Resolves when the plan is released. I generally will stick more to the spirit than the letter of any of these, so if for example it's not exactly 1:1 territory swaps but is very close to it that's a YES.
International means any third parties, not Israel or Palestine
N/A if a plan does not get publicly released before Biden stops being president. Things that are not mentioned in the plan will resolve NO, even if they might still happen if the plan is executed.
Related questions
apparently "nonmilitarized" is the preferred verbiage on the Hill right now
This should be resolved.
Netanyahu's post-war plan for Gaza Strip draws cool US reception | The Times of Israel
Kirby said Washington has been โconsistently clear with our Israeli counterpartsโ about what was needed. He said the US doesnโt โbelieve in a reduction of the size of Gazaโฆ we donโt want to see any forcible displacement of Palestinians outside Gaza and, of course, we donโt want to see Gaza dominated or ruled or governed over by Hamas.โ
The closest there was to this was the Ehud Barak peace plan, which Arafat rejected and launched the Second Intifada instead.
In that plan, only part of Israel's capital would be transferred to the Arab state as its capital of al-Quds. This wouldn't include the Old City, although al-Aqsa would still remain under the administration of the Waqf.
Do you mean something like the Barak plan, or do you mean the entirety of what the Jordanians seized in the 1948 war?
@BrunoParga Olmert also offered a similar thing, the Palestinians did not accept it. Abbas is in no position to concede the "right of return" and ink a deal without e.g. getting shot. Indeed in the negotiations with Herzog and the Kerry negotiations, he failed to make any meaningful concessions on the "right of return", only to be "flexible with its implementation".
But some kind of "revitalized PA" which is dependent on the Saudis might want to or have no choice. So maybe there's a bit more hope here.
@BrunoParga afaik every peace plan ever discussed has included East Jerusalem.
I mean East Jerusalem in whatever definition the peace plan uses. It does not strictly need to return to 67' borders.
@nathanwei That's a very good point with Abbas's legitimacy, which is a very importanr obstacle to any peace deal.
A smart plan would include a step-by-step approach where firat the PA gets revitalized and trust-building steps are performed, and only several years later, after a Palestinian election and if all goes well, an actual Palestinian state is created.
@Shump I think this is reasonable, but any such plan won't address the fundamental issue: a majority of Israelis (say, at least 60%) want a two-state solution, they want both peoples to live in peace, and the majority (>80%, maybe 90) of Palestinians don't.
@BrunoParga No two-state solution is ever to have a majority support among the Palestinians at least for some decades, but that's fine. Palestine doesn't have to be a democracy. You can have a dictator backed by the US, the Saudis, Israel, and so on.
@nathanwei I am not sure how stable that is. Sure, the Egyptian and Jordanian dictatorships mostly rein in those of their citizens which would engage in terrorism against Israel, and the UN by means of UNIFIL and UNDOF mostly does the same with regards to Lebanon and Syria.
But I'm not sure about the practicality of replicating either of these situations in one (or more) Palestinian states. Rejectionism and anti-Semitism and revanchism and irredentism are core to Palestinian national identity; if any of the neighboring countries shares in the intensity of these traits it is Lebanon, but they're also always busy trying to avoid a second civil war. The others all have their own business to take care of as well. And the Palestinian terrories are in practice enclaves within Israel, which makes the contact line much longer and harder to keep an eye on.
It is hard to envision a solution such that everyone and their mom can tell that the peace will only last until the next arabspring or intifada or election where Hamas gets to run.
@BrunoParga If you have Gulf-backed mercenaries going around shooting terrorists in Nablus and Jenin, a permanent IDF presence in the Jordan Valley, and a revamped pro-peace education system, I think it could work. I'm not claiming it's easy, and you would also need a good contingency plan of what to do if it falls apart, both because it might and because a good contingency plan would deter bad actors from making it fall apart in the first place.
Yeah, I agree that such a plan could conceivably work; but even apart from the Palestinian not-so-silent majority themselves, you'd have foreign actors trying to throw a wrench in this plan โ especially Iran.
In the end, it gets to a point where there are so many constraints a potential plan has to fulfill that no plan ever gets attempted or even proposed.
