The “deal of the century” through which US President Donald Trump keeps boasting he will settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been postponed so many times that Saeb Erekat, secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, has dismissed it as the deal of the next century. Others have forecast it will be dead on arrival. The truth is that it was never really alive or likely ever to arrive.
It always looked like a smokescreen to mask the burial of the two-state solution — an independent Palestinian state on the occupied West Bank, and Gaza with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital living in peace alongside Israel — and greenlight the Israeli annexation of most of the West Bank.
The plan, devised by Jared Kushner, Mr Trump’s callow son-in-law, is still notionally scheduled for a soft launch this month at a Peace for Prosperity workshop in Bahrain. Billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are due to be dangled before the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours — without any political solution to end Israel’s occupation.