Why the Bahrain Conferences Will Fail

Jared Kushner’s proposed solution to the Israel/Palestine situation has been nothing if not a novel approach. 

From the start, it was described as a “vision to empower the Palestinian people to build a prosperous and vibrant Palestinian society.” 

Its rollout has been long and arduous, and due the next snap election, happening in September, its full contents will not be unveiled for a while.

But this plan has been doomed from the start, and by no fault of its own. Its approach of providing up to 50 billion dollars in economic aid to the Palestinians was unique, but operates under the assumption that their violence stem from a place of logical coherence. 

If the goal of the Palestinian leadership was to improve the Palestinian quality of life, they would presumably be all-in for this plan. Sadly, however, the need for what they see as vengeance for Israel’s existence continues to cloud the better judgement of Palestinian leadership.

The problem is that the Palestinian leadership refuses to treat the current situation with logical solutions, as they see it through an ideological lens. The opposite has always been true for Israelis — Zionism was born as a largely secular movement and Israel today remains a largely secular country — certainly more so that any other country in the region. The strongest case for Jewish self-determination in the land of Israel has always been the secular one. 

In a region fraught with religious wars for hundreds of years, the case for the land of Israel being controlled by Jews should always be the scientific case. And that is that all available archaeological, anthropological, and historical data support that the Jewish people are native to the land of Israel. 

Both sides see a problem that is the conflict between the currently stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but only one side has leadership that offers reasonable solutions.

To reach any sort of peace deal, it is a given that both sides will have to make concessions consisting of things that they hold dear, and the Kushner plan appears ill-equipped to lay out those terms. 

The Israeli government has long insisted upon an undivided and Israeli-controlled Jerusalem, a completely disarmed Palestine, and recognition of Israel by Palestine as being the Jewish state.

The fact is that there is no way that Palestine disarms, especially in the Gaza Strip. They have long since shown that when they are allowed to elect their own leaders, they elect terrorists, like Hamas. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has proved similarly unwilling to give up its “pay-to-slay” policies which subsidize terrorist action against Israeli citizens.

Palestine’s terms for peace have been characteristically vague, but their point has been made made over and over again through their actions for years now — their leaders have stoked a deeply senseless and clinically insane hatred for the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

The question is whether that contrived hatred would lead to the rejection of a plan that would help their people more than electing another terrorist government ever could, and most evidence suggests that yes, it would.

It was a change in the Egyptian mindset that led to peace between them and Israel, and then Israel proved to be perfectly willing to trade land and sovereignty of the Sinai Peninsula for peace and recognition. Short of a major revelation and change in the mindset of the Palestinians, peace will not be in the short-term future.

The problem with Kushner’s plan, in short, is that it makes sense, and he is brokering a deal between the two sides and only one has a logical outlook on the situation.