The American Position towards the Establishment of the Palestinian State: From the Oslo Accord to the Deal of the Century (1993 – 2019)

Abstract

The end of the Cold War period in the early 1990s crowned the United States of America (US) as the sole superpower in the world, allowing it to engage more actively in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet, there were initiatives by the US administrations that addressed the conflict since the 1970s. The consecutive US administrations of President Clinton, President Bush and President Obama made efforts in addressing the conflict but all failed to reach a settlement where negotiations were stuck during addressing the final status issues including the fate of the Israeli settlements and the status of Jerusalem. The Trump administration took a different radical approach and imposed a unilateral peace proposal that sided the Israeli narrative known as “deal of the century”. Under these US efforts, and under the claim that the Palestinians rejected most of these initiatives or were the side that failed these US peace initiatives, the question that arises in mind is that to what extent did the American position address the minimum aspiration of the Palestinian people in establishing their own independent state? Basically, the article suggests that the US was not a fair broker, it didn’t practice any form of pressure on the Israeli side but instead blamed the Palestinians – who are under the Israeli occupation -, the US didn’t accept the comments or the reservations of the Palestinians over its peace initiatives but accepted and adopted the Israeli comments, according to the US officials’ statements. The article writing methods generally follow the descriptive analytical approach and the historical approach along with highlighting the official statements and documents related to the topic.