‘There shall be no right of return’

The 1948 war resulted in the flight or expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes, creating a refugee crisis that remains unresolved. Today, those refugees and their descendants, spread out across the region, number around five million.

Many Palestinians believe they have the right to return to their ancestral properties, in keeping with the United Nations Resolution 194.

The plan explicitly rejects this idea. Israel can’t accept the right of return without abandoning either its Jewish or democratic identity, as Alex Ward explains at Vox, since the naturalization of so many non-Jews would endanger the majority status of Jews in a Jewish state.

The idea of a “right of return” is antithetical to the two-state solution and to peace, according to Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister. “As the state of Israel is, by definition, the answer to the national aspiration of the Jewish people, as Israel absorbed Jewish refugees that came from all over the world,” she wrote in 2018, “the creation of the Palestinian state, by definition, provides the answer for the entire Palestinian people wherever they may be, including Palestinian refugees.”

But it is precisely Palestinians’ historical claims to Israeli land that makes a two-state solution untenable, argues Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and a Palestinian citizen of Israel. For the better part of a century, he says, Western powers have repeatedly tried “accommodating the Zionist demand for a Jewish-majority state in a land populated overwhelmingly by Palestinians.” This, he contends, is a circle that cannot be squared. Instead, “Israelis and Palestinians should work together to craft a constitution that would uphold the rights of all.”

‘Jerusalem will remain the sovereign capital of the State of Israel’

Under Mr. Trump’s plan, Israel would gain formal sovereignty over an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinian capital would sit on the outer edge of the city beyond an existing wall. The city’s status as a holy site for all three Abrahamic religions has made it a central point of contention in peace negotiations.

Under the United Nations’s 1947 partition plan, Jerusalem was never intended to be the capital of any country, Ms. Buttu wrote in 2017, but “rather a shared city under an international regime with sovereignty resting with neither Israel nor Palestinians.” In 1980, the United Nations deemed Israel’s declaration of Jerusalem as its unified capital a violation of international law.

But Mr. Trump’s plan stipulates that returning to a divided Jerusalem “would be a grave mistake,” particularly because it would entail “having two separate security forces in one of the most sensitive areas on earth.” And many Israeli Jews, such as the writer Shmuel Rosner, believe that Jerusalem “is our capital and it always will be.”

‘A demilitarized State of Palestine’

Mr. Trump’s plan sets aside the goal of a full-fledged Palestinian state; he promised that Palestinians could “achieve an independent state of their very own” but gave few details. Mr. Netanyahu said the deal provided a “pathway to a Palestinian state” under as-yet-unspecified conditions.

This future entity, however, would lack certain characteristics of a state, explains the Israeli reporter Amir Tibon. “The streets of all of its cities, towns and villages, as well as the roads connecting them, will be under the full control of the military of another state — Israel. It will have no control over its borders, which will also be controlled by Israel,” he adds.