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I’m still on vacation and pledged not to engage with anything until Monday, but having just read the Trump economic peace plan, all I can say is that it is the Monty Python sketch of Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives 1/
Sure, it would be great to have the West Bank and Gaza to be a trading hub like Singapore. How’s that going to work without an airport or seaport? For that matter, how will exports happen at all without Palestinian control of its borders? 2/
The West Bank and Gaza are going to be tech hubs despite only having gotten access to 3G last year? Palestinians are supposed to become passionate about corporate governance without having any independent political governance? 3/
As low as my expectations were for this peace initiative, it’s clear that I hadn’t ratcheted them down nearly far enough. Leaving aside that this reads like an investment prospectus for a project that an intern conceived of a week ago, literally none of it is actionable 4/
Not one thing in here can be addressed without first answering the political and security questions of what the political structure of this territory will be, who will control it, and will Israel’s security concerns allow for any of this, since they haven’t up until now 5/
Even consider that this plan treats the West Bank and Gaza as a single entity, which is great so far as the Palestinians are concerned but runs contrary to current Israeli policy and is also belied by the facts on the ground. This really is the dead parrot sketch as I-P peace 6/
If this is what took Kushner and Co. over two years and they think that any of this can even be assessed independent of a political vision, then either they are just as amateurish as some have accused them of being, or they have engaged in history’s best trolling exercise 7/7
