Such visions are hardly new. For decades, American presidents have promised breakthroughs in the Middle East—only to watch their initiatives collapse. Ronald Reagan’s 1982 plan for Lebanon and Palestinian autonomy went nowhere. Bill Clinton presided over the dramatic signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands in the Rose Garden. Clinton famously declared that “today, at last, that changes.” History proved otherwise.

This time, too, early optimism quickly met resistance. Netanyahu, while publicly supportive alongside Trump, reportedly told his cabinet that the plan’s reference to Palestinian statehood was meaningless. His far-right partners went further. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blasted the proposal as “a diplomatic disaster” and warned it would end “in tears.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said it weakened Israel’s war goals.

Meanwhile, Hamas has not accepted the deal, and Netanyahu’s coalition hasn’t formally endorsed it either. Even as Trump insisted that Arab and Muslim states were “all on board,” the proposal left untouched the most enduring fault lines: Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the expansion of settlements there. Successive US administrations have called those settlements “an obstacle to peace,” yet the settler population has surged from about 20,000 in the 1970s to more than 750,000 today.