@BrunoParga Great Bender meme! But yeah, force has been key to previous peace plans like the Israel-Egypt one. Force failed to prevent Sadat from being assassinated. I hope you're wrong... it's certainly true that Iran would try to sabotage this plan. You might be right though...
@BrunoParga I mean, I think the key to such a plan would be that you would need a lot of defense arrangements to make it work. Creating and upholding such a plan would necessitate strong defense ties between the US, Israel, and the Gulf states, but this is in some sense a feature and not a bug. Part of the idea is to formalize the pro-stability, pro-US, anti-Iran, anti-terrorism alliance that already exists between the US, Israel, and the Gulf states, to "consummate the Abraham Accords". At least, I think that's Thomas Friedman's idea, and it's worth at least hearing it.
@nathanwei yeah... in a descriptive sense, I agree with you. In a prescriptive sense I find it kind of a bummer that this throws democracy movements in the Gulf under the bus.
@BrunoParga The last thing anyone needs is an Iran-style Islamic Republic of Arabia. Though, a constitutional monarchy with MBS as the very popular king could work in theory. But you could just as easily get Islamism...
@Shump "A smart plan would include a step-by-step approach where firat the PA gets revitalized and trust-building steps are performed, and only several years later, after a Palestinian election and if all goes well, an actual Palestinian state is created."
I wish! Color me skeptical though. Still, pulling back some isolated settlements and transferring parts of Area C to Area B or whatever in exchange for KSA normalization sounds good to me.
@nathanwei The problem with dictatorships is that you can't just install a dictatorship and expect it to survive. Dictatorships rely on a more limited set of keys to power than democracies, but you still do need to control these to survive. In a way, Israel already tried this, when they overrode the election results that would have put Hamas in power. It failed because it's pretty easy for a regime without internal support to lose power. That's what happened in Gaza. It's also happening right now in the West Bank. The PA is a de facto dictatorship and the IDF has to put itself again and again in shitty situations to prop up the regime, which has lost control of Jenin.
The entire point of a peace deal for Israel is to ensure that security can be kept. What's even the point if you are negotiating with a government with no legitimacy who would collapse at the first blow?
@Shump Every peace deal Israel has ever signed has been with a dictatorship. You think a peace deal between Israel and a democratic Palestine is viable in the near future? Anyway, the Egyptian, Jordanian, Moroccan, Saudi, Emirati etc dictatorships have survived well, with one blip from Egypt. Palestinian democracy has not worked well. Neither has Egyptian democracy.
@nathanwei My point is that Palestine can't be a puppet regime. It has to be a regime that enjoys widespread legitimacy, regardless of democracy or dictatorship. But you can't pick one for the Palestinians, they have to decide.
@BrunoParga I don't really want to get into a political discussion but that's an oversimplification and not even a good one.
@Shump I was left curious about what exactly you think the Palestinians want, and I thought to try to find out where exactly our disagreement lies.
I'm imagining the maximal Palestinian position that still has a chance of being accepted by Israel if, say, they were heavily defeated in war. Something that if they don't want this, then a fortiori they won't want anything less.
Let's assume there was a referendum where every Palestinian living in the territories could vote; I would like your prediction of what share of the vote it would get.
I'm thinking something like:
a sovereign Palestinian state, recognized by Israel, with a peace treaty;
borders based on the Green Line (including Palestine having the Jordan valley), with some form of corridor connecting Gaza to Judea. Maybe some form of condominium over the corridor, an easement, or a UN-administered area under the sovereignty of neither State; whatever the form, something that guaranteed neither side could block transit between different parts of the other's territory;
removal of practically all settlements, except maybe some that are really really big and really really close to the Green Line;
removal of the security barrier (but I don't think it's reasonable to get Israel not to rebuild it inside its own territory);
a good part of Jerusalem, including al-Aqsa, under Palestinian control (maybe with the border running exactly through the Western Wall so that Jews could still access it), and this al-Quds would be their capital;
return of some Palestinian refugees, so that the share of Arab citizens of Israel grows the something like 1/3 from the present 1/5;
some measure of financial support by Israel to the Palestinian refugees resettling in the new Palestinian state, but no measure of support for Israeli resettlement of the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence;
no legal restrictions whatsoever on the Palestinian military or their education system โ if they want to build nukes or teach the Protocols of Elders of Zion in school, that's their sovereign right.
