The Trump peace plan has caused a profound conceptual change, in parts irreversible, even before its details have been unveiled and before we know whether it entails anything that can soon be implemented territorially or diplomatically. Over a quarter-century ago, a similarly impactful conceptual change was precipitated in Oslo regarding the Palestinian issue; the Trump plan amends some of its failures.
In Oslo, Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as a negotiating partner, even though its leader, Yasser Arafat, only barely tempered his overt commitment to the strategy of terror ("the armed struggle") and never even bothered pretending to abandon his goal of destroying Israel ("the right of return"). The establishment of this conception prevented Israel from presenting the Palestinian national movement with preconditions to negotiations – that is to say completely purging the ethos of establishing their state through bloodshed and fire on the ashes of Israel, akin to the deep-seated policy change fostered by Anwar Sadat in Egypt. The lack of this return explains Palestinian society's addiction to glorifying the "shahid" (martyr) and raising its children on the virulent ideology of negating the legitimacy of the Jewish state.
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This topic should be examined from a historical perspective. David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett understood in 1948 that the Palestinians' national movement (led at the time by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini) was built on faulty foundations; hence they partitioned the land in partnership with a responsible Arab party: King Abdullah and his Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. They, too, knew that a sovereign Palestinian state would perpetuate war because its society prioritizes harming its Jewish enemies over giving its children a better future. Today, the Palestinians in Gaza are proof if this.
Now, too, we are facing a conceptual matter of the highest order. Ever since Oslo, the PLO and Hamas have abhorrently ingrained in the past two generations a veneration of violence and delusions of destroying the Jews. Ever since Oslo, it has also been widely accepted that any peace deal must be based on establishing a sovereign Palestinian state in most of Judea and Samaria. The Palestinians rejected two far-reaching Israeli proposals. The first, offered by Ehud Barak at both Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, would have met most of these Palestinian demands; and the second, offered by Ehud Olmert in 2008, would have met almost all of them.
This formula became entrenched in the minds of the entire world, including Washington and normally even in Jerusalem, as an inalienable Palestinian asset. All the subsequent clichés were predicated on this notion: "We all know what the parameters of the solution will be." The Trump plan eviscerates these clichés. From now on, only those who habitually deny reality can stick to them – Palestinians, Europeans, and others.
When the two deciding parties – Israel and the United States – reject this paradigm, new options emerge. Even another administration in Washington, if it tries erasing the Trump legacy, won't undo recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, won't deny Israel's fears that the Palestinians will use their sovereignty for nefarious purposes, will have to recognize the strategic importance of the Jordan Valley, and will have a hard time reintroducing the formula that sanctifies the 1967 borders. The plan can be used by a moderate and determined Israeli government to leverage a series of unilateral moves with US support, aimed at disengaging from the Palestinians under reasonable security conditions.
