No Deal: Why Trump’s Plan for Palestine Will Only Create More Conflict

• No Deal: Why Trump’s Plan for Palestine Will Only Create More Conflict
  by https://www.theguardian.com/international
  US policy for the Middle East cannot work because it requires the Palestinians to accept they are a defeated people. By Rashid Khalidi, Thu 30 Jan 2020 06.00 GMT
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  In 1919, Arthur James Balfour, the foreign secretary, wrote that in Palestine, the British government did not “propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country”. The great powers were committed to Zionism, he continued, “and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”.
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  In 2017, President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying: “We took Jerusalem off the table, so we don’t have to talk about it any more.” Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu: “You won one point, and you’ll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place.” The centre of the Palestinians’ history, identity, culture and worship was thus summarily disposed of without even the pretence of consulting their wishes. Then, in January 2020, the Trump administration finally unveiled its long awaited “deal” – once again without consultation with the Palestinians, the party most directly affected.
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  Throughout the intervening century, the great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking for them, or over their heads, or pretending that they did not exist. In the face of the heavy odds against them, however, the Palestinians have shown a stubborn capacity to resist these efforts to eliminate them politically and scatter them to the four winds. Indeed, more than 120 years after the first Zionist congress in Basel and more than 70 years after the creation of Israel, the Palestinian people, represented on neither of these occasions, were no longer supposed to constitute any kind of national presence. In their place was meant to stand a Jewish state, uncontested by the indigenous society that it was meant to supplant.
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  Yet today, for all its might, its nuclear weapons and its alliance with the US, the Jewish state is at least as globally contested as it was at any time in the past. The Palestinians’ resistance, their persistence and their challenge to Israel’s ambitions are among the most striking phenomena of the current era.
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  The war on Palestine passed the 100-year mark with the Palestinians confronting circumstances more daunting than perhaps at any time since 1917, the year of Balfour declaration, a statement from the British government announcing its support for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. With his election, Trump began pursuit of what he called “the deal of the century”, purportedly aimed at a conclusive resolution to the conflict. Closing the deal has so far involved dispensing with decades of bedrock US policies, outsourcing strategic planning to Israel and pouring contempt on the Palestinians. Inauspiciously, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman (his bankruptcy lawyer and a longtime financial supporter of the Jewish settler movement), spoke of an “alleged occupation” and demanded that the state department stop using the term. In one interview, he declared that Israel has the “right” to annex “some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank”. Jason Greenblatt, for more than two years envoy for Israel-Palestine negotiations (previously Trump’s real-estate lawyer and also a donor to Israeli rightwing causes), stated that West Bank settlements “are not an obstacle to peace”, rejected use of the term “occupation” in a meeting with EU envoys and endorsed Friedman’s views regarding annexation.
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