Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on Trump’s Palestine Policy
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed on how United States President Donald Trump has upended past U.S. policies toward Palestine.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Trump’s Position on Palestinians Upending Past US Policies,” was published in The Arab Weekly on July 6, 2019.
From the text of the article:
Although critics of US policy have long maintained that Washington has been biased in favour of Israel, this did not mean that the United States — at least until very recently — had abandoned the Palestinians.
It should be remembered that, in 1947, the United States supported the first two-state solution proposal — the UN partition plan for Palestine that envisioned a Jewish and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration.
The two-state idea went into abeyance after the 1948 war when the new state of Israel captured even more territory than the partition plan proposed and the West Bank and East Jerusalem came under Jordanian control while the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian control. After the 1967 war, those areas would be under Israeli control.
The 1948 war created about 750,000 Palestinian refugees but they were supported by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), with large grants from the United States starting in 1949.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).