Another Middle East Peace Plan. What Else is New?

So, here we are on a Suday morning and when I woke up and turned on the TV, I started hearing about a plan promoted by Donald Trump that would end the fighting in Gaza and bring peace to the Middle East.

As I lay in bed, still half asleep and listening to this report on CNN, for a minute I thought that I was actually back in 1977 listening to the TV news talking about an end to hostilities in the Middle East, with the only difference being that in 1977 there was no CNN.

Already I’m hearing that maybe this plan will work, maybe it won’t, maybe Hamas will agree to the deal, maybe Hamas won’t agree, nobody really seems to know what’s going to happen in the next days or weeks but if history is any guide, we’ll end up with some kind of deal that will take the Middle East off the front page of The New York Times for some period of time.

Which is, when all is said and done, what has been the history of the Middle East since the region became known as the location of the ‘great game,’ a nineteenth-century contest between Britain and Russia for who would control things and therefore tilt the Middle East either towards the West or towards the East.

Granted, the two countries whose rivalry over who would control the territory in what was then known as Persia and today is known as Iran — Great…