Daily Alert Archives

Implementing Elements of the Trump Plan: An Opportunity to Give New Life to the Two-State Option

(Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security) Col. (res.) Dr. Eran Lerman - Extending Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and settlement blocs, we are being told, would finally bury all hopes of an agreed solution. At the core of the underlying assumptions which give rise to these dire warnings is one persistent but unfortunately perverse proposition: that only an agreement (or an imposed solution) based on the 1967 lines, with minor swaps, a partition of Jerusalem, and some more-or-less symbolic concession on the Palestinian "right of return" can offer any hope for the future. This may be called the "Everybody Knows Paradigm" (EKP) for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Yet there must be a reason why all attempts to realize the EKP have failed, again and again; hence the need to chart a new way forward. A case can be made for trying to do so based upon the strategic outline of Trump's plan. It may even be the case that taking unilateral steps towards its implementation would not wreck the prospects of peace but rather the opposite. It could jolt a moribund process into life. Past intense peace processing efforts fell apart, at the end of the day, not because of some specific fault in Israeli policy, but because the sky-high Palestinian expectations were not met. JISS Vice President Eran Lerman held senior posts in IDF Military Intelligence for over 20 years.
2020-05-07 00:00:00
Full Article