Never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Palestinian leadership has decided to thwart U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan by inciting mass protests, media reports suggest. “Palestinian officials warned over the weekend that US President Donald Trump’s plan for Mideast peace, which is expected to be announced on Tuesday, would spark a new wave of mass protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
Even before the details of the peace deal are made public, the Palestinian Authority has emphatically rejected the U.S. initiative. The Palestinian leadership has a “clear and unwavering position” to reject President Trump’s peace proposal, declared a spokesman for the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
The UK’s Sky News reported the Palestinian unrest that began after the Friday’s Islamic prayers:
Tensions spiked in Jerusalem as Donald Trump stated the contents for his “deal of the century” will be released by Tuesday.Israeli security forces have clashed with Palestinian worshippers as they arrived at Friday prayers at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque.Palestinian leaders had, last week, called for mass attendance at dawn prayers at holy sites in Jerusalem as well as throughout the West Bank and Gaza.But tensions spiked around the mosque, which is located in Jerusalem’s old city on what Israel calls Temple Mount, as news leaked on Thursday night of the contents of Donald Trump’s “peace plan” for the region.The American president has indicated that his long-awaited plan for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians will be released before Tuesday next week.
President Trump has offered a wide-scale economic and developmental plan to get Palestinians to work with him on the peace initiative. In July 2019, the White House proposed a $50 billion economic plan. The ten-year plan seeks to create millions of jobs for Arabs living in the region. “I’m sure they maybe will act negatively at first, but it’s actually very positive for them. But they have a lot of incentive to do it,” he said on Thursday.
The U.S. president is expected to release his Middle East peace plan by Tuesday. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the opposition leader Benny Gantz will be at the White House on Tuesday to discuss the proposal.
Washington’s peace initiative has been received positively on the Israeli side. “An opportunity such as this comes once in history and cannot be missed,”Prime Minister Netanyahu said on Saturday. “Today, we have in the White House the greatest friend that Israel has ever had; therefore, we have the greatest opportunity that we have ever had.”
Support for the Trump peace plan cuts across party lines in Israel. “Trump’s peace plan is one thing most Israelis will agree on,” the Bloomberg columnist Eli Lake noted on Friday. “Few things can bring together Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the leader of Israel’s main opposition party, Benny Gantz. President Donald Trump’s long-awaited peace plan is one of them,” he added.
While Israelis welcomed the prospect of peace offered by the Trump plan, the Palestinian leadership is responding to the proposal with the usual outpouring of rage and violence. Their position, in fact, has remained unchanged since the Arab leaders issued their infamous “Three Nos” at the summit in Khartoum (Sudan) to the Israeli peace offer of 1967: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
True to character, PLO chief Yasser Arafat rejected the Camp David peace offer in 2000 in which Israelis had agreed to 90 percent of the Palestinian demands, unleashing instead the bloody Second Intifada, a campaign of terror and suicide bombings that killed over a thousand Israeli civilians and maimed thousands more.
From the days of the British Mandate, Israel has agreed to almost every single peace proposal tabled by the world powers of the day.
Now would be a time for the Palestinians to show some good faith for a change. With President Trump’s peace plan on its way, the ball is once again in their court. For sense to prevail and peace to return to the region, Palestinians must rid themselves of their vicious and corrupt leadership.
Vice-President Pence meets PM Netanyahu and opposition leader Gantz ahead of the unveiling of Middle East peace plan
[Cover image via YouTube]
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