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Explaining the Trump-Netanyahu “Peace-to-Prosperity” plan last week, the White House made a revealing point: past failure to recognise political reality distorts contemporary perceptions.

Hence, the US was issuing a call for everyone to wake up and acknowledge the real state of affairs in Israel-Palestine. Or, more succinctly, to agree that Might is Right. What seemed surreal

in this travesty of a peace plan was simply “the new real” of _Realpolitik_. We inhabit a global landscape in which considerations of morality or international order are being discarded as

utopian. The disregard of the rights of Palestinians to genuine self-determination, to anything resembling normal statehood, the legalising and entrenchment of Israeli contempt for Security

Council rulings and international law, are today barely considered worthy of comment by western governments, let alone robustly denounced. Have we become inured to injustice, so terrified of

the charge of anti-Semitism that we have lost the ability to think critically? Not so the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, a body including the region’s Roman Catholic

bishops and patriarchs of the ancient Christian Rites in communion with Rome. Their reaction to the plan was straightforward. “It does not give dignity and rights to the Palestinians. It is

to be considered a unilateral initiative, since it endorses almost all the demands of one side, the Israeli one, and its political agenda. On the other hand, this plan does not really take

into considerations the just demands of the Palestinian people for their homeland, their rights and dignified life”. They foresaw the consequences no less clearly: “The plan will bring no

solution but rather will create more tensions and probably more violence and bloodshed”. Trump doubtless learnt at his father’s feet that “Might”, understood as money plus power, is “Right”.

And when it comes to the Palestinians — “losers” in his vocabulary — Trump the Peacemaker presents it as “the deal of the century”. Of course Trump would also be hearing the voice of a core

element of his voter base: 81 per cent of US Evangelicals who support him, many of whom espouse Christian Zionism, the belief that the State of Israel is the fulfilment of biblical

prophecies, and, for some, the sign of the End Times. A much smaller percentage of American Jewish voters support Trump’s current policy and are uncritical of Israel’s human rights record.

Trump’s motivations are complex. But he thinks like a politician who knows from experience how important big blocs of ethnic and religious votes can be in winning the next presidential

election. He may even have hopes of a Nobel Peace Prize. That Obama got there first will rankle with him. The Trump-Netanyahu double-act in Washington on January 28 was a chilling

performance. Netanyahu gloating and thundering that the US not only rejected the illegality of Israeli settlements in contravention of UN resolutions, but that the legality of his “facts on

the ground” were now recognised in a formal peace plan. The Arab League meeting in Cairo rejected the plan; it did “not meet the minimum rights and aspirations of Palestinian people”. In the

words of B’Tselem, the Jerusalem and Washington-based human rights group, Palestine was to be reduced to the structure of a Swiss cheese: “the cheese being offered to the Israelis and the

holes to the Palestinians”. The annexations would become permanent features, enabling the total military encirclement of 15 Palestinian enclaves. Job done for Netanyahu. Peace, it is often

said, is in everyone’s interests. But peace in this “peace plan” means that the Palestinians, in exchange for a promise of a large cash injection, would have to accept greater fragmentation

of their territory than the Bantustans of former apartheid South Africa. It is well known to most peace negotiators that offering money — $50 billion apparently on the table — in exchange

for compromising core religious values, in this case the sanctity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome on the Rock, and Jerusalem itself, will be regarded as a profound insult. People’s religious

values are not for sale. Far from this being a peace plan, it is a knock-out blow to future dialogue, and most likely the beginning of a prolonged insurgency in the fashion of South Africa

from the 1960s to 1990s, resulting in a single rather than a two-state “solution” as the outcome. Sometimes an event sharpens our perception of a whole period. It is a truism that domestic

politics are always a dimension of foreign policy decisions. Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in the 1930s was a direct response to British public opinion, as much as an

expression of British government concern for international order. But it is rare for a major piece of foreign/international policy to be entirely for domestic consumption in the manner of

this Trumpian “peace-to-prosperity plan”. This does not stop it doing irreparable damage to future peace processes in the region. As the Catholic bishops wrote, to ignore the human dignity

and the rights of the Palestinian people is not a peace plan but a recipe for growing violence.