Details remain scarce on President Trump’s Middle East peace plan, scheduled for publication following Israeli elections in April.

Those hoping that Trump’s son-in-law and special envoy Jared Kushner would leak specifics of the plan at last week’s Middle East conference in Warsaw left town disappointed.

What we do know is that Trump has avoided some — but not all — of the same pitfalls that stymied his predecessors, the last three presidents who all thought they had the magic potion to make peace between Jews and Arabs.

Trump disdained Bill Clinton’s formula of treating Israel and the Palestinian Authority as equal partners. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and cutting aid to the PA buried that equation. Trump also never fell for George W. Bush’s fantasies that American-style democracy could be exported — even tariff free — to Arab nations still ruled by kings and clans. Trump also wisely yanked the Persian carpet out from underneath Barack Obama’s courtship of Iran by building an informal alliance to challenge the Islamic Republic, as evidenced in Warsaw when Binyamin Netanyahu broke bread with foreign ministers of Arab countries.

For all of the above, we can say dayeinu, but the other shoe is about to drop.

A month or two after Israel’s April 9 election, the Trump administration is scheduled to release its “deal of the century” for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. If remarks by peace envoy Jason Greenblatt are accurate, and the plan includes ideas on reuniting the territory of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and that both sides will be asked to make compromises, as Kushner has said, then the contours of the Trump plan will bear too close a resemblance to the territorial compromises called for in the Oslo Accords.

If so, the Trump plan is doomed.

Both Greenblatt and Kushner stress the foreign aid component of the plan, and its intent to improve the economic lot of the Palestinians. The major problem is that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority don’t care about their own people. Their singular goal remains replacing Israel with a Muslim caliphate. No amount of American or Saudi cash or Israeli offers to retreat to the pre-1967 lines will budge them.

The deal of the century most likely also fails to take Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon and Syria into account. Focusing on the Hamas-PA-Israel conflict that is mainly under control while ignoring the military threat Hezbollah missiles pose to several million Israelis is like treating a heart patient for an ingrown toenail.

For Trump’s plan to work, he’s got to persuade Israelis scarred by 25 years of post-Oslo terror that his strategy to isolate Iran pertains not only to halting its nuclear or ballistic weapons programs, but that it also includes proposals to force Iran to pull its troops from Syria and oust Hezbollah from Lebanon.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 749)