“Trump’s peace plan has ­morphed from being a plan to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians to a plan to help get Netanyahu re-elected in return for Netanyahu helping to get Trump re-elected,”  Martin Indyk

With the second Israeli election this year taking place this week, the Kushner Peace Plan, the US’ long awaited solution to the seventy year old – no, century old – conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and put together by President Trump’s ingenue and arguably disingenuous businessman son-in-law Jared and his highly partisan, blinkered and thus discredited amigos. is about to finally be plonked down on the rickety and sloping negotiating table.One of them, Donald’s “special representative to the peace process’  Jason Greenblat has just this week left the room, which says heaps about his confidence in the project.

The “speculative” details are now well known, and it would appear that the “deal of the Century” will be DOA. The plan has been described as a a rewriting of the old story of the king’s new clothes. It will likely be rejected by both Israeli right-wing hardliners and a majority of Palestinians, but Israel’s leadership is likely to accept the plan only because they know that the Palestinians will reject it, allowing them to blame the failure of the Trump administration-brokered “peace process” on the Palestinians. It seems like the Us is going to an awful lot of trouble to get to exactly where things are now : stalemate and the potential for annexation.

There has been much excellent reporting on the so-called ‘deal of the century” (as in “mo one does deals like Donald’. ‘I’m finding Bel Trew’s reports from the Middle East very worthwhile and insightful, alongside her colleagues Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn.

The indefatigable Fisk takes the prize, but.

‘How many times can you fit a South Sea Bubble into a Bermuda Triangle?’

Whatever you might think of Robert Fisk or whatever side you take on the Israel-Palestine conundrum, he certainly pinpoints the strangeness of Jared Kushner’s “March of folly”. He was in fine form and in full flight whilst reporting on the recent Bahraini bash that launched the plan’s economic vision, he  was in fine form:

“Trump’s fey and vain son-in-law, a supporter of Israel’s colonial expansion on Arab land, set off with” Jason Greenblatt (who says “West Bank settlements are not an obstacle to peace”) to work out the economic underpinning of Trump’s “deal of the century” … Kushner recently went to visit some Muslim killer-states, some of them with very nasty and tyrannical leaders – Saudi Arabia and Turkey among them – to chat about the “economic dimension” of this mythical deal. Middle East leaders may be murderers with lots of torturers to help them stay in power, but they are not entirely stupid. It’s clear that Kushner and Greenblatt need lots and lots of cash to prop up their plans for the final destruction of Palestinian statehood – we are talking in billions – and the Arab leaders they met did not hear anything about the political “dimension” of Trump’s “deal”. Because presumably there isn’t one …”

Fisk continues: “This very vagueness is amazing, because the Kushner-Greenblatt fandango was in fact a very historic event. It was unprecedented as well as bizarre, unequalled in recent Arab history for its temerity as well as its outrageous assumption … this was the first time in modern Arab history – indeed modern Muslim history – that America has constructed and prepared a bribe BEFORE the acquiescence of those who are supposed to take the money; before actually telling the Palestinians and other Arabs what they are supposed to do in order to get their hands on the loot”.

On the eve of the the peace plan’s great unveiling, we republish from behind News Limited’s paywall, the following a worthwhile interview with veteran US diplomat Martin Indyk.

Related: Throwing Abbas under the bus; and on a lighter note, Bob Dylan’s 116th Dream – a Jerusalem Reverie.

Also, in In That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany

Trump’s deal of the century engineered for failure: Indyk

Cameron Stewart, The Weekend Australian, 14th September 2019

Bibi and his bestie. Israeli election billboard captioned ‘Netanyahu, in another league’

Martin Indyk’s phone won’t stop ringing in his office at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. US President Donald Trump has just sacked his third national security adviser, John Bolton, while in Israel a few hours earlier Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex a large chunk of the West Bank if he wins next week’s general election.

These events mean that Indyk, the Australian-educated two-time US ambassador to Israel and former National Security Council member in Bill Clinton’s White House, is in high demand for comment from the US media.

