The Chinese Peace Plan – Just As Bad As All The Others
China’s UN ambassador has been calling on the international community to support a four-point proposal from President Xi Jinping to guide Israeli-Palestinian negotiations leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.
The Chinese plan would harm Israel’s national security, concede strategic Israeli territory, and result in the creation of a terrorist-supporting Palestinian state.
The four points of China’s plan, as outlined by the Washington Post, are:
- Advancing a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state.
- Upholding “the concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security,” immediately ending Israeli settlement building, taking measures to prevent violence against civilians, and calling for an early resumption of peace talks.
- Coordinating international efforts to put forward “peace-promoting measures that entail joint participation at an early date.”
- Promoting peace through development and cooperation between the Palestinians and Israel.
Below are six major problems with China’s unrealistic plan:
1) The Chinese plan, like others before it, relies on the failed two-state solution paradigm and assumes that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is a partner for peace. Yet, just last week it was reported that the PA’s 2017 budget for payments to terrorists and their families amounts to about half of all foreign aid the PA expects to receive this year.
Abbas’s official PA organs and media outlets promote the destruction of Israel while PA propaganda calls for dismantling the Jewish state and glorifies murderous terrorists. In one of countless examples, on Thursday, Breitbart Jerusalem reported on a Fatah summer camp for children named after Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in which 38 people – including 13 children – were murdered.
2) The very idea that the Palestinians would accept a state is contradicted by the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of a state along the so-called 1967 borders. Israel has offered the Palestinians a state in much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with a shared capital in Jerusalem numerous times. These offers were made at Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, and the Annapolis Conference in 2007, and more offers were made in 2008. It was recently reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to start talks based on a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. In each of these cases, the PA refused generous Israeli offers of statehood and bolted negotiations without making a counteroffer.
3) The plan would create a terrorist-supporting state in the heart of Israel’s capital and may hand holy sites over to the Palestinians. The so-called 1967 borders refer to the strategically important West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. The Chinese plan gives “East Jerusalem” to the Palestinians as a capital. (In reality, Jerusalem is one city; there is no city called East Jerusalem. The term is largely utilized to claim that Israel is occupying “East Jerusalem,” and that it should become part of a future Palestinian state.)
While it is unclear how much of eastern Jerusalem would be included in a future Palestinian state under the Chinese proposal, the plan implies that it would be all eastern sections. Eastern Jerusalem includes the Old City as well as the Western Wall, and Temple Mount, the holiest sites in Judaism.
Jews maintained a historic presence in Jerusalem, including in the eastern sections, until they were forced to leave the Old City en masse in 1948. Jordan illegally occupied and annexed the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem from 1948 until Israel captured the lands in a defensive war in 1967.
4) The Chinese plan does not specify what would happen to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Presumably, the coastal enclave would be included as part of a Palestinian state. Would Hamas, an anti-Israel terrorist group which has been losing ground to Islamic State ideologues, govern Gaza? Or would Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s terrorist-supporting Fatah party, which has little standing in Gaza, be in charge?
5) The plan calls for Israeli gestures to jumpstart talks, ignoring that the Palestinians have not responded to previous such gestures. To begin talks, the Chinese plan calls for Israel to immediately end settlement building, meaning construction of Jewish homes in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem. Beyond the anti-Semitic undertones of a Jewish construction freeze, the plan ignores rampant illegal Palestinian construction taking place in key areas of eastern Jerusalem.
The Chinese, meanwhile, should take note that the PA failed to respond to Netanyahu’s unprecedented attempts to jump-start negotiations aimed at creating a Palestinian state, including freezing Jewish construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and releasing Palestinian prisoners.
6) China’s plan may fund terrorist-supporting PA institutions. China calls for “peace through development.” While it is unclear what that means, the plan apparently seeks international development projects to aid the Palestinian Authority. The concept may be well intentioned, but the plan ignores rampant PA financial corruption and cronyism as well as Abbas’s steadfast support for Palestinian terrorists and their families, which, as noted above, now amounts to about half of the total international aid expected this fiscal year.