Trump writes off UN two-state solution

Former President Donald Trump has rejected UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s mantra to create a Palestinian Arab state between Jordan and Israel during Trump’s wide-ranging interview in Time on April 30, 2024.

Guterres – in addressing the Security Council on January 23, 2024 – made his position clear:

“A lasting end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meanwhile, can only come through a two-State solution, he declared. Israelis must see their legitimate needs for security materialized, and Palestinians must see their legitimate aspirations for a fully independent, viable and sovereign State realized. Further, Israel’s occupation must end, and Israeli leaders’ recent, clear and repeated rejection of a two-State solution is unacceptable”

Guterres’s arrogance in declaring what Israel must do is clearly out there for all to see.

For the last 23 months – Guterres has deliberately failed to advise the Security Council of the existence of the Saudi-based Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) authored by Ali Shihabi an advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman--published in Al-Arabiya News on June 8, 2022 and subsequently amended on June 19, 2022.

HKOPS trashes Guterres’s two-state solution--proposing instead the creation of a new territorial entity comprising Jordan, Gaza and part of the West Bank to be ruled by the Hashemites--with its capitol in Amman--not Jerusalem.

HKOPS makes the following points that leaves Guterres out on a limb in a fantasy dream world of his own:

• The Palestinian problem can only be solved today if it is redefined. The issue in this day and age for people should be not so much the ownership of ancestral land but more the critical need to have a legal identity—a globally respected citizenship that allows a person to operate in the modern world.
• The most logical vehicle for this redefinition and hence for the solution to the Palestine problem is the Kingdom of Jordan. It is the Jordanian governance infrastructure that needs to be captured and put to productive use in integrating the millions of Palestinians and Jordanians into a modern, reasonably well-functioning state that would, in an era of real peace and economic integration with Jordan’s neighbors, have a much higher chance of growth and prosperity.
• Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and stateless refugees in places like Lebanon and Syria would get full citizenship in the merged Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine with all the elements of sovereignty applicable to those Territories that belonging to a fully recognized state in the UN entail.
• Jordanians and Palestinians are as similar as any people can be. They are Sunni Arabs from the same neighborhood. Merging them will not create any long-term ethnic or sectarian fault lines.

Trump has added his voice to abandoning Guterres’s two-state solution--telling Time:

“There was a time when I thought two states could work. Now I think two states is going to be very, very tough. I think it's going to be much tougher to get. I also think you have fewer people that liked the idea. You had a lot of people that liked the idea four years ago. Today, you have far fewer people that like that idea”

Guterres is swimming against the tide trying to get Israel to commit national suicide by implementing the failed 2016 two-state solution embodied in UNSCR 2334--especially after the murders, rapes and hostages taken during Gaza’s invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023.

Palestinian Arabs will need to make concessions in implementing HKOPS--as will Israel--if there is to be an end to a conflict which has raged unresolved for more than 100 years.

Get off your hobby horse Secretary-General Guterres and stop continuing to deliberately bury HKOPS from Security Council scrutiny.

Please join my Facebook Page: “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine supporters”

Author’s note: The cartoon--commissioned exclusively for this article--is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”--one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators--whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades.

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