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During Trump’s administration, the United States has introduced a peace plan in the Middle East known as the “Deal of the Century” (DOTC). The DOTC was a plan to propose a “solution” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The plan has invited criticisms following Trump’s administration which recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. What was the content of the peace plan and how will it be implemented? Why such a decision has been taken by Trump? Will Joe Biden, who is now replacing Trump as the US President, continue with the DOTC plan? To answer these questions, this paper aims to examine the content of the deal and analyze its impacts on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and stability in the Middle East region. To achieve this objective, critical content analysis has been made on the DOTC peace plan as well as existing reports and studies related to DOTC. Basically, the content of the DOTC peace plan gave more advantage to Israel, which indicates the US’ pro-Israel attitude. The deal will further complicate the peace process between Israel and Palestine because it only benefits one side. In addition, the DOTC also has the potential to cause a remapping process of the Middle East and invite the involvement of regional powers. This paper argues DOTC as a failed project because it was unable to attract the stakeholders to the negotiation. The deal is expected not to be continued by Biden who is likely to come up with his own peace plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of institutional and macroeconomic variables upon the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) in selected MENA (Middle East and North Africa) by using Pooled Mean Group (PMG) panel data estimation. The focal point is to examine the influence of several institution variables namely the government stability, investment profile, internal conflict, corruption, and bureaucracy quality upon the inflow of FDI to MENA country. The empirical findings revealed that the important role of institutional factors in influencing the inflow of FDI to MENA countries. Subcomponents of institutional variables namely government stability, investment profile, internal conflict, and bureaucracy quality are significance and have positive effects in influencing the inflow of FDI to MENA countries in the long-run. However, corruption has a negative effect upon the inflow of FDI in the long run. In addition, macroeconomic variables such as GDP growth and economic openness have a positive effect on the inflows of FDI. Whereas, in the short-run, all institutions variables are not statistically significance in influencing the inflow of FDI. Thus, in order to attract the foreign investors, the policy maker in MENA countries should implement a FDI-friendly policies by providing and maintaining the quality of domestic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]