United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov predicted that the Middle East peace plan proposed by President Trump on January 28th will not become the basis of negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians.
The plan “does meet every single red line that Israel has put in place for negotiations, but stops very far from addressing the concerns of the Palestinian side,” Mladenov said. A statement issued by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ spokesman on Tuesday declared that the UN “remains committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis to resolve the conflict on the basis of United Nations resolutions, international law and bilateral agreements and realizing the vision of two States - Israel and Palestine - living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.”
Defining the highly insecure pre-1967 lines as the internationally recognized border between Israel and an independent Palestinian state would give the Palestinians what they have long demanded.
Why should the Palestinians bother negotiating with Israel if the United Nations and the so-called “international community” are completely in their corner and consider anything less than agreeing to the Palestinians’ demands as illegitimate?
No wonder Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is seeking to address the UN Security Council shortly on the Palestinians’ rejection of the Trump Middle East peace plan. “We say 1,000 ‘no’s to this deal,” Abbas declared on the day the plan was announced.
The Palestinian UN ambassador Riyad Mansour said that the Palestinians intend to have a draft resolution submitted to the Security Council supporting their rejection of the Trump peace plan. Knowing the U.S. will certainly veto such a draft resolution, the Palestinians are once again using the UN for their propaganda purposes, hoping to isolate the U.S. and Israel diplomatically.
“Of course we would like to see a strong, large opposition to this Trump plan,” Mansour told reporters, standing alongside Tunisian Ambassador to the UN Moncef Baati, who is currently serving a two-year term on the 15-member Security Council. No doubt after the Security Council draft resolution is vetoed, the Palestinians and their friends will run to the General Assembly, where they can count on many anti-U.S., anti-Israel votes to supposedly “legitimize” the Palestinians’ rejectionism.
According to Mansour, Abbas will use his visit to the UN to “put before the entire international community the reaction of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership against this onslaught against the national rights of the Palestinian people by the Trump administration.”
The UN’s apparent outright dismissal of the Trump peace plan is playing right into the Palestinians’ hands. It typifies the UN’s reckless pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bias.
United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Mladenov, for example, completely ignored major concessions offered to the Palestinians in the plan, which is built around the principle of a two-state solution that incorporates a step by step pathway to an independent Palestinian state. These concessions include;
- Providing the Palestinians with territory reasonably comparable in size to the territory of the West Bank and Gaza pre-1967,
- A capital in a portion of East Jerusalem that could bear the name already used by the Palestinians, Al Quds, and
- Transportation links allowing efficient movement between Gaza and the West Bank, as well as throughout a future Palestine.
Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that President Trump’s peace plan is as one-sided as its critics have charged, there is still no reason to completely dismiss its relevance to direct negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The plan represents, at the very least, the most detailed and comprehensive description of the concessions the Israelis are willing to offer, accompanied by a map of territorial borders the Israelis believe they can live with in recognizing an independent Palestinian state. The Palestinians insist on a Palestinian state with borders based on the pre-1967 lines that Israel considers to be indefensible. Those are two negotiation positions that can serve as starting points for further discussions directly between the parties.
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