7 july 2019
by Dr. Amira Abo el-Fetouh
During the rule of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid, Theodor Herzl made an offer to buy Palestine in order to move the Jews of the world there, but the Sultan rejected the offer.
Last week, Herzl’s ideological grandson, Jared Kushner, went to Bahrain to ask the Arabs to sell Palestine in order to move the Palestinians to Jordan, Sinai, Lebanon, Syria and the rest of the world.
The Arabs accepted the offer previously rejected by the Ottomans and agreed to sell it cheaply, for just $50 billion. This is the price of conceding Palestine, which is a tenth of what Donald Trump obtained during just one visit to Saudi Arabia. This is the price of our martyrs and dignity in the eyes of the Arab gentlemen who went to Bahrain and rushed to normalise relations with the Israeli enemy. They sat as obedient slaves, listening as their master, Kushner, gave them a lecture.
The Bahrain workshop was basically a market to sell land, dignity and pride for a few dirhams. The corruption and shame reached the highest level when the Bahraini Foreign Minister said that the Palestinians did not have the right to reject the deal, and that he and his kind would pressure them to accept it.
The purpose of the cursed “deal of the century” is to end the conflict between the Arabs and Israel, without resolving it and reaching a just settlement. In order to do so, normalisation must occur between the Arabs and Israel by means of bribes presented in the form of investments and economic deals in the occupied Palestinian territories that would improve the poor economic conditions of the Palestinians both in the West Bank and Gaza, who are suffering from extreme hardship imposed by the Israeli enemy.
They are replacing the political side of the Palestinian cause with the economic side, exchanging cash and economic development for the politics; that’s the main goal of the US plan. They think that this money, which will certainly be from the Gulf, will blind the Palestinians and make them forget the central issue and national project to establish their independent state. They will also tempt the countries hosting Palestinian refugees to settle them permanently, thus cancelling the legitimate right of return. We must keep in mind Trump’s decision last year to cut all funding to UNRWA and his request to other countries to do the same; the agency provides essential services to Palestinian refugees in their miserable camps, including food, healthcare and education.
In order to know why Trump cut funding to UNRWA, we must understand the importance of this agency and its role. It was established in 1949 after the previous year’s Nakba and the expulsion of no less than 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in Palestine. The label “refugee” includes all of the Palestinians who left Palestine in 1948, including their children and grandchildren, now totalling 5.4 million people according to UNRWA statistics. The US administration regards this as one of the major obstacles to peace between the Palestinians and Israel.
Cutting aid was the first step towards ending the refugee issue, which is the most complicated one on the negotiating table, and thus at a stroke eliminate the “right of return”. Kushner is Trump’s Zionist son-in-law and advisor; he is tasked with closing down UNRWA and stripping the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of refugee status so that the Americans can say that there are only 500,000 refugees instead of 5.4 million.
This is where the idea of resettling Palestinian refugees in neighbouring Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, originated, although it is actually an old idea from the 1950s which was completely rejected by the Arab governments in order to preserve Palestinian identity. As such, they did not grant the Palestinians citizenship of the countries in which they sought refuge; they are guests in the host countries, keeping the right of return valid. The Arab League made this decision when it was still a serious body.
We cannot separate any of this from the Nation State Law passed by Israel last year, with which it exposed its ugly racism. This law makes Palestine a land solely for the Jewish people and Hebrew the only official language in the country. The law also makes the Arabs an official minority and imposes on Palestinians the inevitability of accepting either to leave the state or agree to be second class citizens who do not have the right to demand equal rights.
This further establishes the major lies promoted by the Zionists for a century that Palestine is the land of the Jewish people only; that it is the Promised Land granted to them by God; that the Palestinian presence in the country is an occupation; and that the war in 1948 was a war to liberate the land from the Palestinian “occupiers”.
The Zionists also claim that the land on which they are building settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank is not “occupied”, but simply part of the expansion of the Jewish homeland. That is why the Nation State Law says that, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation” and that immigration leading to immediate citizenship is granted only to the Jewish people in an effort to end the right of return issue permanently.
