Trump writes off UN two-state solution
Former President Donald Trump has rejected UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s mantra to create a Palestinian Arab state between Jordan and Israel during Trump’s wide-ranging interview in Time on 30 April.
Guterres – in addressing the Security Council on 23 January 2024 – made his position clear:
“A lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meanwhile, can only come through a two-State solution, he declared. Israelis must see their legitimate needs for security materialized, and Palestinians must see their legitimate aspirations for a fully independent, viable and sovereign State realized. Further, Israel’s occupation must end, and Israeli leaders’ recent, clear and repeated rejection of a two-State solution is unacceptable”
Guterres’s arrogance in declaring what Israel must do is clearly out there for all to see.
For the last 23 months – Guterres has deliberately failed to advise the Security Council of the existence of the Saudi-based Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) authored by Ali Shihabi an advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman – published in Al-Arabiya News on 8 June 2022 and subsequently amended on 19 June 2022.
HKOPS trashes Guterres’s two-state solution – proposing instead the creation of a new territorial entity comprising Jordan, Gaza and part of the West Bank to be ruled by the Hashemites – with its capitol in Amman – not Jerusalem.
HKOPS makes the following points that leaves Guterres out on a limb in a fantasy dream world of his own:
- The Palestinian problem can only be solved today if it is redefined. The issue in this day and age for people should be not so much the ownership of ancestral land but more the critical need to have a legal identity—a globally respected citizenship that allows a person to operate in the modern world.
- The most logical vehicle for this redefinition and hence for the solution to the Palestine problem is the Kingdom of Jordan. It is the Jordanian governance infrastructure that needs to be captured and put to productive use in integrating the millions of Palestinians and Jordanians into a modern, reasonably well-functioning state that would, in an era of real peace and economic integration with Jordan’s neighbors, have a much higher chance of growth and prosperity.
- Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and stateless refugees in places like Lebanon and Syria would get full citizenship in the merged Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine with all the elements of sovereignty applicable to those Territories that belonging to a fully recognized state in the UN entail.
- Jordanians and Palestinians are as similar as any people can be. They are Sunni Arabs from the same neighborhood. Merging them will not create any long-term ethnic or sectarian fault lines.
Trump has added his voice to abandoning Guterres’s two-state solution – telling Time:
“There was a time when I thought two states could work. Now I think two states is going to be very, very tough. I think it’s going to be much tougher to get. I also think you have fewer people that liked the idea. You had a lot of people that liked the idea four years ago. Today, you have far fewer people that like that idea”
Guterres is swimming against the tide trying to get Israel to commit national suicide by implementing the failed 2016 two-state solution embodied in UNSCR 2334 – especially after the murders, rapes and hostages taken during Gaza’s invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023.
Palestinian Arabs will need to make concessions in implementing HKOPS – as will Israel – if there is to be an end to a conflict which has raged unresolved for more than 100 years.
Get off your hobby horse Secretary-General Guterres and stop continuing to deliberately bury HKOPS from Security Council scrutiny.
Please join my Facebook Page: “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine supporters”
Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively for this article — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.
David Singer is a Sydney lawyer and a foundation member of the International Analysts Network
This is basing a policy on a trial balloon raised by a not so fraternal country
So what? That such a plan could be put into the public arena by Saudi Arabia in its Government-controlled media surely makes it worthy of being seriously analysed and considered with a view to its possible implementation.
I have yet to see David Singer supply proof that the Hashemite kingdom .Is and was in agreement with the proposal He championing
Ben:
Jordan’s King Abdullah has not expressly rejected the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) since its initial publication on 8 June 2022. I requested a statement from the Jordanian Embassy in Canberra on the Saudi-based solution at that time and the Embassy did not respond.
Until King Abdullah expressly disavows the Saudi-based solution I am entitled to draw the conclusion that he is interested in pursuing that proposal. It certainly trashes the creation of a state between Israel and Jordan and vests the power to govern the new territorial entity of Jordan, Gaza and part of Judea and Samaria in the Hashemites who have governed 76.9% of former Palestine for more than 100 years – that would increase to about 80% if HKOPS is successfully implemented – and restore the status quo that existed between 1950 and 1967 in that area of Judea and Samaria included in the newly-merged entity .
King Abdullah could simply state: “I reject the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution published on 8 June 2022.” He hasn’t done so to my knowledge. Even if he had – it would be open to argue he should still be pressured to try and implement HKOPS in an effort to end a conflict between the Arabs and the Jews that still remains unresolved after more than 100 years.