The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, combined with his close and cosy relationship with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is providing a new and urgent impetus to the cause of Palestinian statehood. The sheer contempt that the Netanyahu administration has heaped upon the United Nations Security Council for its decision to denounce Israel’s unbridled construction of colonies and its injustices against the people living under Israeli occupation, bears witness to Tel Aviv’s total disregard for any two-state solution now or in the near future.
President-elect Trump says he will rip up more than five decades of US policy by moving Washington’s embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem, in effect deeming the seized city to be the historical and political heart of Jews alone, and shunning both the claims of Islam and Christianity alike. It’s a dangerous move, one that treads underfoot the interfaith and intertwined history of the city.
There is also the realisation too now that Netanyahu has done nothing to positively solve the lingering question of Palestine’s future, and has done everything to suppress Palestinian rights. That includes waging war on three occasions on the Gaza Strip, murdering thousands there, jailing many thousands more on rollover administrative detention orders, sanctioning the execution of Palestinians protesters in the streets, and demolishing their homes to make way for new colonies.
It’s against this poisonous background that more than 70 nations are meeting in Paris in attempt to move forward, in an attempt to restore the moribund peace process and provide a level of support and dignity for the long-suffering Palestinian people. These right-thinking nations oppose Israel’s land grab and blatant theft of property by its construction of illegal colonies in occupied East Jerusalem and across the West Bank. They are nations too that accept the right of the Palestinian people to their own homeland as the only way to ensure a long-lasting peace in the region.
The two-state solution is the only realistic and just manner by which Palestinians can ensure that they are no longer treated as third-class citizens in their own territory, that they are no longer enslaved by Israeli laws and bigotry, and that their history and heritage will be protected for future generations. Clearly, everything that Netanyahu has done to date is undermine the two-state tenet.
Enough. The international community has had enough of Israel redrawing its pre-1967 property lines at the whim of right-wing Jewish politicians and their real-estate crony now in Washington.
