50 former ministers and European leaders speak out against Trump’s Palestine plan

Fifty European celebrities – former foreign ministers, prime ministers or heads of the European Commission, the United Nations or NATO – Sign the open letter (full text)which was reprinted by El País on Thursday, in which they asked the EU to reject Donald Trump’s Near East Plan Considering that this would cause Palestinians to sufferapartheid“Like the South Africans.

They condemned the plan as allowing Israel to annex occupied territories and making a viable Palestinian state impossible. The signatories included Spaniards Javier Solana and Trinidad Jiménez, Frenchmen Jacques Delors and Hubert Vidrine, Britons Jack Straw and Chris Patten, Italian Massimo D’Alema and Irishman Mary Robinson.

Forums such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation have all publicly opposed this practice. President Trump’s peace plan Consider that it breaks with decades of international consensus on a two-state solution to the conflict between Arabs and Palestinians.

As the letter from 50 former foreign ministers and former European leaders stressed, “It is apartheid“Because it leads to separation between two peoples. The former glory of European diplomacy that signed the letter and the designs of the advisers who developed the White House peace plan face challenges under international law.

The initiative favors a permanent Israeli occupation but is limited to promising a better life for Palestinians without guaranteeing them a state of their own. Figures that have dominated EU foreign policy in recent decades, such as Javier Solana, not only expressed concerns about this project, which could exacerbate the core conflict in the Middle East, but also called on the current European political leadership to take steps to reject the Trump plan and counter the threat of annexing Palestinian territories.

Like skilled real estate lawyers experienced in the Manhattan land market, the architects of the White House plan rushed to measure and demarcate the disputed properties. Since last Monday, a team of cartographers has been mapping the West Bank to determine which land in the occupied Palestinian territory (30% of the area) can be annexed by the Jewish state.

Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” initiative reflects Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to leave new negotiating parameters that favor Israel’s interests as a legacy of his decade in power.

The plan foresees no concessions beyond the eventual handover of some desert territory in exchange for the capture of West Bank settlements (home to more than 400,000 settlers) and the strategic Jordan Valley, the natural border to moderate Sunni Arab states.

Palestinians must give up Jerusalem — their greatest symbol of identity, embodied in the esplanade of the Al-Aqsa Mosque — and their dream of a viable state in the Jordanian West Bank, along with the return of the five million diaspora refugees inherited from Israel’s birth in 1948.

In return for their dashed hopes, the “deal of the century”, as often defined by the US president himself, promises them a massive $50 billion (€46 billion) in international investments. “Trump has limited himself to copying and pasting the Israeli plan,” explained Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, about the US proposal.

Israel intends to tolerate a demilitarized and regulated entity. Only in the non-annexed areas of the West Bank will there emerge a pseudo-Palestinian state with 2.5 million inhabitants, whose borders are not effectively controlled and “the transit of people and goods is supervised by Israel.”

Palestinian freedom of movement came at the cost of building a network of “separate roads for each population and imaginative infrastructure solutions such as tunnels and overpasses.”

The asymmetry of the peace plan is most evident in Jerusalem, which Trump has now declared “inalienable,” shutting down Palestinian demands for a national capital in the eastern part of the holy city.

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