Friday | 17 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
বাংলা
   
Friday | 17 January 2025 | Epaper

Trump card for Middle East peace plan!

Published : Sunday, 9 February, 2020 at 12:00 AM  Count : 576
Md Zillur Rahaman
Md Zillur Rahaman

Md Zillur Rahaman

No doubt, US President Donald Trump is mainly a businessman cum low profile politician. It is hardly believe that he has a little know-how about US foreign policy and the rest of the world. He is such a president who can't believe anyone as a friend for long time and make him foe within a short time, changed his own decision in the day night! Several high-ups have already left the White House for his headstrong decisions!

Jared Kushner who married to Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka, has been selected as senior adviser to the President. When Donald Trump announced his son-in-law Jared Kushner as his senior adviser, the move sparked criticism and the decision was reviewed over "conflict of interest" concerns and considered as nepotism in White House history. However, he is the planner and best adviser of Trump Middle East peace plan which seems to be bizarre but the Trump family business.

After electing the US President, Donald Trump has taken so many non-stop controversial decisions one after another and his one of the most controversial decision to shift the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Most of his decision is not only confused the Yankees but also the peoples across the world.

President Trump has lastly unveiled his much talked Middle East Peace Plan, vowing a map showing his vision for an even further depleted Palestinian state than that envisioned by the Oslo peace agreement in 1993. Trump unveiled the plan at the White House at the presence of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Palestinian leaders did not attend the event, saying the proposals were unfair.

Trump's initiative, whose principal designer is his son-in-law Jared Kushner, follows a long line of efforts to resolve one of the world's most intractable issues. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. Palestinians have also refused to cooperate with the Trump administration and denounced its first stage - a $50 billion economic revival plan announced last June.

The basic "concept map" in the plan shows the occupied Jordan valley under Israeli control - although Trump suggests that could be eased in the future - and a West Bank split north and south around Jerusalem, heavily eaten into by Israeli settlements which the plan proposes to recognise under Israeli sovereignty.

The so-called 'Deal of the Century' has gone back on years of promises and negotiations that Palestinians have already endured, and rejected. Thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes after Israeli forces and settlers occupied their towns and villages. Trump's wishful plan to settle the long-simmering Israeli- Palestinian conflict has almost no chance of working. That's simply because the Palestinians have nothing to gain from it.

None of the pressing issues including the return of towns and villages occupied by Israel, the right of return for Palestinian refugees, or the removal of illegal Jewish settlements has been addressed in the so-called Deal of the Century. The map of the proposed Palestinian state looks like the cracked surface of poorly-baked cake crumbling apart. It's like an archipelago on land with Israeli roads cutting through it in more than a dozen places.

The idea that this would be a sovereign Palestinian state is pretty weak and much of its sovereignty -- as we understand it for another country-- won't be there. If by any chance the plan does go through, the Palestinians "won't have a defence policy, their foreign policy would be easily influenced, and their economic relations would be dependent on Israel.

Trump's proposal, which comes at a time when was facing impeachment proceedings within his own country, sharply deviates from previous attempts to settle the territorial and diplomatic disputes. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution dividing the Palestinian territory between the Arab and Jewish people.

More than 56 per cent of the land went to the Jewish people who at the time numbered 498,000. The Arab population of more than 800,000 people was given a landmass of 43 per cent. Jerusalem was supposed to be an internationalised city. Palestinians rejected the proposal as they said the rights of the majority weren't being protected. The Jewish Agency, a representative body of the Jews, wasn't too happy with the contours of the plan but nevertheless cheered on the creation of an Israeli state.

By the time Israel was established in May 1948, it was already in control of some of the territory reserved for Palestine. In subsequent years, the Arab states in the region fought wars with Israel, which allowed the Israelis to occupy more territory. Israel pushed out Palestinians from their villages to make way for Jewish settlers. Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.

The UN Security Council Resolution 242 on November 22, 1967, called for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict". In return, the Arab states in the region were asked to mend ties with Israel. But the resolution was never implemented, and world leaders just paid lip service to its enforcement. Israel continues to occupy all that territory except for the Sinai Peninsula.

Trump's plan recognises almost all the occupied land in the West Bank as part of the Israeli state. Half a million Israeli settlers live in at least 100 illegal settlements that would be annexed by Israel under Trump's plan. In the 1990s, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by its charismatic leader Yasser Arafat held a series of negotiations with the Israelis to find a peaceful resolution.

The talks followed the First Intifada of the 1980s when ordinary Palestinians mobilised in a non-violent movement against the Israeli occupation and drew the world's attention to the inhumane conditions of occupation. Finally, the Oslo I Accord was signed in 1993, and the Oslo II Accord, in 1995.

Those agreements didn't end in a permanent solution as critical issues like illegal Israeli settlements, the question of the return of refugees and the status of Jerusalem were never settled. Palestinians continued to live under tight Israeli security with their movement restricted and monitored.

Yitzhak Rabin, then Israeli prime minister, who led his side in the talks with Arafat, was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist who thought too much was given to the Arabs. People across the Muslim world protest against Donald Trump's peace plan.(AP)
The Accords did transfer control of major Palestinians cities and towns in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority, but Tel Aviv continued to exert control of security and sent in soldiers whenever it felt the need.

Jewish extremists regard the land as a biblical right and opposed negotiations with Yasser Arafat and feared they would be evicted from illegal settlements. Israel has withdrawn soldiers from the Gaza Strip but keeps it under a tight air, land and sea blockade, making the everyday lives of the caged residents miserable.

Trump's plan has left the fate of Palestinian refugees, who have been driven out of their homes by Israeli aggression, in limbo. More than a million Palestinian refugees, many of them living in Jordan and Lebanon, will have no right to return to their homes if the deal goes through.

It seems to us that Trump is seriously stubborn and most of his decision is very biased towards Israel and raises some serious loophole of Middle East peace plan regarding the foreign policy of USA. America is playing games with Middle East peace process since long, so obviously it cannot be accepted so-called "the Deal of the Century" but early it can be called the best Trump card of Middle East peace plan!

The writer is Banker and freelance contributor


LATEST NEWS
MOST READ
Also read
Kudos Shakib Al Hasan
2020: When people spoke truth to power
A revolutionary and a hero
Does Bangladesh need health court?
Bangladesh and China: An alliance for prosperity
Small powers of South Asia in strategic competition
Shariatpur, A name of negligence
Time in the time of coronavirus: Where did 2020 go?
Editor : Iqbal Sobhan Chowdhury
Published by the Editor on behalf of the Observer Ltd. from Globe Printers, 24/A, New Eskaton Road, Ramna, Dhaka.
Editorial, News and Commercial Offices : Aziz Bhaban (2nd floor), 93, Motijheel C/A, Dhaka-1000.
Phone: PABX- 41053001-06; Online: 41053014; Advertisement: 41053012.
E-mail: district@dailyobserverbd.com, news©dailyobserverbd.com, advertisement©dailyobserverbd.com, For Online Edition: mailobserverbd©gmail.com
🔝
close