The Palestinian/Israeli Peace Plan to End all Peace Plans

“We’ve informed the Israeli side … that there will be no relations at all with them and the United States including security ties."
"Trump asked that I speak to him by phone but I said ‘no’, and that he wants to send me a letter … but I refused it." 
"I will not have it recorded in my history that I sold Jerusalem."
Palestinian Authority Leader, President Mahmoud Abbas

Mahmoud Abbas attends the Arab League’s foreign ministers meeting in Cairo. Photograph: Mohamed Elbendary/EPA

"How can this be a capital?"
"Jerusalem has the Aqsa mosque, the churches, business, places to work. What do we have here, in our little town?"
Ahmed Bader, Abu Dis, West Bank

"Jerusalem is the old walled city. The rest is not Jerusalem."
"We mean by Jerusalem -- and I think everybody around the world means -- the holy sites."
"If you know these areas, you know they're just making a joke of you and your national aspiration."
"These areas are not a symbol for anybody."
Nazmi Jubeh, historian, Birzeit University Museum, West Bank

As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned the Old City of Jerusalem which is the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon -- where the ruins of the Western Wall (Wailing Wall) mark its presence in antiquity, representing the most holy site in Judaism -- is Palestinian. Ancient Judea, the home of Jews since time immemorial is but a figment of the warped imagination of Jews, and the State of Israel is a farce perpetrated upon Palestinians to deprive them of their heritage.

Deprivation of heritage is something that Muslims know a whole lot about. Witness the many ancient buildings dedicated as churches and synagogues that have been razed and in their ruins have arisen mosques. Those venerable churches known to history as great monuments of Christian presence and symbolism venerated for their antiquity and the role they played in representing Christianity down the ages have not been immune to a reversal of fortunes as mosques.

The Western Wall

The ruined Temple of Solomon -- in its second ancient configuration following on the destruction of the first (586 B.C.) -- was never recognized by Muslim invaders as a site holy to a Jewish god even though the Koran speaks kindly of the Abrahamic religions; Judaism which begat Christianity and which the Prophet Mohammad (a trader/merchant) took inspiration from through Judaic tradition and scripture to fashion Islam upon, co-opting Biblical figures from Father Abraham, the Israelite prophets to Jesus, to dignify and grant heavenly authorization to his claims for Allah's final prescription for humanity.

Just as Islam began with a self-entitling appropriation of Judaic precepts, laws and authoritative figures so it took to itself the sacred-to-Judaism tombs of the ancestors, the sites of religious eminence, building over and taking possession of all that it felt legitimized its claim of god's final word to mankind. Nothing has diminished Islamic zest for claiming that everything that ever happened of any significance in the world was initiated by Islam, its presence from the 7th Century forward notwithstanding.



So Jerusalem, once the shining city on the hill of Judaism, is the coveted treasure not of Jewish heritage, but of Palestinian aspiration where it plans to declare itself a nation, with its capital the Old City of Jerusalem. Jewish claims to the city, a febrile fiction according to the Palestinians, and supported by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League, though not once does the Koran mention Jerusalem, while historical texts, period and Judaic scripture are replete with constant references.

"(420) Now the number of those that were carried captive during this whole war was collected to be ninety-seven thousand [Jews], as was the number of those that perished during the whole siege eleven hundred thousand, (421) the greater part of whom were indeed of the same nation [with the citizens of Jerusalem], but not belonging to the city itself; for they were come up from all the country to the feast of unleavened bread [Passover], and were on a sudden shut up by an army, which, at the very first, occasioned so great a traitness among them that there came a pestilential destruction upon them, and soon afterward such a famine, as destroyed them more suddenly."
The Works of Josephus, Roman-Jewish historian : Roman Sack of Jerusalem, 70 CE

In a town on the West Bank abutting the outskirts of Jerusalem, sits an uncompleted Palestinian parliament building on a ridge in the West Bank. This is where the Trump Peace Plan proposes that a nascent Palestinian state locate its capital, not within, but nudging Jerusalem. As a proposed nation next door to an existing nation, the capitals would not be far apart, but only one has the historical and heritage right to claim Jerusalem as its capital.

The parliamentary building whose construction began in the mid 1990s resulted from Palestinian sovereignty plans. From the building could be sighted the revered Al Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, some four kilometers' distance. Repeated intifadas and incitements to Palestinians from birth to adulthood to 'resist the occupation' and become martyrs for 'Palestine' led to the erection of a separating wall to keep Israelis safe as possible from violent death at the hands of these martyrs whose exploits in delivering death to Jews are upheld as righteous celebrants of jihad.

