Palestinians Reject Trump's Biased Peace Plan

The Palestinians have already dismissed "the deal of the century," as the peace plan is widely dubbed, saying it will likely be heavily tilted in Israel's favour - like several other steps taken by Trump since taking office in January 2017.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) cut off all talks with Washington since the first of these moves, and a spokesman for PA President Mahmoud Abbas said this week that the Palestinian leadership had a "clear and unwavering position" to reject any Trump-led initiatives.

In a Twitter post, Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said any proposal that ignored Palestinian rights would be "recorded in history as the fraud of the century".

"This peace plan is a euphemism," said Noura Erakat, a human rights lawyer and assistant professor at Rutgers University. "There is no peace involved in it."

Palestinians fear that the plan seeks to use economic incentives to bribe them into accepting Israeli occupation, in what could be an Israeli aim to annex the majority of the West Bank and most of the Jordan Valley, a strategic and fertile strip of territory.

In 1948, the state of Israel came into being in a violent process that entailed the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The 1948 war ended with Israeli forces controlling approximately 78 percent of historical Palestine. The remaining 22 percent fell under the administration of Egypt and Jordan

Zionist forces, in their mission to create a "Jewish state", expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland and destroyed their villages in the process.

In 1967, Israel absorbed the whole of historical Palestine, as well as additional territory from Egypt and Syria. By the end of the war, Israel had expelled another 300,000 Palestinians from their homes, including 130,000 who were displaced in 1948, and gained territory that was three and a half times its size.

The development of the peace plan began in November 2017 by a Kushner-led team of advisers and officials including chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt, Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell and Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

Kushner said the peace proposal will not include the phrase "two-state solution". Previous US administrations oversaw the peace process between the two sides based on the two-state solution, which sees a Palestinian state established within the June 4, 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.

"If you say 'two-state', it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians," Kushner told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in May.