The only goal behind the Bahrain workshop remains to perpetuate the Zionist occupation in the Palestinian territories and the loss of Palestinian rights, which no Palestinian or free-minded Arab will accept. There is no way that the Palestinians would choose the economy over their national project and right to establish an independent state. In fact, the political aspect of any peace deal should come before the economic part, and from that should emerge the investments and economic projects for Palestinian citizens. This is what the US does not understand. It believes that the Palestinians will rejoice at economic incentives as an alternative to an independent state that they have for so long demanded as a condition for any sustainable peace negotiations with the Israelis.
The Bahrain workshop of betrayal became a quagmire of shame and disgrace from which it will never emerge, as were all of the shameful conferences that were held before it to normalise relations with the Israeli enemy. They are all destined for the dustbin of history; Trump’s “deal of the century” will not pass unchallenged. The Arab nation still has a pulse and it refuses to concede historic Palestine as long as the resistance in Gaza bares its teeth and does not bargain or concede the land. Peace will not be achieved without the Palestinians receiving all of their rights and establishing a free and independent state.
~Middle East Monitor/Days of Palestine
During the rule of the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid, Theodor Herzl made an offer to buy Palestine in order to move the Jews of the world there, but the Sultan rejected the offer.
Last week, Herzl’s ideological grandson, Jared Kushner, went to Bahrain to ask the Arabs to sell Palestine in order to move the Palestinians to Jordan, Sinai, Lebanon, Syria and the rest of the world.
The Arabs accepted the offer previously rejected by the Ottomans and agreed to sell it cheaply, for just $50 billion. This is the price of conceding Palestine, which is a tenth of what Donald Trump obtained during just one visit to Saudi Arabia. This is the price of our martyrs and dignity in the eyes of the Arab gentlemen who went to Bahrain and rushed to normalise relations with the Israeli enemy. They sat as obedient slaves, listening as their master, Kushner, gave them a lecture.
The Bahrain workshop was basically a market to sell land, dignity and pride for a few dirhams. The corruption and shame reached the highest level when the Bahraini Foreign Minister said that the Palestinians did not have the right to reject the deal, and that he and his kind would pressure them to accept it.
The purpose of the cursed “deal of the century” is to end the conflict between the Arabs and Israel, without resolving it and reaching a just settlement. In order to do so, normalisation must occur between the Arabs and Israel by means of bribes presented in the form of investments and economic deals in the occupied Palestinian territories that would improve the poor economic conditions of the Palestinians both in the West Bank and Gaza, who are suffering from extreme hardship imposed by the Israeli enemy.
They are replacing the political side of the Palestinian cause with the economic side, exchanging cash and economic development for the politics; that’s the main goal of the US plan. They think that this money, which will certainly be from the Gulf, will blind the Palestinians and make them forget the central issue and national project to establish their independent state. They will also tempt the countries hosting Palestinian refugees to settle them permanently, thus cancelling the legitimate right of return. We must keep in mind Trump’s decision last year to cut all funding to UNRWA and his request to other countries to do the same; the agency provides essential services to Palestinian refugees in their miserable camps, including food, healthcare and education.
In order to know why Trump cut funding to UNRWA, we must understand the importance of this agency and its role. It was established in 1949 after the previous year’s Nakba and the expulsion of no less than 800,000 Palestinians from their homes in Palestine. The label “refugee” includes all of the Palestinians who left Palestine in 1948, including their children and grandchildren, now totalling 5.4 million people according to UNRWA statistics. The US administration regards this as one of the major obstacles to peace between the Palestinians and Israel.
Cutting aid was the first step towards ending the refugee issue, which is the most complicated one on the negotiating table, and thus at a stroke eliminate the “right of return”. Kushner is Trump’s Zionist son-in-law and advisor; he is tasked with closing down UNRWA and stripping the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of refugee status so that the Americans can say that there are only 500,000 refugees instead of 5.4 million.
This is where the idea of resettling Palestinian refugees in neighbouring Arab countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Iraq, originated, although it is actually an old idea from the 1950s which was completely rejected by the Arab governments in order to preserve Palestinian identity. As such, they did not grant the Palestinians citizenship of the countries in which they sought refuge; they are guests in the host countries, keeping the right of return valid. The Arab League made this decision when it was still a serious body.
We cannot separate any of this from the Nation State Law passed by Israel last year, with which it exposed its ugly racism. This law makes Palestine a land solely for the Jewish people and Hebrew the only official language in the country. The law also makes the Arabs an official minority and imposes on Palestinians the inevitability of accepting either to leave the state or agree to be second class citizens who do not have the right to demand equal rights.
