Arab League Rejects Trump's Middle East Plan

The Arab League has rejected US President Donald Trump's Middle East plan. At an emergency meeting in Cairo, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas attacked the proposal, saying his people will never accept it. Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim reports from Ramallah, the occupied West Bank.

Analysis: Trump's Middle East Plan: The Farce, the Fraud and the Fury

The Trump administration has finally lifted the curtains on the final act of its Middle East diplomacy by revealing the long-awaited, ahem, "peace plan" in a surrealistic White House celebration. I will admit from the outset that I cannot write about it with a straight face, considering the absurdity of the last three years of Trump policies towards Israel and Palestine. To call it a "peace plan" is to do injustice to the infamous "peace process" and its many failed "peace plans". It is so much worse, that a better term for it would be an "assault on peace". Everything about the plan is farcical. Al Jazeera's senior political analyst Marwan Bishara discusses the outcome of the deal.

Trump's "Deal of the Century": Mideast Plan Imposes Conditions on Palestinians

Donald Trump unveiled his "Deal of the Century" even though Palestinians and Israelis are not speaking. Timing is everything for a U-S president who is running for re-election while under impeachment and an Israeli prime minister who is running for re-election while under indictment.

Will the US Mideast Plan Boost or Undermine Peace? I Inside Story

The last opportunity for peace. That's how U.S. president Donald Trump described his plan to end seven decades of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

However, Palestinian leaders weren't involved in the process and they immediately rejected it as a conspiracy. The plan sides with Israel on the so-called 'final status issues' to be resolved with the Palestinians.

Israel gets Jerusalem as its capital, as well as sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Palestinians have been promised a path towards their own state, but only after four years of monitoring to determine whether their leaders are doing enough to fight 'terrorism'.

So does the proposal boost or undermine peace? And what does it say about America's evolving position on the conflict?

Presenter: Sami Zeidan | Guests: Robbie Sabel - Professor at Hebrew University of Jersualem and Former Legal Adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Nabil Sha'ath - Senior Palestinian Official and Adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas; Phyllis Bennis - Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of the book, 'Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.'

Mehdi Hasan: Trump’s Middle East Plan Is a Policy of Apartheid & Settler Colonialism

We continue our discussion of President Trump’s long-awaited Middle East plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which he has described as the “deal of the century.” The plan was drafted by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner without any input from Palestinians and would give Israel sovereignty over large areas of the occupied West Bank, control over all of Jerusalem, and keep all illegal settlements built in the occupied West Bank. We speak with Mehdi Hasan, senior columnist at The Intercept, and Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. Khalidi’s latest book is titled “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”

Trump's Mideast Peace Plan: Is It Really the 'Plan of the Century'?

Trump's Mideast peace plan: is it really the 'plan of the century'? FRANCE24's Claire Pryde asks chief foreign editor Robert Parsons.

Peacemaker? After Saudi Arabia, Trump Visits Israel

Middle-East: Can Israeli-Palestinian Talks Succeed under Trump?

Netanyahu: "Israel's Hand Is Extended to Peace with All Our Neighbours, Including Palestinians"

Paris Mideast Peace Conference: "The Two-state Solution Is the Way Forward"

Middle East Peace Talks Leaks: Obama 'Backed Out of Land Promise to Palestinians'
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: President Barack Obama’s efforts to reach out to the Arab world have been tarnished after it emerged that he reneged on an important Bush administration pledge to the Palestinian leadership.

Confidential Palestinian documents leaked to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television network, suggest that Mr Obama retreated from a promise that territory occupied by Israel after the Six Day War of 1967 should become the basis for a future Palestinian state.

The documents, part of a second tranche of the “Palestine Papers” released by Al Jazeera on Monday evening, indicate that Mr Obama’s change of heart was the result of Israeli pressure.

That fact alone is likely to damage Mr Obama’s carefully-cultivated image as a friend of the Arab world.

According to the papers, Condoleezza Rice, President George W Bush’s secretary of state, explicitly endorsed the use of 1967 borders as a basis for future negotiations on dividing territory in the months after the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.

The gesture was a hugely significant one for the Palestinians as it acknowledged the broad outlines of the state they craved. >>> Adrian Blomfield, Ramallah | Tuesday, January 25, 2011

AL JAZEERA ENGLISH: Deep frustrations with Obama: Obama pressured PA negotiators to restart talks and refused to honour one of the Bush administration's key promises. >>> Gregg Carlstrom Monday, January 24, 2011

The Palestine Papers: Obama Envoy Shunned Bush Parameters
The Palestine Papers also reveal that US president Barack Obama's administration refused to build upon agreements made under his predecessor George Bush. The documents show that they wanted to start negotiations from scratch. And as Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna reports, that is something that the Palestinian negotiators found extremely frustrating

Niall Ferguson: Warburg's Middle East Peace Doubts
Watch Telegraph video here

Israeli and Palestinian Leaders Agree to Work for Draft Treaty with Fortnightly Meetings
THE TELEGRAPH: The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority concluded their first direct talks in nearly two years by agreeing to meet personally every two weeks in a bid to cement a peace deal in the Middle East within a year.

Mr Netanyahu and Mr Abbas will meet on Sep 14 and 15 at a location in the Middle East. Photo: The Telegraph
Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, held what was described as a "long and productive discussion" in which they concurred that they would start striving for a draft treaty.

George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, said a "framework agreement" would include all the "core issues", such as Jewish settlements and the status of Jerusalem that have divided the two sides for so long.

He said the two leaders decided that the "logical next step was to begin agreeing a framework to establish the fundamental compromises to flesh out and complete a treaty".

"Both expressed an intent to approach negotiations in good faith and with a seriousness of purpose," he said, reporting on closed door meetings that followed a public ceremony at the US State Department. >>> Alex Spillius in Washington | Tuesday, September 02, 2010

Bush’s Mideast Pipe Dream
SPIEGELONLINE INTERNATIONAL: The American president came to the Middle East in an attempt to deliver peace. Instead, George W. Bush's visit to the Holy Land has only deepened the divide between the Israelis and Palestinians.

US President George W. Bush is an optimist. That's why he's visiting the Middle East this week in order to speed up the peace process that he started in Annapolis (more...) at the end of 2007.

He wants to use the 12 months left to him in the White House to solve the 60-year-old Middle East conflict, he says, and he gushes bravely about a two-state solution -- with Israel and Palestine living in harmony, side by side.

But during his visit, which ends Friday, he has achieved exactly the opposite. Instead of bridging the divide between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he has made it wider. Neither has he accelerated the peace process. Instead, he has merely managed to make it more difficult. On the red carpet that was laid out for him in the Holy Land, he has managed to bury the Palestinian state before it was even born.

Take, for example, what Bush said at a joint press conference with President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Thursday: The US president promised the Palestinians their own state within a year. He said he was convinced that a peace accord would be signed before the end of his term in January 2009.

Speaking at Abbas' side, Bush said that he was confident that "with proper help, the state of Palestine will emerge." Sources close to the negotiations said that Bush had offered to visit the region again if this was required to give the peace process fresh impetus. And the White House also announced on Thursday that Bush had named Lt. Gen. William Fraser as his envoy to monitor the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" peace plan.

But Bush has expectations that cannot be fulfilled in the madness of the Middle East; in fact, they just come across as naïve. He appears to assume that some kind of inner compulsion to find a harmonious solution to conflicts must exist -- a view that is not supported by history. Bush’s Mideast Pipe Dream >>> By Pierre Heumann

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