When robbing Palestinians of their rights is called a 'peace plan'
US President Donald Trump's "peace plan of the century" is not designed to solve the Palestine question and achieve a just and lasting peace in the Middle East but to legalise Israel's military occupation, territorial expansion and violations of international law.
Trump believes the US can bully the Palestinians, Arabs and the international community into accepting this plan. Dr Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's executive committee and Palestinian chief negotiator, revealed in an interview with al-Jazeera TV on January 28 that Trump's "plan of the century" was originally proposed by the Netanyahu government in 2011 and rejected by the Palestinian Authority at that time.
This revelation, and the absence of Palestinian input regarding its proposals, shows the extent to which US Middle East policy has been hijacked by Israel.
In order to understand what the plan means and its rejection by the Palestinian people, as well as what a just solution would look like, it is essential to realise the root historical and political causes of the Palestine question.
The aims of the Zionist Organisation, from its founding father Theodor Herzl to Israel's fathers Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion to its current leader Benjamin Netanyahu, never included co-existence with the Muslim and Christian Palestinians, nor to establish a Jewish state on part of Palestine. Their aim all along has been to colonise all of historical Palestine and parts of neighbouring Arab states, which they call "Eretz Israel" (the Land of Israel), and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians.
Herzl wrote in his diaries that the area of the Jewish state stretches "from the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates" and that Zionists should "try to spirit the penniless population across the border", the process of dispossession taking place "discreetly and circumspectly".
The only solution now is for the Palestinian people to demand equal rights and the establishment of one democratic state.
When the United Nations issued UN resolution 181 in 1947, recommending the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, more than half the land area of Palestine was alienated from its indigenous inhabitants to provide a homeland for Zionists, most of whom had arrived – either illegally or under the protection of British bayonets – in the previous 30 years.
Despite the Zionists' claim to have "accepted" the partition plan, it soon became clear that they would not be bound by it. Their unilateral declaration of statehood, along with a campaign of terror by Jewish militias, sought to establish a Jewish state beyond the boundaries set out in the partition plan and to establish a state as far as possible devoid of its Palestinian population. Massacres and ethnic cleansing saw more than 800,000 Palestinians displaced and their properties and belongings confiscated.
A few months after this catastrophe, the international community passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declaring in Article 13 that: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
The following day, December 11, 1948, the UN passed resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and pay them compensation. All countries, including Australia, supported that resolution.
RELATED ARTICLE
The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the cities and villages they were ethnically cleansed from is inalienable. It is the most basic human right. There can never be a just peace which does not address it.
But the dispossession of Palestinians in the 1940s and then in Israel's "pre-emptive" war of 1967 was not the end of the matter. To this day Israel does not have defined borders, retaining the right to expand and using its relationship with the White House to override international law in annexing East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights of Syria and soon swathes of land in the West Bank.
The Trump "deal" envisages Israeli sovereignty extending into a host of "enclaves" within any future Palestinian state, making a nonsense of any claim to have given Palestinians territorial contiguity.
The Palestinian leadership and people have shown their commitment to peace as a strategic choice. In September 1988, the Palestine National Council, the highest body in the PLO, accepted the two-state solution, agreeing to establish a state on the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 War, an area that represents only 22 per cent of their homeland – less than half of what was allocated by the 1947 UN Partition Plan.
But for Israel and its allies within the Trump administration – men like US ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson – this historic compromise is not enough.
RELATED ARTICLE
The Trump plan gives Israel alone sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem – a city where 300,000 Palestinians live under siege – and sovereignty over more than 30 per cent of the West Bank, including land crucial to the economic and social viability of any future Palestinian state. Above all, it perpetuates Israeli military control over Palestinian lives.
Trump's plan does not deceive the 14 million Palestinians living in the Middle East and beyond, nor their hundreds of millions of supporters around the world, but it deceives Zionists and their backers by suggesting that peace can be achieved without justice and recognition of the human and political rights of Palestinians.
The only solution now is for the Palestinian people and the PLO to demand equal rights and the establishment of one democratic state in historical Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews have equal rights as is the case in all democratic and civilised countries.
Ali Kazak is a former Palestinian ambassador to Australia.
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten