UN support bolsters Gaza plan, but road ahead is still rough

The UN Security Council has enacted hundreds of resolutions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many have accomplished nothing.

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Unlike those, the council’s recent vote to adopt President Donald Trump’s peace plan for the Gaza Strip is tethered to a specific — if enormously ambitious — project in which the world’s leading superpower has already invested heavily.

‘Trump has made the plan’s success or failure a test of his prestige and powers of persuasion and persistence. The United States has deployed hundreds of troops, a small army of diplomats and a cavalcade of top officials to Israel to chart the way forward for Gaza and, further out on the horizon, for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a whole.

The question now is whether Trump and his administration, confronted with the difficulties still ahead, will have the wherewithal and staying power to see those plans through.

The Security Council’s blessing was important to the US because it attached to the Trump peace plan a scaffolding of international legitimacy, meeting a minimum requirement of countries whose help the US administration wants in Gaza.