Tag Archive for: Palestine

Jerusalem: it’s time for two American embassies

In his article ‘The Islamic scramble for Jerusalem’ in The Strategist, former Israeli diplomat Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch claimed that ‘the Palestinian Authority, consciously or unconsciously, [is] in competition, and eventually on a collision course, with Jordan about which country will have the special role in Jerusalem’s holy shrines’, and that Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are also competing with each other over the Muslim holy sanctuaries in Jerusalem. That is far from the truth.

No Muslim ruler or country claims sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem other than the Palestinian Authority (PA). The current Jordanian role with al-Haram al-Sharif is due to the fact that Jerusalem was occupied while it was under Jordanian rule and the Palestinian Authority is prevented by Israel from looking after al-Haram al-Sharif. This agreement was made between the Jordanian government and the PA. The Vatican, Sweden, Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Thailand and 138 other states recognise Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital.

All Muslim countries want Jerusalem and its holy sanctuaries to be liberated from Israel’s occupation, but being a city holy to Muslims doesn’t mean they claim a special role and sovereignty over it, just as no Catholic country claims sovereignty over the Vatican because it’s holy to them.

Similarly, being also holy to Jews doesn’t give Israel the right to colonise the city. These colonialist ambitions don’t belong to the 21st century. The Crusaders and others have tried and failed.

Jerusalem was originally established by the Jebusites, an Arab Canaanite subgroup who are the Palestinians of today, and has throughout history been their spiritual, commercial and cultural capital. We were a settled, urban and advanced society before nomadic Hebrews came to our country.

When Abraham and his Hebrew tribe arrived in Palestine for the first time from Ur in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq), Palestine was already inhabited and Jerusalem had been a prosperous and walled city with a king, Al Adel al Sadek Salem, for over 1,000 years. The Old Testament tells us that King Al Adel al Sadek went to the outskirts of Jerusalem to welcome Abraham and his tribe and offered gifts of bread and wine.

When Moses led the Jews out of Egypt to conquer the land of the Canaanites, he described it to them like this:

(It is full of) great and goodly cities which you did not build, and houses full of good things which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn out which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant … (Deuteronomy 6:10–11)

Jerusalem is an occupied city and widely recognised as such. This fact was also emphasised by the International Court of Justice in the ruling it issued in July 2004.

Palestinians are living under military rule in East Jerusalem. They’re discriminated against, and land and property has been confiscated for the use of Jews only. Christian and Muslim Palestinians from the rest of the occupied territories aren’t allowed to go and live in their capital, while Jews from anywhere in the world can move to Jerusalem.

Israel is internationally isolated, and isolated with its blind guardian, the United States. At the UN recently, they couldn’t find more than a handful of small states (Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Togo, Guatemala and Honduras) to stand beside them.

The status of Jerusalem and the right of the Palestinian people expelled from their homeland in 1948 are the two most important issues to be solved in accordance with international law and UN resolutions for durable peace to be achieved in Palestine.

Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to recognise occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital violates numerous UN resolutions, as well as long-standing US policy and assurances.

Washington’s letter of assurances given to the Palestinian delegation attending the 1991 Madrid peace conference states:

The United States understands how much importance Palestinians attach to the question of east Jerusalem. Thus, we want to assure you that nothing Palestinians do in choosing their delegation members in this phase of the process will affect their claim to east Jerusalem, or be prejudicial or precedential to the outcome of negotiations. It remains the firm position of the United States that Jerusalem must never again be a divided city and that its final status should be decided by negotiations. Thus, we do not recognize Israel’s annexation of east Jerusalem or the extension of its municipal boundaries.

Unlike Israel’s claim to all of Jerusalem, the Palestinians have a number of fair offers for a solution.

We don’t wish to see Jerusalem torn asunder, separated by walls and governed by an apartheid regime. We’re willing to share Jerusalem as the capital of one state in a single-state solution for all to share: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Alternatively, Jerusalem could be an open city and the capital of two states: East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine and West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, each run by separate municipalities and administered by a joint council. Our vision of Jerusalem is a city of peace and coexistence.

Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital will never be accepted by Arabs and many other people around the world. It’ll continue to fuel the flames of their anger against the US, Israel and all complicit regimes.

Or, Trump could achieve a durable peace in the Middle East by recognising East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, elevating the status of the US consulate in East Jerusalem to the level of an embassy, and inviting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas to Washington to resume peace negotiations under international supervision.

It’s time the US, as a superpower, dealt credibly and responsibly with the Palestinian question, and adopted a policy based on justice, international law and the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people.

Trump can do that if he wishes. By doing so, he would regain some of the respect and credibility the United States has lost around the world.

