Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller write:

The Trump administration’s long-awaited and ill-named peace plan has many objectives, but making peace isn’t among them.

Neither is jump-starting negotiations, or nudging the parties toward compromise, or even enshrining implicit, private understandings in the hope Israelis and Palestinians might eventually publicly espouse them—each one of which, as we know from successful and unsuccessful experience, has been featured as the goal of past American plans.

The motives behind a document conceived without any Palestinian input, unveiled on the same day as an important vote in the Israeli parliament on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s immunity, and less than a year before Americans vote for their next president, are at once more mundane and more grandiose.

The mundane reasons, first. It’s hard not to see in the timing an effort by Trump to help Netanyahu in Israel’s elections six weeks from now, and, more than that, an effort by Trump to help Trump—to shore up support from evangelicals and conservative Republicans as he heads into his reelection campaign. [Continue reading…]