Riyaz Patel
A draft United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution has condemned American/Israeli plans to annex settlements in the West Bank in a strong rebuke of President Donald Trump’s pro-Israel peace proposal.
The draft text, circulated to council members by Tunisia and Indonesia Tuesday, would most likely face a US veto, but highlighted some members’ dim view of the plan that Trump trumpeted last week with great fanfare.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is expected to speak to the council next week about the plan, possibly coinciding with a vote on the draft resolution.
The resolution “stresses the illegality of the annexation of any part” of occupied Palestinian territories and “condemns recent statements calling for annexation by Israel” of these territories, Reuters reported.
“The Trump plan is just a cover for Israel’s final land grab,” said Jonathan Cook, a British journalist based in Nazareth since 2001 and the the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The headlines are that, with US blessing, Israel’s dream is about to be realised: it will be able to annex its dozens of illegal settlements in the West Bank and the vast agricultural basin of the Jordan Valley. In return, the Palestinians can have a state on 15 percent of their homeland,” he said.
But, he added, “that is not the real aim of this obviously one-sided ‘peace’ plan. Rather, it is intended as the prelude to something far worse for the Palestinians: the final eradication of the last traces of their political project for national liberation.”
Trump’s plan, the product of three years effort by senior adviser Jared Kushner, would recognize Israel’s authority over the settlements and would require the Palestinians to meet a highly difficult series of conditions to be allowed to have a state, with its capital in a West Bank village east of Jerusalem.
Kushner is due to brief Security Council on the plan Thursday.
A US veto at the council level would allow the Palestinians to take the draft text to the 193-member UN General Assembly, where a vote would publicly show how Trump’s peace plan has been received internationally.
