Silly and sad

Jared Kushner’s much-hyped Peace to Prosperity economic proposal for Palestine, published over the weekend by the White House, is like a three-legged stool that is missing two legs. It can serve little purpose without two others: a Palestinian state with the sovereign authority required to implement the plan and an Israeli state ready to cooperate with its Palestinian neighbors in that process.

Both are absent from Kushner’s $50-billion proposition. He manages to discuss empowering Palestinians and Palestinian governance without mentioning Israeli checkpoints and other security controls, the split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli settlements and territorial control in the West Bank as well as Israel’s continuing embargo of Gaza. Kushner wishes away all the driving forces of the conflict in order to wave a shiny future that has no practical means of implementation. This is the real estate prospectus version of international politics: show them what it might look like and investors will flock.

Only they won’t, because Arabs and Jews are not dumb. Both know this is silly. No money will flow until the other two legs of the stool are put in place. Palestine needs a secure, unified, and democratic political future before it will get the public and private investment and enhanced trade of the sort Kushner imagines. I’ve been to Rawabi, the truly magnificent Palestinian showcase town built with Qatari funding. It will remain a showcase, not a prototype, so long as the Palestinian state remains weak and Israeli cooperation weaker.

Many peace negotiators try Kushner’s gimmick: a fat economic proposal to sweeten the bitter political and security pills that have to be swallowed. As a State Department official in 1995, I wrote the one-page, three-year, $3 billion proposal that Dick Holbrooke carried into Sarajevo to sweeten the pot. Admittedly it wasn’t as glossy as Kushner’s. It got precious little attention, because it didn’t address the issues that caused Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 3.5-year war. I hasten to add that it is about how much we spent, but to little avail, because the underlying causes of the conflict were not resolved in the Dayton peace agreement.

Erratic though he is, Trump is a one-trick pony. He maximizes pressure, flashes an attractive but entirely imaginary future, and then either caves himself or moves on to his next self-generated crisis. Cases in point: North Korea, Venezuela, Israel/Palestine, and now Iran. The Palestinians are not going to buy a one-legged stool. Imagining they will is silly. But it is also sad. It reduces America to the international equivalent of a real estate huckster.