Armed Palestinians take part in a rally organized in Ain el-Helweh, Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, near the southern coastal city of Sidon, to protest against the US peace plan, on January 31, 2020. (Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP)

Arabs and Muslims will not countenance the presence of Jews on what the Jews regard as the Temple Mount where the Temple of Solomon once stood, to pray. Palestinians speak of Jewish feet on the area they refer to as the Noble Sanctuary -- where they believe Mohammad ascended to heaven on a horse -- as defiling the site; Muslims may pray there, at the third most-sacred site in Islam, yet should Jews attempt to pray at their foremost holy site, riots ensue and accusations of intentions to debase Islam and threaten Muslims' sanctuary lead to violence.

The Trump Peace Plan recognizes Israel's historical claims to Jerusalem. It does not propose that Israel co-opt the Temple Mount. It does leave the way open for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on the details that could lead to peace. Nothing, however, pacifies and satisfies the Palestinian Authority, even at those times in the past when other Israeli negotiators and Prime Ministers have acceded to all the Palestinian demands -- only to have them conclude that meeting their declared demands are insufficient.

Members of the Israeli security forces stand guard at one of the entrances leading to the Temple Mount as Palestinians head to the site to take part in the Friday prayers, on January 31, 2020. (Emmanuel Dunand/AFP)

Clearly the only measures that will satisfy their demands is for Israel to no longer be present. It is illustrated clearly enough when the Palestinian Authority produces maps absent of the Israeli presence, only an area that is assigned completely to the Palestinians. The proposed site for a Palestinian capital, Abu Dis, has neighbourhoods technically in East Jerusalem, with the security barrier separating those neighbourhoods from the rest of East Jerusalem, securing Israeli citizens' safety.

In one of those neighbourhoods stands the Shuafat refugee camp, a slum where even the Palestinian police may not venture, much less Israeli police, ridden as it is with the presence of violent gangs. In another of its areas, Kufr Aqab, domestic construction is of questionable reliability even though it remains within the municipality of Jerusalem. Al-Quds University is located within Abu Dis, opened in the 1980s, where 120,000 Palestinians live beyond the barrier. Their residency cards enable them to work and travel within Israel.

Muslim men attend Friday prayers on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City on January 31, 2020. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP)

"It's chaos here. At night, we're ruled by the gangsters. What kind of capital is that?", asks a contemptuous resident, 30-year-old Muhammad Inbawi, who lives in the Shuafat camp. The Palestinian Authority is responsible for the infrastructure, the civil rights and law and order in the West Bank, although its security forces act together with Israeli security forces by mutual agreement. The fact that some of the West Bank towns and villages are rife with violence reflects the corruption within the Palestinian Authority for siphoning off funding given it by the EU and related sources which it uses to pay annuities to the families of 'martyrs'.

As for Gaza, it lacks sewage treatment facilities, allowing 1200 million liters of raw sewage to flow from Gaza daily into the Mediterranean where the current takes it up the coast to clog Israel's Ashkelon desalination plant. Gaza's aquifer is in a parlous state where 97 percent is no longer fit for human use. People fill jerrycans with water from small desalination plants operated by private vendors and international organizations. Unhealthy drinking water is cited as the cause of a quarter of the diseases Gazans suffer.

Hamas, which rules Gaza, uses funding from the international community not for the purpose for which it is meant, to improve the lives of Gaza's Palestinian population, which would include reliable electricity, potable water, waste sewage disposal, and the building of homes. Hamas, however, focuses on issues far more important to them; building underground tunnels into Israel, acquiring munitions to stockpile for future conflict, taking possession of rockets to be fired into Israel, inciting Gazans to weekly challenge Israel's borders hoping to infiltrate and make up for the killing opportunities that the security wall has deterred.

As for facilities in the West Bank, to ease the lives of Palestinians living there, in hot summer months Bethlehem residents are able to access municipal water only episodically, while Jewish settlements are connected to the Israeli water grid through a network operating 24/7. Palestinian villages in the West Bank are often without sewage treatment facilities where their raw sewage goes into cesspits that allow liquid to seep into the groundwater and where sewage in the greater Hebron area where over 300,000 people live, flows via the Hebron Stream to the Israeli town of Beersheba.

Uncivil, deprived, desperate, the Palestinians deserve better, but their leadership remains focused on destroying Israel's presence, neglecting their responsibilities to the people they purport to govern, whose best interests they claim to represent. As a test of readiness for nationhood, they're found miserably wanting. They view themselves as victims, through the prism of a victimhood culture supported by the United Nations deeming them through UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) as the world's first and only perpetual 'refugees' generation after generation.

A Palestinian carries a ladder past a fire by the Israeli security barrier in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah on January 31, 2020, during clashes with Israeli security forces over the US-brokered proposal for a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Abbas Momani/AFP)