This further establishes the major lies promoted by the Zionists for a century that Palestine is the land of the Jewish people only; that it is the Promised Land granted to them by God; that the Palestinian presence in the country is an occupation; and that the war in 1948 was a war to liberate the land from the Palestinian “occupiers”.
The Zionists also claim that the land on which they are building settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank is not “occupied”, but simply part of the expansion of the Jewish homeland. That is why the Nation State Law says that, “The state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value and will act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation” and that immigration leading to immediate citizenship is granted only to the Jewish people in an effort to end the right of return issue permanently.
The only goal behind the Bahrain workshop remains to perpetuate the Zionist occupation in the Palestinian territories and the loss of Palestinian rights, which no Palestinian or free-minded Arab will accept. There is no way that the Palestinians would choose the economy over their national project and right to establish an independent state. In fact, the political aspect of any peace deal should come before the economic part, and from that should emerge the investments and economic projects for Palestinian citizens. This is what the US does not understand. It believes that the Palestinians will rejoice at economic incentives as an alternative to an independent state that they have for so long demanded as a condition for any sustainable peace negotiations with the Israelis.
The Bahrain workshop of betrayal became a quagmire of shame and disgrace from which it will never emerge, as were all of the shameful conferences that were held before it to normalise relations with the Israeli enemy. They are all destined for the dustbin of history; Trump’s “deal of the century” will not pass unchallenged. The Arab nation still has a pulse and it refuses to concede historic Palestine as long as the resistance in Gaza bares its teeth and does not bargain or concede the land. Peace will not be achieved without the Palestinians receiving all of their rights and establishing a free and independent state.
~Middle East Monitor/Days of Palestine
4 july 2019
At Israel Hayom’s Forum on US-Israeli relations, US envoy Jason Greenblatt made sure that references to the Palestinian people and their history were as obscure as possible. Palestinian history and memory are not about resentment and repetitive stories, as Greenblatt implied. On the contrary, both are imbued with war crimes and transgressions which the perpetrators — Israel, the US and the international community — are doing their utmost to force into oblivion.
For the US, the way forward is to present President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” as a beacon of peacemaking whereas, in reality, America is anything but an honest broker. The US tactic, according to Greenblatt, is “to confront deception, on the one hand, wishful thinking on the other hand, and to speak hard truths.” What the envoy omits is the context behind those “hard truths”. In the Trump administration, Israel has found a willing ally in fabricating pretexts upon which to force Palestinians into subjugation. The US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its consequences is one such example. The international community has facilitated Israel’s colonization of Palestine to such an extent that the US and Israel are now simply tying up the loose ends.
Greenblatt referred to the ambiguity promoted by the UN, but fails to state how it has been exploited by Israel’s allies. “We might get there if people recognize that vague terms such as ‘international law’, ‘UN Resolutions’ and ‘internationally recognized parameters’ are not always clear cut, are interpreted differently by different parties in good faith and do not provide an executable solution to end this conflict,” he declared.
This statement should be read as indicative of what the international community is all about when it comes to Palestine. It has intentionally created space for interpretation based on political power rather than justice. That is why it is acceptable for Greenblatt to speak of “conflict” rather than colonization when it comes to Israel’s presence and actions in Palestine.
What Greenblatt will not admit is that Israel has benefited from the international community’s refusal to speak of it being a colonial state. The US might present itself as offering a purportedly new vision due to its refusal to endorse the two-state paradigm, in line with what Israeli politicians promote. Yet Washington is building upon precedents that has seen Palestine ethnically cleansed with international permission, and is now creating the conditions to force Palestinians into a situation where there is not even the semblance of any option but to accept what is forced upon them.
Furthermore, the US-Israeli obsession with altering the significance of the legitimate Palestinian right of return will aid the narrative of conflict over colonization, which the international community and the US are promoting. What will be left of Palestine if the right of return is eliminated? This is where the US wants to arrive; to be able to speak of Israel without mentioning Palestinians and how they were ethnically cleansed from their own land.
