Seth J. Frantzman, Columnist

A Swiss-Cheese State For Palestinians Won’t Work

History and cartography are against the Trump administration’s “peace plan.”

February 3, 2020 at 10:42 AM UTC

Seth J. Frantzman covers Middle East affairs for the Jerusalem Post. He is the author of "After ISIS: America, Iran and the Struggle for the Middle East" and executive director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis.

This is not how it works.
Photographer: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg

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One of the most striking aspects of President Trump’s Middle East “peace plan” is the convoluted map of the future state of Palestine. It envisions a barely-contiguous state, more a series of cantons. Full of holes, it has inevitably been compared to “Swiss cheese.”

The map alone makes the plan look unworkable. How can you make a country out of patches of lands connected by bridges and tunnels, one of which is 20 miles long? Remember that this is not an archipelago of islands separated by sea, but rather a Palestinian state surrounded mostly by Israeli territory and Israeli control.