So: do you think this is a reasonable maximalist position? Something from which one can reason a fortiori ? If not, what am I missing? By "a fortiori reasoning" I mean, I'm trying to find some value of X such that one can say "if the Palestinians are offered X and they reject it, then there's nothing reasonable that they would accept".
Once we agree on what such a position would be, what is the percentage of the vote you think it would get in a referendum? You can give some form of probability distribution if you want.
"Return of some Palestinian refugees, so that the share of Arab citizens of Israel grows the something like 1/3 from the present 1/5;"
Pretty sure the current position is that the Arab citizens of Israel need to be more than 50% (and then shortly afterwards ~100%) if you want the plan to get any real traction in Palestine...
@PaulBenjaminPhotographer I agree, but apparently @Shump doesn't.
To be clear, they pay lip service to the rights of Jews living there before Zionist immigration began in the 1880s. Like the ones they massacred in Hebron in 1929.
I agree this is a reasonable maximalist position. Some Palestinians would probably say something like that nothing of a full right to return is not enough, but that's not reasonable. Also note that the Saudi initiative has been that has been agreed upon by the PLO and all Arab countries except Libya talks about a limited, symbolic right to return. Any practically-minded Palestinian knows it's not possible.
How many would vote for this in a referendum? I'd say my MLE is 80%, and something like 15% that less than a majority woukd vote for it, but that 15% is mostly due to unknowns about how is will be presented and spun by politicians, the context, what Israel is doing in the meantime, etc.
I think it's important to understand that current opinion polls are done in a state where Palestinians don't believe there's a chance that Israel willl agree to a two-state solution, they see that Abbas's diplomatic approach hasn't worked at all, and many believe an armed struggle is the only way. But the armed struggle has always been a means to an end. The end can be achieved in other ways.
But how about Israeli support? This is something that I understand much better, and Israelis are not nearly as supportive as you state. A majority of Israelis have voted for parties which vowed to keep a peace deal away (i.e. the current coalition). A majority thinks a peace deal is futile, or don't believe that it will stop terrorism. There's just no will in Israel right now to negotiate.
But how about Israeli support? This is something that I understand much better, and Israelis are not nearly as supportive as you state. A majority of Israelis have voted for parties which vowed to keep a peace deal away (i.e. the current coalition).
I agree the current coalition would never in a million years accept these big losses for Israel. I disagree that they "vowed to keep a peace deal away", while acknowledging that they are all for policies that make a deal harder (e.g. expanding settlements).
A majority thinks a peace deal is futile, or don't believe that it will stop terrorism.
I mean, I can't really blame anyone who thinks that way, can you?
There's just no will in Israel right now to negotiate.
Why would there be? I explicitly mentioned that the hypothesis was a much weaker Israel. In the present situation of strength, yeah, Israel doesn't have to negotiate, definitely not in terms anywhere near what I mentioned.
(Edit: also, there won't be any will to negotiate as long as there are still hostages, and while the war is ongoing.)
How many would vote for this in a referendum? I'd say my MLE is 80%, and something like 15% that less than a majority woukd vote for it
I appreciate you putting numbers on it, and I strongly disagree with those numbers. I don't think this is even more likely to pass than not. I think we should ask Manifold, what do you think?
I would also ask how many years after Palestinian sovereignty it would take for them to break the peace deal, or take actions akin to Egypt closing the Straits of Tiran in 1967 and thus precipitate an Israeli attack.
@BrunoParga Feel free to create a market about it, but I don't know how to operationalize it or make it not resolve N/A.
I mean, I can't really blame anyone who thinks that way, can you?
But you blame Palestinians for thinking the same way?
In the end, there's a huge trust issue between both sides. You have to solve it before making any peace deal.
But you blame Palestinians for thinking the same way?
Israel doesn't act towards Palestinians the way Palestinians act towards Israel. Never has, hopefully never will. So one cannot compare these things. And yes, I can and do blame the Arabs for being the ones that prevent peace in the region for the last 100+ years, wayyyyyy before the establishment of the State.