President Trump’s oft-expressed expressed intention to treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an opportunity to apply his skills as a dealmaker got us thinking about how well his negotiating model might work.
When people sit around a table negotiating about this or that business project, the working assumption is that all sides are there to iron out issues and come to an agreement or agreements through compromises that reasonably satisfy the goals of all parties. So it is likely that none of the parties is going to insist on results concerning issues that are palpably unreasonable for any of them.
Deal-breaking demands may emerge, but it is rare that anyone goes into a negotiation with the intent of insisting on concessions that can in no way be made by the other side. And there’s the rub. In the world of diplomacy, persisting with unreasonable demands more often than not reflects a desire that a solution be imposed by (presumably friendly) outside forces rather than through a process of give and take by the participants.
Thus, we have no doubt the Palestinians under Mahmoud Abbas are shooting for stalemated negotiations and clinging to the hope that President Trump and/or the UN will somehow force Israel to agree to accommodations seriously inimical to its interests.
Is Mr. Abbas’s overarching demand that Israel relinquish virtually all of the territory it gained in the Six-Day War – and accept the 1967 lines with only minor adjustments – as the framework for negotiations on borders something he really thinks Israel might accept? Does he think Israel could possibly accept his demand that Palestinians must have the right to unlimited immigration to Israel? Or that Israel could ever drop its demand that any Palestinian state be demilitarized?
Does he really think Israel would ever accept the notion that stipends to families of dead or incarcerated terrorists are simply a form of welfare to needy Palestinians? Or that terrorists are the heroes of the Palestinian people and must be forever lionized and celebrated?
So we hope the notion of negotiations doesn’t assume a life of its own, divorced from the realities of what’s behind Palestinian demands. Taken as a whole, their demands demonstrate that the Palestinians are not contemplating making any meaningful concessions. President Trump must read the leaves and see through the Palestinian negotiation ruse.