Source: The Guardian
By Yousef Munayyer, is the executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights
US proposals always treat Palestinians as second-class citizens. But this time Trump has said the quiet part out loud, and it’s ugly indeed
Palestinians have been ‘offered’ a truncated and dismembered archipelago of Bantustans connected by bridges and tunnels and subservient to the Israeli state. Photograph: Mahmoud Illean/AP
This week Donald Trump, in the company of the scandal-mired Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally released his long-promoted vision for “peace” between Israelis and Palestinians. The plan itself was unsurprising, and consistent with the Trump administration’s Middle East policies and the personnel in charge of executing them.
In the US president’s vision, which might as well have been drawn up by Netanyahu himself, Palestinians are “offered” a truncated and dismembered archipelago of Bantustans connected by bridges and tunnels and subservient to the Israeli state, which will retain security control over the entirety of the land. The Israelis will keep all of Jerusalem. No Palestinian refugees will be able to return to their homes.
But wait, there’s more! Palestinians will only receive this sorry excuse for an offer, which fails to meet even basic human rights, once they satisfy several conditions “proving” they are ready for statehood.
To call this a nonstarter would be to glorify it with negotiation language it doesn’t deserve. The “offer” is little more than a calculated insult, oozing with the most colonial-minded racism, and cynically designed to elicit a rejection.
What is most striking to me about Trump’s plan, however, is not how different it is from previous American and western proposals, but rather how similar it is. Members of the peace process industry might object over the nuances, percentages of land swaps, and so on, but in the final analysis the Trump plan is born of the same bankrupt principle underlying all other American and western proposals regarding Palestine for the last hundred years: the rights of Palestinians, both individually and collectively, are inferior to the rights of Jewish Israelis in the land.
Time and again, western proposals have divided, dismembered and discarded Palestinians in an effort to gerrymander a Jewish majority
It is this principle that leads Trump and others before him to support policies and plans in which the Palestinian entity will never have true or equal sovereignty, where the rights of Palestinian refugees are ignored, where the equality of Palestinian citizens of Israel is easily and quietly dismissed. Trump’s plan is merely the latest iteration, fashioned around the current realities on the ground – themselves conditions created by Israel and supported by the United States.
For a century, western powers, formerly led by Britain and now by the US, have shaped their policy toward Palestine in deference to the demands of Zionism. Time and again, western proposals have divided, dismembered and discarded Palestinians in an effort to gerrymander a Jewish majority in a land that has historically been overwhelmingly populated by Palestinians. There is no amount of negotiation, no slick diplomacy, no cadre of state department bureaucrats that can turn this racist principle into a formula for peace.
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Categories: America, Americas, Arab World, Asia, Israel, Palestine, United States, US President, USA
OK, thanks for showing that the present so-called peace plan is no such thing. But could we now PLEASE start working towards a real solution?
My solution would be a one state solution with equal rights for all. Anyone, whether Israeli or Arab, who cannot agree to that, should seek residence elsewhere, For the Israelis it is easy, they can simply go back where they came from. Brooklyn, other parts of USA, Germany, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Ethiopia and whereever …
Somi: From what I have seen and heard from and about Israelis and Palestinians the majority of Israelis are much worse than the Palestinians. They consider the Palestinians very much below them and not equal at all. That is why Palestinians do not (yet) demand a one state solution, because they know how the Israelis are thinking and treating them. Please Somi, go and visit and see for yourself.
As long as Arab teachers and parents still teach hatred toward Jews in school and at home, Jews have the right to defend them selve. A tiny state of Jews is surrounded by Arab Muslim who hate Jews . 4 times Arab attacked Israel— unfortunately God protected Jews. That is the fact!
Those hadith have to be taken out from arab schools and Home. No kids will be taught with hatred hadith any more.
That is solution
When will you stop this nonsense? It is the Israelis (I am purposely not saying the Jews) that hate the Palestinians. Listen to the settlers and other Israelis. Arabs and Muslims have no hatred for Jews only for Israelis that steal their houses and lands. That is a difference which Somi does not seem to get a grip on. After all we can even marry Jewish ladies. If I were younger (and had sufficient funds) I would prove it to you.
Please Rafiq— do use Islam’s teaching to marry more women from other countries— do not misuse Polygamy for your nafsu sex— not good.🙏
Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is beyond insulting. That’s deliberate>> Trump floats expanding NATO to add Middle East>. WARNING>DANGER > THIS IS TRUMPS UNDERHAND PROMISE TO HELP THE JEWS if he was elected, and, common knowledge, he did get elected. They are known as ‘The wandering jew’ in the Bible.. The Jews are STATELESS, they are in Palestine by deceiving London, they had no legal claim to Palistine, they are there to continue in parallel to the bible thus continuing to confuse the Christians re their wandering existence in the past. The word Israel is taken from the Bible. Jacob who Abraham named Israel and termed him (Israel) “the fruit of his (Abraham’s) bowels”. The Jews rely on ignorance of the contents of the Bible and Qur’an. HEADS OF STATE SHOULD BE INFORMED. THEIR AIM IS WORLD DOMINATION THRU THE BIBLE AND QU’RAN.