It was no secret, but now it’s official: the Trump
administration decided to go around the Palestinians to forge normalisation
agreements last year between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Robert
O’Brien, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, admitted
the Trump administration sought to build “political capital” with Israel first
by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over
the Golan Heights.
“We couldn’t allow the Palestinians to stand as a roadblock to a broader
Middle East peace,” O’Brien said, describing for the first time since leaving
office the strategy behind Trump’s diplomatic moves.
“So we went to our friends and partners and allies and we built political
capital. And one way we built political capital in Israel was by moving the
embassy to Jerusalem, one way we did it was by recognising the Golan Heights,
as Israeli territory,” O’Brien said.
Former President Trump forged normalisation agreements called the
“Abraham Accords” between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in
September 2020. Additional agreements were reached to include Morocco in
December and Sudan in January.
Trump had announced in 2017 the US would move its
embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognise Jerusalem as the capital
of Israel. The move was celebrated in Israel but widely condemned elsewhere as
detrimental to internationally supported Palestinian interests.
Trump unilaterally recognised Israel sovereignity over the Golan in
2019, contravening international law. Israel had seized the territory from
Syria in the Six Day War of 1967.
“These were facts that were never going to change on the ground. Jerusalem was never going to change being the capital of Israel. Israel was
never going to give the Golan Heights back to Assad or any other regime in
Syria,” O’Brien said.
“We did the same thing. We built political capital with Bahrain, with
Morocco with the UAE by letting them know that we would stand with them, by
getting out of” the Iran nuclear deal “which was a serious threat to the
region”, O’Brien said.
The 2015 United Nations-backed Iran agreement was “providing the Iranian
regime with so much money, so many funds, to export their revolutionary
ideology,” O’Brien said.
Trump unilaterally withdrew In 2018 from the Iran nuclear agreement
which had been negotiated by his predecessor President Barack Obama. Now,
President Biden is moving to open negotiations with Iran to revive the
agreement.
We then took that capital and used it to bring the parties together and to
see if we could bring them to some sort of accord, which we did,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s remarks came during a panel discussion hosted by the US Institute
for Peace in Washington that included President Joe Biden’s National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.
Other Arab states are likely to join the Abraham Accords as they see
economic benefits and the new relations should allow the US to draw down some
its military forces in the region, O’Brien said.
Among the benefits, O’Brien said the accords should allow Israeli
entrepreneurs to raise capital from Arab sovereign wealth funds.
“It boxes China out of Israel’s tech sector to some extent, which is
something I looked at very carefully,” O’Brien said.
Biden adviser Sullivan said the new administration intends to build on the
Abraham Accords. The new president is “thinking about how we make sure that the
seeds that have been planted actually grow into the kind of full cooperation”
that has been promised, he said.
Separately, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told the US Senate on
January 19 the Biden administration would be taking a close look at the incentives
Trump had offered the UAE and Bahrain to enter the accords.
O’Brien said he still hoped for a peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians and suggested other Arab states like Saudi Arabia would join in
future.
“We weren’t able to get the Palestinians. I wish we had been. But there are a number of carrots and sticks that’ll bring them to the table,” O’Brien said, adding that he thinks European nations will help when they “see the success” of the Abraham Accords.
Daily life under Occupation
Will
the European Union help as apartheid state to get away with ethnic cleansing?
“A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea: This is Apartheid,” was the title of a January 12 report by
the Israeli rights group B’Tselem – an Israeli human rights advocacy
organization. No matter how one is to interpret B’Tselem’s findings, the report
is earth-shattering. The official Israeli response merely confirmed what
B’Tselem has stated in no uncertain terms.
Those of us who repeatedly claimed that Israel is not democratic, governed
by an apartheid regime and systematically discriminates against its ethnic and
racial minorities, in favor of the country’s Jewish majority, purportedly have
nothing to learn from B’Tselem’s declaration. Thus,
it may seem that the report, which highlighted racial discrimination in four
major areas – land, citizenship, freedom of movement and political
participation – merely restated the obvious. In actuality,
it went much further.
