However biased it may be in favor of Israel, the "deal of the century" promised by Donald Trump was revealed in the presence of three Arab ambassadors. Representatives in Washington of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Oman attended Tuesday, January 28, the presentation of the US President’s peace plan. Their unexpected presence, amid the boiling supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the Hebrew State, who did not fail to greet them, indicates that the Arab consensus on Palestine, embodied by the plan of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2002 begins to crumble.
This text, adopted by the Arab League, calls for the creation of a Palestinian state over all of the 1967 occupied territories, with East Jerusalem as its capital. So many elements missing from the document unveiled by the White House, which offers the Palestinians a pseudo-state, fragmented by the colonies, amputated from the Jordan Valley, with, as its capital, simple suburbs of the Holy City.
However, reactions on the Arab diplomatic scene are far from being unanimously negative. The United Arab Emirates, which has quietly moved closer to Israel in recent years due to their shared hostility to Iran, welcomed "A serious initiative, an important starting point for a return to the negotiating table". "The UAE leaders are very unhappy with the Palestinian leadership, judge Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political scientist from Dubai. They believe that she should seize what is offered to her, rather than risk losing everything. "
Jordanian exception
The Saudi Arabian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a self-proclaimed leader of the Sunni camp in the face of Tehran's expansionism in the Middle East, has "Appreciated the efforts" the United States. A statement tempered by King Salman, who reiterated his support "Unshakeable" Palestinian rights in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas, the former head of the PLO. In 2018, the ruler of Riyadh had reframed his son, the impetuous crown prince Mohammed Ben Salman, following remarks perceived as too favorable to Israel.
Egypt, which was a pillar of the Oslo peace process and the two-state solution buried by the Trump plan, urged both parties to "Take into account the American vision". Aside from Washington’s traditional adversaries, such as Syria, Jordan is one of the few Arab states to have distanced itself from the US proposal. The Hashemite kingdom, guardian of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, the majority of whose population is of Palestinian origin, recalled that the only path to peace was the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders.
"The Arab states are as weak as the Palestinians, decrypts the Lebanese commentator Rami Khoury, a good connoisseur of the Middle East diplomatic scene. The Gulf monarchies, in particular, are too dependent on the United States for security to be able to criticize them. At the meeting of the Arab League, scheduled for Saturday, the 2002 Abdallah plan may be recalled. But it will be nothing more than words on paper. "
