts the peace we all seek at greater risk.”
After Ambassador Craft spoke, the other Security Council members continued to ignore the Iranian regime’s grave threats to peace and security, focusing their disapproval instead on Israeli policies.
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