“The departure of Bolton suggests that President Trump is going to be his own foreign policy adviser,” he tells The New York Times in a quote that will appear on the front page the next day.

Right now Indyk is watching a confluence of events that will help determine the future of US policy in the Middle East with ramifications for allies such as Australia. On Tuesday Israel goes to the polls in an election that could end the era of Netanyahu, its longest serving prime minister, or extend his reign and reshape Israel’s footprint in the occupied territories. Soon after that election, perhaps even within days, Trump says he will release his long-awaited Middle East peace plan, which he has dubbed “the deal of the century”.

At the same time, the Trump White House is struggling to deal with a more assertive and aggressive Iran as it stares down the US in protest against crippling sanctions imposed on it by Washington.

Trump’s decision to sack Bolton reflected growing differences on a range of issues including Iran, where Bolton unsuccessfully tried to push Trump to launch a military strike over its recent downing of a US drone. Indyk says Bolton’s overly hawkish views on Iran have helped lead Trump down the wrong road on dealing with Tehran. More broadly, he says Trump’s overall policy approach to the Middle East has been poorly advised and badly executed.

“When it comes to the Middle East, Trump is effectively subcontracting to Israel and Saudi Arabia, and that can’t work, it isn’t working,” he tells Inquirer. “It doesn’t work for the peace process, as we can see, and it hasn’t worked for Arab-Israeli relations. These things, I think, are a real setback for American interests.”

Indyk, who was the US special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations from 2013 to 2014, says there is “zero chance” the Trump White House will produce a plan that will revive the stalled peace process.

“One leading indicator of the expectations for this plan is that Jason Greenblatt, who is Trump’s envoy for the negotiations, has resigned before the plan has come out,” he says. “If he expected that this plan would lead to negotiations he would not be resigning.”

Indyk expects the administration’s plan, which is said to be 60 pages long, will take the form of a vague “vision” for the region rather than a document that can work towards solutions.

“In terms of process, I don’t see how a 60-page document can be the basis for negotiation,” he says.

“A two-page document which laid out the basis for the negotiations could, but not 60 pages. In terms of acceptance there is zero chance that the Palestinians will accept it because it will not see their minimum requirements of a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital.”

Indyk says Trump’s peace plan was effectively dead from the moment the administration moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed city of Jerusalem.

“The peace process had a design fault from that time on,” says Indyk. “It was engineered for failure because there was no way they were going to get the Palestinians to engage.”

Trump’s strong support for Netanyahu is largely driven by the belief of both leaders that they can help each other to get re-elected, Indyk says. Trump has been a far more pro-Israel president than his predecessor, Barack Obama. He has moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognised Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, sup­ported Netanyahu’s expansionist policies in the occupied territories and adopted a far tougher stance against Iran, including withdrawing from the nuclear deal. Indyk says Netanyahu’s statement this week that he would seize on the historic opportunity given to him by a sympathetic White House to annex nearly a third of the occupied West Bank if he were re-elected would be a generational blow to peace.

“There is no way that Israel can go ahead and annex the Jordan Valley and expect to have peace with the Palestinians. That is critical territory for the Palestinian state, which is the minimum the Palestinians would require to make peace with Israel,” he says. If the Trump administration backs such a move, as Netanyahu claims, it will be “a recipe for continued conflict”.

“If Trump has in mind green-lighting a (partial) annexation of the Jordan Valley then that’s not a peace plan; that’s a plan for peace between the US and Israel, it’s a plan for the right-wing annexationists and it’s a plan for a one-state solution, which is not a solution at all.”

Indyk says Trump’s support for Netanyahu, which has proved divisive with American Jews, is driven more by domestic US politics than by geo-strategic calculations.

“Trump’s peace plan has ­morphed from being a plan to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians to a plan to help get Netanyahu re-elected in return for Netanyahu helping to get Trump re-elected,” he says. “The key here for Trump is the (vote of the) US evangelicals. It’s not the American Jews because the vast majority of American Jews vote Democrat. But the evangelicals care deeply about Israel and appreciate what Trump has done for Israel and appreciate it when Netanyahu says he is the best president Israel has ever had, so that’s a critical part of Trump’s base.”

