Trump-Kushner Peace Plan Will Be DOA Next Week

As I have blogged before, the Trump-Kushner U.S. peace plan for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be DOA–Dead On Arrival. It will happen next week at a conference in Bahrain. But neither the leadership of Israel nor Palestinians will attend. Israel was told to stay home, and Palestinian leaders are boycotting it. Some expected participants reportedly are getting cold feet about it. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said it “will not pass because it ends the Palestinian cause.” Most Arab heads of state surely don’t want to do that.

As I have previously blogged, the plan has two parts: economic and geo-political. The economic portion supposedly involves $50 billion with no firm commitments from sources. But the U.S. has decided to delay presenting the second part of the plan, which does not contain a two-state solution. That means the plan does not provide for a Palestinian state, which is what Israel wants. Why is the plan about what Israel wants?

The people who drafted this U.S. peace plan Israeli Jews and Palestinians are all highly biased in favor of Israel. How so? All three are Torah-practicing, Orthodox Jews: Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, and David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. It is so ridiculous for these three men to be the architects’ of a U.S. peace plan to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It looks like a joke! It makes President Donald Trump look dumber than a stick.

Thus, only the first part of this peace plan will be considered at the conference. This first part reportedly consists of $50 billion to be divided up mostly among West Bank Palestinians and all those in Gaza, with a portion going to Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. That’s where many Palestinians have lived for decades, especially in UN camps.

But when Abbas speaks of the two-state solution as the only way to solve this conflict, he means the traditional one in which the Palestinian state would exist in the separated territories of the Gaza Strip and all or part of the West Bank. I say even that is DOA and always has been since it is based on demographics instead of historical precedent.

I do not believe this conflict will be solved unless Palestinians do the same thing Jews did back in 1948 in their Proclamation of Independence. They claimed historical precedent–that Jews had a right to their “ancestral land.” That refers to the land Jews possessed during much of antiquity. (“Ancestral land” does not refer to the so-called Promised Land, which some call Greater Israel. Many people confuse these two concepts.) But Israel did not get their ancestral land after the 1948-49 war was fought and the Green Line established, inside which is the West Bank. Rather, Jews only got a portion of their ancestral land, and nothing has changed since. The very heartland of ancient Israel was Judea-Samaria, which amazingly is almost exactly the West Bank.

So, as Jews did back in 1948, Palestinians need to claim their ancestral land, which is “the land of Philistines.” Where is it? It’s all of the coastal plain south of Tel Aviv. This State of Palestine would be a very expanded Gaza Strip. According to this proposal, Israel would annex all of the West Bank, which would make religious Jews very happy, and Palestinians would get all of the coastal plain south of Tel Aviv. The latter would be a much better place to live than a Swiss-cheese West Bank and separated Gaza Strip.

Why do I say Palestinians need to claim their ancestral land? I believe Palestinians who have substantial ancestral roots in The Levant have a much stronger genetic link to the ancient Philistines than to any other people group. I believe that is why the Bible locates “Philistines” in the coastal plain during the latter days (e.g., Isaiah 11.14).

We could find out for sure about this by comparing the 3,000-year old DNA from the 200+ Philistine skeletons found at the ruins of Ashkelon (35 miles south of Tel Aviv) recently with that of today’s Palestinians. Much of those remains contain uncorrupted DNA. Why isn’t this happening?

Palestinian leadership should be demanding this. But does the Palestinian Authority, located in the West Bank, want a Palestinian state only in the coastal plain. I’m doubtful that they do. But Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, might like it.

I’m beginning to think there is foul play going on about this. I suspect this DNA comparison isn’t happening because Israel doesn’t want it to happen. And Israel no doubt has the last word about this because the ruins of Ashkelon exist in Israel. Thus, those Philistine skeletal remains belong to the State of Israel. Yet, if those skeletons represent the ancestral remains of today’s Palestinians, don’t they belong to the Palestinians? I’ve been trying for three years, since this Ashkelon discovery was announced by the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, to stir something up about this. But I’ve been getting nowhere with it.

This proposal, which I call The New Philistia Proposal, is what my book is about–Palestine Is Coming: The Revival of Ancient Philistia (1990). But this is not just a proposal; it is my interpretation of ten prophecies of the biblical prophets. In fact, that is how I came to this proposal. See my website where I show how events have been happening since this book was published. They have been moving exactly in the direction I lay out in this book. Folks, it’s going to happen; it’s just a matter of time; it’s in the Bible.