It is hypocritical to say that there is “an alternative path with the potential to unlock a prosperous future for the Palestinian people if they choose to follow it.” Any real choice for Palestinians was deliberately abolished before Israeli was even established. For the US, promoting an economic plan driven by external interests is just another step that ties in with what the Trump administration has so far accomplished for Israel, which is anything but honest peacemaking.
- Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America. Her article appeared in MEMO.
For the US, the way forward is to present President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” as a beacon of peacemaking whereas, in reality, America is anything but an honest broker. The US tactic, according to Greenblatt, is “to confront deception, on the one hand, wishful thinking on the other hand, and to speak hard truths.” What the envoy omits is the context behind those “hard truths”. In the Trump administration, Israel has found a willing ally in fabricating pretexts upon which to force Palestinians into subjugation. The US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and its consequences is one such example. The international community has facilitated Israel’s colonization of Palestine to such an extent that the US and Israel are now simply tying up the loose ends.
Greenblatt referred to the ambiguity promoted by the UN, but fails to state how it has been exploited by Israel’s allies. “We might get there if people recognize that vague terms such as ‘international law’, ‘UN Resolutions’ and ‘internationally recognized parameters’ are not always clear cut, are interpreted differently by different parties in good faith and do not provide an executable solution to end this conflict,” he declared.
This statement should be read as indicative of what the international community is all about when it comes to Palestine. It has intentionally created space for interpretation based on political power rather than justice. That is why it is acceptable for Greenblatt to speak of “conflict” rather than colonization when it comes to Israel’s presence and actions in Palestine.
What Greenblatt will not admit is that Israel has benefited from the international community’s refusal to speak of it being a colonial state. The US might present itself as offering a purportedly new vision due to its refusal to endorse the two-state paradigm, in line with what Israeli politicians promote. Yet Washington is building upon precedents that has seen Palestine ethnically cleansed with international permission, and is now creating the conditions to force Palestinians into a situation where there is not even the semblance of any option but to accept what is forced upon them.
Furthermore, the US-Israeli obsession with altering the significance of the legitimate Palestinian right of return will aid the narrative of conflict over colonization, which the international community and the US are promoting. What will be left of Palestine if the right of return is eliminated? This is where the US wants to arrive; to be able to speak of Israel without mentioning Palestinians and how they were ethnically cleansed from their own land.
It is hypocritical to say that there is “an alternative path with the potential to unlock a prosperous future for the Palestinian people if they choose to follow it.” Any real choice for Palestinians was deliberately abolished before Israeli was even established. For the US, promoting an economic plan driven by external interests is just another step that ties in with what the Trump administration has so far accomplished for Israel, which is anything but honest peacemaking.
- Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America. Her article appeared in MEMO.
Senior White House advisor Jared Kushner said he would announce next week the next steps the US administration intends to take following its economic conference in Bahrain.
"We will be announcing probably next week what our next steps will be and we will keep pushing forward. We want to take the feedback on the economic plan, incorporate it, finalize it." Kushner said on a conference call with reporters a week after holding the workshop in Bahrain.
Kushner, known for not having commons sense or political experience, also offered a mix of praise and contempt for the Palestinian leadership on Wednesday.
Kushner said the decision of Palestinian leadership to boycott the Manama meeting had been "hysterical and erratic and not terribly constructive."
"The Palestinian leadership has made a strategic mistake by not engaging on this; they look very foolish for trying to fight against this," he said.
But asked to speak specifically about Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, the White House official seemed self-contradictory.
"I have a lot of respect for president Abbas," he said. "He has devoted his life to trying to make peace."
Kushner said his sentiments about Abbas were shared by his father-in-law Donald Trump.
"President Trump is very fond of president Abbas. He likes him very much personally."
"Our door is always open to the Palestinian leadership," he added.
"We will be announcing probably next week what our next steps will be and we will keep pushing forward. We want to take the feedback on the economic plan, incorporate it, finalize it." Kushner said on a conference call with reporters a week after holding the workshop in Bahrain.
Kushner, known for not having commons sense or political experience, also offered a mix of praise and contempt for the Palestinian leadership on Wednesday.
Kushner said the decision of Palestinian leadership to boycott the Manama meeting had been "hysterical and erratic and not terribly constructive."
"The Palestinian leadership has made a strategic mistake by not engaging on this; they look very foolish for trying to fight against this," he said.
But asked to speak specifically about Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, the White House official seemed self-contradictory.
