The US administration has made decisions that go against the two-state solution

Thus, skepticism reigns in many conflict experts over seven decades old. "The Bahrain conference is badly off and not likely to do much," says Hugh Lovatt, researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) for the Maghreb and the Middle East. Indeed, the idea of ​​economically helping the Palestinians before any political agreement has already been advanced in the early 1990s, then in the 2000s, each time ending in failure. "A lot of the countries that are going to participate are more present in order not to displease Washington rather than in the hope that this really ends," the researcher told ECFR. "It's been two years since the US administration made decisions that go against the two-state solution. "

Since taking office in January 2017, Donald Trump has worked to undermine one by one the main foundations of the so-called two-state solution, an Israeli state and a Palestinian state living side by side in peace. In February 2017, he broke with the sacrosanct principle of "two states for two peoples", which is, however, a consensus among the international community as the only outcome for a "just and lasting" peace between the two camps.

Then, in December, the White House boarder went from words to action, breaking another principle of American diplomacy in the Middle East. Donald Trump unilaterally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thereby removing one of the thorniest points of the conflict from its "agreement of the century", and breaking with the Palestinian camp.

In an attempt to convince the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table, the US president hit them in the wallet: he removed nearly $ 500 million in aid that Washington paid to the Palestinian Authority each year before to attack the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA), which Washington was helping to raise $ 200 million a year. 

By targeting this institution, which is at the bedside of more than 5 million Palestinian refugees, the Trump administration intends to return to the definition of their status and thus their potential "right to return", another Gordian knot of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. . A UN General Assembly resolution in 1948 authorizes Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to the lands from which they were expelled in 1948 during the first Arab-Israeli war. Israel believes that such a movement of refugees would call into question the Jewish character of the Jewish state.

"By legitimizing the Israeli right-wing policy vis-à-vis the Palestinian territories, the Trump administration has been very aligned with the vision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the priority is a regional agreement with the Gulf countries. before an agreement with the Palestinians, "analyzes researcher Hugh Lovatt from ECFR. "Pushed by the Israeli Prime Minister in person, this idea is not new, but nobody believed it before Trump, neither in Europe nor in the United States. Without doubt, the presence of delegations from the Gulf countries alongside that of Israel is a new diplomatic coup by "Bibi", who will not fail to use it in the new electoral campaign in which it is launched.