Trump’s Jerusalem rationale and its consequences

It is 50 years since the Six-Day War—the June 1967 conflict that, as much as any other event, continues to define the Israeli–Palestinian impasse. After the fighting was over, Israel controlled all of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, in addition to the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights.

Back then, the world saw this military outcome as temporary. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, the backdrop to what was to become a diplomatic solution to the problem of the stateless Palestinians, was adopted some five months after the war ended. But, as is often the case, what began as temporary has lasted.

This is the context in which President Donald Trump recently declared that the United States recognised Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital. Trump stated that the US was not taking a position on the final status of Jerusalem, including ‘the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty’ there. He made clear that the US would support a two-state solution if agreed to by both sides. And he chose not to begin actually moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv, even though he could have simply relabelled what is now the US consulate in Jerusalem.

The attempt to change US policy while arguing that little had changed did not persuade many. Most Israelis were pleased with the new US stance, and most in the Arab world and beyond were incensed.

Just why Trump chose this moment to make this gesture is a matter of conjecture. The president suggested it was simply recognition of reality and that his predecessors’ policy failure to do so had failed to yield any diplomatic benefits. This is true, although the reason diplomacy failed over the decades had nothing to do with US policy towards Jerusalem, and everything to do with divisions among Israelis and Palestinians and the gaps between the two sides.

Others have attributed the US announcement to American domestic politics, a conclusion supported by the unilateral US statement’s failure to demand anything of Israel (for example, to restrain settlement construction) or offer anything to the Palestinians (say, supporting their claim to Jerusalem). Although the decision has led to some violence, it looks more like an opportunity lost than a crisis created.

What made this statement not just controversial but potentially counterproductive is that the Trump administration has spent a good part of its first year putting together a plan to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This announcement could well weaken that plan’s already limited prospects.

What the Trump administration seems to have in mind is to give outsiders, and Saudi Arabia in particular, a central role in peacemaking. Informing this approach is the view that Saudi Arabia and other Arab governments are more concerned with the perceived threat from Iran than with anything to do with Israel. As a result, it is assumed that they are prepared to put aside their long-standing hostility towards Israel, a country that largely shares their view of Iran.

Progress on the Israeli–Palestinian issue would create a political context in the Arab world that would allow them to do just this. The hope in the Trump administration is that the Saudis will use their financial resources to persuade the Palestinians to agree to make peace with Israel on terms Israel will accept.

The problem is that the only plan to which this Israeli government is likely to agree will offer the Palestinians far less than they have historically demanded. If so, the Palestinian leaders themselves may well determine it is safer to say no than to sign on to a plan sure to disappoint many of their own people and leave them vulnerable to Hamas and other radical groups.

The Saudis, too, may be reluctant to be associated with a plan that many will deem a sellout. The top priority for the new Saudi leadership under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is to consolidate power, which the prince is doing by associating himself with an effort to attack corruption in the kingdom and by pursuing a nationalist, anti-Iranian foreign policy.

But neither tactic is going entirely according to plan. The anti-corruption effort, while so far popular, risks being tarnished by selective prosecution of offenders (which suggests that it is more about power than reform) and reports about the crown prince’s own lifestyle. And the anti-Iran efforts have become inseparable from what has become an unpopular war in Yemen and diplomatic embarrassments in Lebanon and Qatar. Meanwhile, ambitious plans to reform the country are proving easier to design than to implement, and are sure to alienate more conservative elements.

The problem for Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law who leads US policy in this area, is that the Saudis are likely to prove much less of a diplomatic partner than the White House had counted on. If the new crown prince is worried about his domestic political standing, he will be reluctant to stand shoulder to shoulder with an American president seen as too close to an Israel that is unwilling to satisfy even minimal Palestinian requirements for statehood.

All of which brings us back to Jerusalem. Trump argued that recognising the city as Israel’s capital was ‘a long overdue step to advance the peace process and the work towards a lasting agreement’. More and more it appears that Trump’s move will have just the opposite effect.

Illiberal Israel

Image courtesy of Pixabay user dimitrisvetsikas.

After a half-century of occupying Palestinian territory, Israel is succumbing to its deepest ethno-centrist impulses, and increasingly rejecting recognized boundaries. Israel is now on its way to join the growing club of illiberal democracies, and it has Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to thank.

Over the course of 11 years as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu has reshaped the country’s collective psyche. He has elevated the isolated, traumatized ‘Jew’—still at odds with the ‘gentiles,’ not to mention the ‘Arabs’—above the secular, liberal, and globalized ‘Israeli’ envisioned by the country’s founding fathers.

