A coffin for peace hopes
The latest Middle East plans offers Palestinians a shrunken caricature of a state, writes Serena Moran.
The latest White House plan for the Middle East hardly changes any of the tragic facts for the Palestinian people. Israel has military control over all of historic Palestine. Murder, land confiscation, home demolition, child imprisonment, and expulsions are routine, and will continue unabated.
But on top of that, the plan to let Israel annex large parts of the occupied West Bank is a huge step to extinguish the hopes for Palestinian rights in the future.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have cynically timed the announcement to help in their re-elections and personal legal battles.
International law is deemed so yesterday. Israel is freed from perpetually saying it will eventually evacuate the occupied Palestinian territories.
Indeed, Trump has nominally opened the door for a Palestinian state. That fictional door has been swinging away in various peace talks since the partition of Palestine by the UN General Assembly in 1947. Each time Israel re-shuts the door, each time for a smaller state.
Under the Trump plan, there is two-thirds of the West Bank, and nothing of Jerusalem.
Palestine would cover some 15 per cent of the original Palestine, controlled and surrounded by the Israeli military. Israel’s infinitely convoluted borders are to be engineered to allow the almost 800,000 illegal Israeli settlers, spread throughout East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Golan Heights, to maintain democratic rights in Israel.
The Bantustan map would exclude the vote from those who are not Jewish. After all, more Palestinians than Israelis live under Israeli control.
Palestinians are to get a link between the West Bank and Gaza. They were promised that 26 years ago. It never happened.
They are also going to be given some little bit of the Negev Desert. Enough said.
This emergence of the shrunken and fractured caricature of a state would be permitted only if the Palestinians recognise Israel in a more effusive way than they did under the Oslo Accords in 1993.
It didn’t get them a state then, and it won’t now.
But there’s more. Trump has decided the millions of Palestinian expelled refugees will never be allowed to return. Jews who have never even visited Israel are welcome as new citizens.
Trump has moved the US from a partisan mediator for Israel to the role of judge, jury, guarantor and enforcer for it. It’s the same as if Scott Morrison got permission from Trump to annex New Zealand.
The US is telling the world that it’s quite admissible to acquire land by force, so long as you call yourself a US ally. Russia is not allowed to do it, but only because Russia is an enemy, and not because it is wrong in principle.
New Zealand has stayed silent. The previous government spoke up in support of the Palestinians in the UN Security Council. In comparison, since the White House announcement, the Ardern/Peters Government has issued more than a dozen media statements. None was about the peace plan.
This Government has instead just criticised Palestinians for threatening Israel’s borders. It has not criticised Israel, nor mentioned any reciprocal Palestinian right to defend its borders.
In the end though, such is the process of history, the peace plan could have sown the perverse seeds of the destruction of Israel as an apartheid state.
The end result of Israeli expansion and refusal to allow a Palestinian state will be to formalise Palestinians as a disenfranchised majority within Israel’s external borders.
As was the case in South Africa, this cannot work forever. A state of whatever name, for all its people, of whatever faiths or ethnic identity, may come into existence.
It’s been decades since a twostate solution was logistically possible. Trump has finally killed off the fiction. Roll on the future.
Trump has moved the US from a partisan mediator for Israel to the role of judge, jury, guarantor and enforcer.