Middle East Experts Analyze President Trump’s Peace Plan

AMANPOUR:
Should the Palestinians be advised to take this as the basis of something, of negotiations and engage with the Trump administration.

MUASHER:
This is not a reasonable plan. This is a farce in my view. No Palestinian, no Arab can accept a plan that does not include a, you know, part of Jerusalem that does not include the right of return. That does not include, uh, uh, uh, sort of the majority of the West bank and Gaza. You cannot take all of these away, often negotiation stay but, and then ask the Palestinians to negotiate for the rest of the 70% or 60% of the West bank. That’s not, you know, that’s not a reasonable solution in my view. This is only for maligning an apartheid system, uh, with the Palestinians.

AMANPOUR:
Let me turn to Aaron, David Miller, who has been your partner in Paul’s negotiations and as I said, serve many American presidents from both sides of the aisle. Um, can you describe what has just happened, Aaron, David Miller, and do you think that this is at least the basis for future negotiations? And also what Marwan just said about, you know, is it’s a doubling or an increase in the size of territory also to the Palestinians. What about Jerusalem? The president said that us would proudly build a, an embassy in that positive. He said Eastern Jerusalem, not East Jerusalem. I don’t know whether that was just a misspeak or what, what, what stood out for you?

MILLER:
You know, I’m one of those failed peacemakers under both Republican and democratic administrations that I think mr Cushner was referring to. And I understand his point. Um, eh, we’ve tried and, and some of our ideas were half baked, um, most failed in lare part because neither Israelis nor Palestinians were prepared to make the kinds of decisions. My concern is this Christianne uh, when I met mr [inaudible] for the first time, I, I said to him, I wish half jokingly, I said, I wish my father-in-law’s as much confidence in me as your father in law has in you because he’s given you mission impossible. I said, you can’t solve this, but you can make it worse. And in my judgment, and I understand all mr questionnaires points the importance of pragmatism, practicality, the importance of broadening the economic horizons of Palestinians. But the reality is, what has happened here today in my judgment was not a question of peacemaking. It was largely a question of, of politics. And the administration, once again in my view, is come up with a solution to a problem we didn’t have. And in the process made that made that problem even worse,