The Democrats gave Trump “a gift” with controversial anti-Israeli comments made by Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, members of the so-called Squad, Indyk adds.

“That gave Trump the ability to try to paint the Democratic Party as anti-Semitic, and I don’t think anyone really takes it seriously, but he is trying to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and American Jews. I don’t believe he will succeed but that is his purpose. The way he did it most recently by questioning the loyalty of American Jews … saying they should be loyal to Israel is something that is very dangerous and yet Netanyahu did not say a word. So I think it is an informal pact they have reached that he will do what he can do to get Bibi elected and in exchange Bibi will help him.”

Indyk says if the results of the Israel election reflect current polling then Netanyahu’s prospects of forming a working coalition of 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset are unlikely. He says in some ways the election will be a referendum on Netanyahu, who faces indictment on corruption charges and has had a larger-than-life presence in Israeli politics for a generation.

“He has dominated the Israeli political scene for more than a decade and he has made this election very much about himself,” he says. “The fact that he is likely to be indicted within a month of the elections also ensures that it’s going to be focused on him.”

On Iran, Indyk says the US has lost the advantage it had in negotiations with Tehran because the White House has overplayed its hand and provoked Iran to step up its aggression. He says the US decision last year to leave the Iran nuclear deal and impose tough economic sanctions on Tehran initially led to a relatively muted response from Iran. “The Iranians were kind of hunkering down in the face of this intense economic pressure from the sanctions hoping to wait Trump out while staying within the nuclear deal hoping to split the Europeans off from Trump,” he says. “So in a sense Trump was winning the game.”

But he says when Trump went a step further by designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as terrorists and further increasing economic pressure, sending Iran’s economy deep into negative territory, he provoked Tehran to become more assertive.

“They decided to show Trump that they could hurt him in every area that mattered to him,” he says. This included attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, threatening US troops in Iraq and a step-by-step flouting of the terms of the nuclear deal.

“It put Trump in a tighter and tighter corner. He had to decide whether he was going to respond by confronting them.”

But Indyk says Trump then made the mistake of blinking in June when he initially ordered a military strike against Iran for the shooting down of a US drone, only to reverse the order several hours later. As a result, Indyk says, Iran is much more confident that Trump will not pursue armed conflict.

“Trump’s advisers, Bolton and (Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo, should never have put him up to it, one drone being shot down is not a basis for a strike on Iran,” he says. “Trump doesn’t want a war and they don’t want a war, but they have won this round.”

Australia is correct to stand alongside the US in helping enforce safe passage of oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian attacks, Indyk says. “Australia has always been there in every circumstance when the United States has needed military assistance and I think that one would have to say, looking back over the years, with the exception of Vietnam, I think paying that premium has been basically a worthwhile policy from a strategic point of view.

“And given that Australia, like all America’s allies, are now dealing with a mercurial and unreliable President who has a kneejerk disdain for allies who aren’t pulling their weight in his terms, I think it is probably a prudent thing for Australia to do.”

Indyk, who was born in London to Jewish immigrants from Poland, was reared in Sydney, attending the University of Sydney and then the Australian National University. His brother and their family still live in Australia and he visits them each year. He moved to the US in 1992 and became a US citizen the following year. “But you can’t take the Australian out of the American,” he says. “Australia is still very much in my heart.”

In a glittering CV, Indyk says the best job he has had were his two terms as US ambassador from 1995 to 1997 and again from 2000 to 2001, during a turbulent era in Israel. “It was really difficult and in the end disastrous with (prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, the Intifada, but there were also some very high points like the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, the Oslo Accords; we did some great things,” he says.

“Being an ambassador on the front lines of American diplomacy at a time when the US was heavily involved in trying to make peace was just an amazing experience and a real privilege.”

Cameron Stewart is an Associate Editor of The Australian and its Washington correspondent.

Martin Indyk