Leaked details of the Trump administration’s Deal of the Century (the Deal) show that it offers neither an end to Israeli rule nor its policies of colonisation in Palestine. 

What it does do is entrench and codify existing Israeli practices, while demanding that the Palestinians finally submit to domination by the Israeli state, or face the wrath of Israeli and American power should they resist.

Central to the Deal is a discursive repackaging, a rewording, of the status quo meant to legitimise Israel’s colonial practices on Palestinian territory. This includes, above-all-else, legitimising the radical demographic transformations - forced population transfers and settlement building - carried out by the Israeli state since 1967;  an ongoing process of dispossession that dates back to the Nakba (Catastrophe) in 1948. 

Thus, the US plan is expected first-and-foremost to recognise Israeli annexation of the settlements in Area C of the West Bank. Following US recognition in March of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, this seems to be a foregone conclusion. Area C represents a little over 60 percent of the land originally intended for a Palestinian state by the Oslo Process in the West Bank, without which the entire Oslo Process is rendered unrealistic. 

So, officially recognising settlements that have long been considered illegal under international law would condemn Palestinians to live in discontiguous Bantustans (overcrowded towns and cities): cut off from each other and the outside world, labourers and traders abused in between, stuck in perpetuity under oppressive Israeli rule.