Before I get to my actual text of what I wanted
to say, I just wanted to make a comment.
There’s a lot of statements and assessments
made about what used to be called the “Deal
of the Century,” now it has a different
name but President Trump’s peace plan.
Sometimes I even check these things.
Now this is an American plan.
You have to remember that the whole time.
It’s not an Israeli plan, it’s an American
plan.
Some of us followed it extremely closely for
a variety of reasons, but I start with an
assumption, looking at this plan and looking
at the whole history of U.S. policy in the
Middle East that basically all the previous
plans that were put on the table, didn’t
work.
If they did work, we’d be having peace right
now.
But they didn’t work and people actually
forget that.
There is a mythology that has persisted for
many years about peace plans, assigning them
far more effectiveness and utility than they
ultimately demonstrated.
Just one or two examples, we have with us
Yoni Ben Menachem.
And back during the Taba negotiations, you
remember those the Taba negotiations after
Camp David, I was in my car going from Jerusalem
to Tel Aviv and I hear the voice of Yoni Ben
Menachem on the radio.
Yoni was the Arab affairs correspondent of
Kol Israel and we had just heard on the radio,
the Foreign Minister of Israel, Shlomo Ben-Ami
making a statement which was very typical
for the period.
He said, “We have never been so close at
reaching an agreement.
Never ever so close.”
And you could have heard this from a dozen
different speakers, but he said it and it
was during the Taba negotiations, so I just
asked Yoni about.
Yoni was sitting next to Mohammed Dahlan and
he asked Dahlan said Mr. Dahlan,” Is it
true what the Foreign Minister of Israel said
– that you’ve never been so close to a
breakthrough?” and Dahlan used the term
that Israelis understand.
He said חרטה ברטה, which basically
I don’t feel comfortable translating it
properly, but it basically means bull.
There’s this gap between what people thought
about the peace process, working, not working
and what was being stated in the public domain.
One other example about things working and
not working.
What was the last major effort to come up
with a peace initiative prior to the Trump
plan?
And what happened in the Kerry plan?
And we actually have Kerry’s memoirs and
what you find is something that was well known.
In the month of March of 2014 Secretary Kerry
accompanied Mahmoud Abbas into the Oval Office
and Kerry been working for the previous year
tirelessly on a peace plan and they were going
to now present the peace plan.
They had actually done it the night before
and the hope for the peace team at the time
was that Mahmoud Abbas would accept the plan
and what happened was rather edifying in terms
of how negotiations work or don’t work.
Here you have Mahmoud Abbas sitting in the
Oval Office with the President of the United
States Barack Obama and Abbas is asked, “Do
you accept the plan?”
Now there were rules of how those peace negotiations
worked.
You could actually accept a plan and say yes,
but I have reservations about clauses 3, 7,
and 11.
That was actually rather creative.
It got people to accept, to buy-in, but leave
them a little wiggle room to express their
differences.
So again Abbas was asked, “Do you accept
the plan that you worked on with Secretary
Kerry?”
And the basic answer that Abbas gave was,
“I’ll get back to you.”
And you know what happened?
He never did!
He never got back to him.
So what lessons are supposed to be drawn from
an experience of that sort?
I think it’s pretty clear that we did not
have a working peace process with the Palestinians
that was on the verge of success.
We didn’t discover what was the you know
key to making this whole thing work and it
just defied the efforts of the most hard-working
diplomats.
And therefore something new was needed.
Something different was needed.
And that brings us to the Trump plan, which
the Ambassador will speak about in a few minutes.
But you can’t understand the significance
of the Trump plan unless you understand the
failures of the past, and there are a whole
bunch of others that make good stories.