Netanyahu himself is a secular, cynical hedonist who faces an ongoing investigation into his alleged acceptance of lavish illicit gifts from a Hollywood mogul. Yet he is adept at playing the ‘Jewish card’ to his own benefit. In 1996, his promise to be ‘good for the Jews’ won him power. In 2015, his warning that Jews must rush to vote for him, or have their fate decided by ‘droves’ of Arabs supposedly headed to the polling stations, did the same.

Just as appealing to people’s Jewishness wins elections, it blocks negotiations on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state in 2014 became the last nail in the coffin of an already dying peace process.

In many ways, Netanyahu’s political profile matches that of the most hardline Republicans. His wife once boasted that, had he been born in the US, he could have been president. He probably would have preferred such a life, largely for the sheer power it would afford him. It also would have enabled him to avoid eight frustrating years at loggerheads with President Barack Obama.

Now, however, Netanyahu is relieved to have in the White House Donald Trump, a like-minded Republican who is, in practically every way, the polar opposite of Obama. The last US president showed empathy for minorities and immigrants; defended human and civil rights; achieved a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran; sought peace in Palestine; and, most problematic, attempted to hold the Israeli leader to account. One of Obama’s last acts as president was to have the US abstain from voting on a United Nations Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories, rather than vetoing it.

Netanyahu far prefers Trump’s crude charlatanism to Obama’s professorial liberalism. In fact, Trump and Netanyahu share much in common with each other—and with other illiberal leaders, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. All three view open hostility toward the mainstream media as a means of securing and consolidating power.

Trump has launched, in so many words, a ‘war on the media.’ Erdoğan, for his part, has cracked down on press freedom, arresting journalists on accusations of involvement in last July’s failed military coup. Netanyahu has been Israel’s acting communications minister since late 2014.

The logic is not difficult to discern. News media are supposed to hold those in power accountable. So those in power try to muffle the news media. One way to do that is to amplify the voices of more agreeable alternatives, such as Israel Hayom—a Hebrew-language free daily newspaper dedicated to singing Netanyahu’s praises.

The goal of this North Korea-style pamphlet is not to turn a profit. In 2014, Sheldon Adelson, an American casino mogul who has long supported Netanyahu and also helped to finance Trump’s campaign, invested an estimated $50 million in Israel Hayom, which has lost more than $250 million since its launch in 2007. Netanyahu held an early election in 2014, in order to protect his mouthpiece—which now has the largest circulation of any Israeli newspaper—from parliamentary bills threatening to hobble it.

Netanyahu has always denied that he had anything to do with Israel Hayom, though the truth is that he is practically its editor-in-chief. In what other capacity could he have discussed with the owner of its main competitor, Yedioth Ahronot, the possibility of curtailing the distribution of Israel Hayom, in exchange for more favorable coverage?

Of course, Netanyahu is not doing all of the heavy lifting in pushing Israel toward illiberalism, and censorship and harassment are not reserved exclusively for the media. The minister of education, Naftali Bennett—Chairman of the Jewish Home party, a key ally in Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and a leading advocate for annexing Palestinian lands—is now instructing schools that ‘studying Judaism is more important than math and science.’ A novel describing a love affair between a Palestinian boy and a Jewish girl has been banned from school curricula.

The minister of justice, Ayelet Shaked, also a member of the Jewish Home party, is second only to Bennett in her ultra-Zionist ardor. She is now spearheading an attack on Israeli democracy’s last frontier, the Supreme Court, condemning it for rulings such as last April’s decision holding that Israel’s natural-gas policy was unconstitutional.

More recently, Shaked approved the ‘loyalty in culture bill,’ which would make government cultural funding contingent on the recipient’s ‘loyalty’ to the Jewish state. Right-wing groups supporting annexation, meanwhile, receive lavish support from the government, as well as from foreign Jewish donors.

Notions of loyalty are used as weapons not just against artists. A newly passed bill—clearly aimed at Israeli Arabs’ representatives in the Knesset (parliament)—would allow MKs to be dismissed for disloyalty to the state. NGOs focused on human rights and peace-seeking are scrutinized as foreign agents.

For Israel, democracy has always been a strategic asset, because a democratic Israel was a natural fit in the Western alliance. Whereas the West lost no time in imposing sanctions on President Vladimir Putin’s Russia following its annexation of Crimea, it has not punished Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. The more Israel embraces Putin-inspired practices, however, the weaker becomes its connection to its strategic rearguard in the West.

It remains to be seen whether the unpredictable Trump will meet Israel’s expectations. What is clear is that by weakening its democratic credentials, Israel imperils its lifeline to the West—including post-Trump America.