"I have a lot of respect for president Abbas," he said. "He has devoted his life to trying to make peace."
Kushner said his sentiments about Abbas were shared by his father-in-law Donald Trump.
"President Trump is very fond of president Abbas. He likes him very much personally."
"Our door is always open to the Palestinian leadership," he added.
3 july 2019
Donald Trump’s supposed “deal of the century”, offering the Palestinians economic bribes in return for political submission, is the endgame of western peace-making, the real goal of which has been failure, not success.
For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.
The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away – to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.
Even Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducements he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.
That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.
But Israel’s image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
It is worth examining what those landmark “missed opportunities” consisted of.
The first was the United Nations’ Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel’s telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians’ homeland.
But the real story is rather different.
The recently formed UN was effectively under the thumb of the imperial powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. All three wanted a Jewish state as a dependent ally in the Arab-dominated Middle East.
Fueled by the dying embers of western colonialism, the Partition Plan offered the largest slice of the Palestinian homeland to a minority population of European Jews, whose recent immigration had been effectively sponsored by the British empire.
As native peoples elsewhere were being offered independence, Palestinians were required to hand over 56 percent of their land to these new arrivals. There was no chance such terms would be accepted.
However, as Israeli scholars have noted, the Zionist leadership had no intention of abiding by the UN plan either. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, called the Jewish state proposed by the UN “tiny”. He warned that it could never accommodate the millions of Jewish immigrants he needed to attract if his new state was not rapidly to become a second Arab state because of higher Palestinian birth rates.
Ben Gurion wanted the Palestinians to reject the plan so that he could use war as a chance to seize 78 percent of Palestine and drive out most of the native population.
For decades, Israel was happy to entrench and, after 1967, expand its hold on historic Palestine.
In fact, it was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who made the biggest, unreciprocated concessions to peace. In 1988, he recognized Israel and, later, in the 1993 Olso accords, he accepted the principle of partition on even more dismal terms than the UN’s – a state on 22 percent of historic Palestine.
Even so, the Oslo process stood no serious chance of success after Israel refused to make promised withdrawals from the occupied territories. Finally, in 2000 President Bill Clinton called together Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to a peace summit at Camp David.
Arafat knew Israel was unwilling to make any meaningful compromises and had to be bullied and cajoled into attending. Clinton promised the Palestinian leader he would not be blamed if the talks failed.
Israel ensured they did. According to his own advisers, Barak “blew up” the negotiations, insisting that Israel hold on to occupied East Jerusalem, including the Al Aqsa mosque, and large areas of the West Bank. Washington blamed Arafat anyway, and refashioned Israel’s intransigence as a “generous offer”.
A short time later, in 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Peace Initiative offered Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a minimal Palestinian state. Israel and western leaders hurriedly shunted it into the annals of forgotten history.
After Arafat’s death, secret talks through 2008-09 – revealed in the Palestine Papers leak – showed the Palestinians making unprecedented concessions. They included allowing Israel to annex large tracts of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ expected capital.
Negotiator Saeb Erekat was recorded saying he had agreed to “the biggest [Jerusalem] in Jewish history” as well as to only a “symbolic number of [Palestinian] refugees’ return [and a] demilitarized state … What more can I give?”
It was a good question. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s negotiator, responded, “I really appreciate it” when she saw how much the Palestinians were conceding. But still, her delegation walked away.
Trump’s own doomed plan follows in the footsteps of such “peace-making”.
In a New York Times commentary last week Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, candidly encapsulated the thrust of this decades-long diplomatic approach. He called on the Palestinians to “surrender”, adding: “Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission.”
The peace process was always leading to this moment. Trump has simply cut through the evasions and equivocations of the past to reveal where the West’s priorities truly lie.
It is hard to believe that Trump or Kushner ever believed the Palestinians would accept a promise of “money for quiet” in place of a state based on “land for peace”.
Once more, the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it – it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leadership are united – again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.
The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens.
When Trump’s plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as a justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory.
The Palestinians will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos. And decades of western diplomacy will finally have arrived at its preordained destination.
– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
For decades, peace plans have made impossible demands of the Palestinians, forcing them to reject the terms on offer and thereby create a pretext for Israel to seize more of their homeland.