B’Tselem is a credible Israeli human rights organization. However, like
other Israeli rights groups, it rarely went far enough in challenging the
Israeli state’s basic definition of itself as a democratic state. Yes, on
numerous occasions it rightly accused the Israeli government and military of
undemocratic practices, rampant human rights violations and so on. But to
demolish the very raison d’etre, the basic premise that gives Israel its
legitimacy in the eyes of its Jewish citizens, and many more around the world,
is a whole different story.
“B’Tselem rejects the perception of Israel as a democracy (inside the Green
Line) that simultaneously upholds a temporary military occupation (beyond it),”
the Israeli rights group concluded based on the fact that
the “bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met
after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to
entrench its control over Palestinians.”
Let’s be clear on what this actually means. Israel’s leading human rights
organization was not arguing that Israel was turning into an apartheid state or
that it was acting contrary to the spirit of democracy or that Israel is an
undemocratic apartheid regime only within the geographic confines of the
occupied Palestinian territories. None of this. According to B’tselem, which
has for decades diligently documented numerous facets of
Israeli government practices in the realm of politics, military,
land-ownership, water distribution, health, education, and much more, Israel
is, now, wholly an apartheid, undemocratic regime.
B’Tselem’s assessment is most welcomed, not as a belated admission of a
self-evident reality but as an important step that could allow both Israelis
and Palestinians to establish a common narrative on their relationship,
political position and collective action in order to dismantle this Israeli
apartheid.
Relatively, Israeli groups that criticize their own government have
historically been allowed much larger margins than Palestinian groups that have
done the same thing. However, this is no longer the case.
Palestinian freedom of speech has always been so limited and the mere
criticism of the Israeli occupation has led to extreme measures, including
beatings, arrests, and even assassinations. In 2002, a government-funded
organization, NGO Monitor, was established precisely to monitor
and control Palestinian human rights organizations in the occupied territories,
including Addameer, al-Mezan Center, al-Haq, PCHR among others. The Israeli
army raid on the Ramallah-based offices
of the Palestinian human rights group Addameer in September 2019 was one of
many such violent examples.
However, Israeli government actions of recent years are pointing to an
unmistakable paradigm shift where Israeli civil society organizations are
increasingly perceived to be the enemy, targeted in myriad ways, including
defamation, financial restrictions and severing
of access to the Israeli public.
The latter point was put on full display on January 17, when Israeli
Education Minister, Yoav Galant, tweeted that he had instructed his
ministry to “prevent the entry of organizations calling Israel ‘an apartheid
state’ or demeaning Israeli soldiers, from lecturing at schools”.
Oddly, Galant demonstrated B’Tselem’s point, where the group challenged
Israel’s very claim to democracy and freedom of expression, by curtailing
Israeli human rights workers, intellectuals and educators’ own right to express
dissent and to challenge the government’s political line. Simply stated,
Galant’s decision is a functional definition of totalitarianism at work.
B’Tselem did not back down. To the contrary, the group expressed its determination “to
keep with its mission of documenting reality,” and making its “findings
publicly known to the Israeli public, and worldwide”. It went even further as
B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad met with hundreds of Israeli students on January
18 to discuss the inconsistency between military occupation and the respect for
human rights. Following the meeting, El-Ad tweeted “The @btselem lecture did
take place this morning. The Israeli
government will have to contend with us until the apartheid regime ends.”
The B’Tselem-Galant episode is not an isolated
spat, but one out of many such examples, which demonstrate that the Israeli
government is turning into a police state against, not only the Palestinian indigenous
population, but its own Jewish citizens.