The more they have compromised, the further the diplomatic horizon has moved away – to the point now that the Trump administration expects them to forfeit any hope of statehood or a right to self-determination.
Even Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of the peace plan, cannot really believe the Palestinians will be bought off with their share of the $50 billion inducements he hoped to raise in Bahrain last week.
That was why the Palestinian leadership stayed away.
But Israel’s image managers long ago coined a slogan to obscure a policy of incremental dispossession, masquerading as a peace process: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”
It is worth examining what those landmark “missed opportunities” consisted of.
The first was the United Nations’ Partition Plan of late 1947. In Israel’s telling, it was Palestinian intransigence over dividing the land into separate Jewish and Arab states that triggered war, leading to the creation of a Jewish state on the ruins of most of the Palestinians’ homeland.
But the real story is rather different.
The recently formed UN was effectively under the thumb of the imperial powers of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. All three wanted a Jewish state as a dependent ally in the Arab-dominated Middle East.
Fueled by the dying embers of western colonialism, the Partition Plan offered the largest slice of the Palestinian homeland to a minority population of European Jews, whose recent immigration had been effectively sponsored by the British empire.
As native peoples elsewhere were being offered independence, Palestinians were required to hand over 56 percent of their land to these new arrivals. There was no chance such terms would be accepted.
However, as Israeli scholars have noted, the Zionist leadership had no intention of abiding by the UN plan either. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, called the Jewish state proposed by the UN “tiny”. He warned that it could never accommodate the millions of Jewish immigrants he needed to attract if his new state was not rapidly to become a second Arab state because of higher Palestinian birth rates.
Ben Gurion wanted the Palestinians to reject the plan so that he could use war as a chance to seize 78 percent of Palestine and drive out most of the native population.
For decades, Israel was happy to entrench and, after 1967, expand its hold on historic Palestine.
In fact, it was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who made the biggest, unreciprocated concessions to peace. In 1988, he recognized Israel and, later, in the 1993 Olso accords, he accepted the principle of partition on even more dismal terms than the UN’s – a state on 22 percent of historic Palestine.
Even so, the Oslo process stood no serious chance of success after Israel refused to make promised withdrawals from the occupied territories. Finally, in 2000 President Bill Clinton called together Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to a peace summit at Camp David.
Arafat knew Israel was unwilling to make any meaningful compromises and had to be bullied and cajoled into attending. Clinton promised the Palestinian leader he would not be blamed if the talks failed.
Israel ensured they did. According to his own advisers, Barak “blew up” the negotiations, insisting that Israel hold on to occupied East Jerusalem, including the Al Aqsa mosque, and large areas of the West Bank. Washington blamed Arafat anyway, and refashioned Israel’s intransigence as a “generous offer”.
A short time later, in 2002, Saudi Arabia’s Peace Initiative offered Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a minimal Palestinian state. Israel and western leaders hurriedly shunted it into the annals of forgotten history.
After Arafat’s death, secret talks through 2008-09 – revealed in the Palestine Papers leak – showed the Palestinians making unprecedented concessions. They included allowing Israel to annex large tracts of East Jerusalem, the Palestinians’ expected capital.
Negotiator Saeb Erekat was recorded saying he had agreed to “the biggest [Jerusalem] in Jewish history” as well as to only a “symbolic number of [Palestinian] refugees’ return [and a] demilitarized state … What more can I give?”
It was a good question. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s negotiator, responded, “I really appreciate it” when she saw how much the Palestinians were conceding. But still, her delegation walked away.
Trump’s own doomed plan follows in the footsteps of such “peace-making”.
In a New York Times commentary last week Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, candidly encapsulated the thrust of this decades-long diplomatic approach. He called on the Palestinians to “surrender”, adding: “Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission.”
The peace process was always leading to this moment. Trump has simply cut through the evasions and equivocations of the past to reveal where the West’s priorities truly lie.
It is hard to believe that Trump or Kushner ever believed the Palestinians would accept a promise of “money for quiet” in place of a state based on “land for peace”.
Once more, the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it – it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leadership are united – again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.
The Palestinians may have refused this time to stumble into the trap, but they will find themselves the fall guys, whatever happens.
When Trump’s plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as a justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory.
The Palestinians will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos. And decades of western diplomacy will finally have arrived at its preordained destination.
– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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