Indeed, the decision by the Israeli Ministry of
Education is rooted in a previous law that dates back to July 2018, which was dubbed the “Breaking the
Silence law”. Breaking the Silence is an Israeli civil society organization of army veterans who became vocal in their criticism of the Israeli
occupation, and who have taken it upon themselves to educate the Israeli public
on the immorality and illegality of Israel’s military practices in occupied
Palestine. To silence the soldiers, former Israeli Education
Minister Naftali Bennett ordered schools to bar these
conscientious objectors from gaining access and directly speaking to students.
The latest government’s decision, taken by Galant, has merely widened the
definition, thus expanding the restrictions imposed on Israelis who refuse to
toe the government’s line.
For years, a persisting argument within the Palestine-Israel discourse
contended that, while Israel is not a perfect democracy, it is, nonetheless, a
‘democracy for Jews’. Though true democracies must be founded on equality and
inclusiveness, the latter maxim gave some credibility to the argument that
Israel can still strike the balance between being nominally democratic while
remaining exclusively Jewish.
That shaky argument is now falling apart. Even
in the eyes of many Israeli Jews, the Israeli government no longer possesses
any democratic ideals. Indeed, as B’Tselem has succinctly worded it, Israel is
a regime of Jewish supremacy “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”
Daily life under Occupation
That said, the world is exhaling following the end of the vicious incompetence and corruption of Donald Trump’s presidency. Journalists and political commentators applauded the inaugural address delivered by President Joe Biden, and expressed varying levels of hope about what is called a “return to normalcy” in US public policy. Meanwhile, we wonder whether the Biden administration will finally end US complicity in and support to the Israeli apartheid regime.
As I said above, B’Tselem disputes the popular
narrative about Israel being a democracy. Instead, I repeat, the
position paper makes the following assertion: “One organising [sic.] principle
lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and
perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”
The B’Tselem position paper does not stand alone. In June 2020, Yesh Din, yet
another Israeli human rights organization, issued a legal opinion that concluded that the
Israeli regime is committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank against
Palestinians. Although the Yesh Din legal opinion (which cites international
law as its controlling authority) limits its apartheid indictment to the West Bank,
the B’Tselem position paper makes the more sweeping indictment that Israel
exists as one apartheid regime “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean
Sea,” an area that includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
We agree that Israel is an apartheid regime. One of us (Raouf Halaby) is a
Palestinian-American who was born in Jerusalem; in 1959 his family was forced
from their home by Jewish persecution. One of us (Lauri Umansky) is ancestrally
Jewish. One of us (Wendell Griffen), who is ancestrally African American, was
born during (and vividly recalls what life was like during) the last years of
Jim Crow segregation in the United States. One of us (Allan Boesak) is a native
of South Africa who was a leading opponent to the apartheid regime of South
Africa.
We each, and separately, have first-hand knowledge about the political,
social, and legal oppression perpetrated by the Israeli regime against
Palestinians. That first-hand knowledge is the foundation for our agreement
with the B’tselem position paper. Contrary to the popular narrative mouthed by
US politicians and media pundits, Israel is an apartheid regime, not a
democracy. The Yesh Din legal opinion provides a clear explanation for this
conclusion based on universally accepted principles of international law.
The Israeli apartheid regime is subsidized, politically and economically,
by US tax dollars, US corporations, and by US-based charitable organizations. A
2015 article reported that the US government has
provided $139 billion in direct assistance to Israel since 1949. The article
also mentions how US taxpayers receive favorable tax deductions by making
charitable donations to organizations that fund illegal Israeli settler
activities in the West Bank.
For generations, people in the United States have turned a blind eye to the
ongoing crimes against humanity practiced by the state of Israel against
non-Jews generally and against Palestinians, especially. Israel’s racial
disdain of Ethiopian Jews and other African nationals has been duly noted. And
Israeli and non-Israeli Jews who dare criticize Israel’s racist policies are
labeled as self-hating Jews. Now that the Biden-Harris administration has
entered office, we should open our eyes to the apartheid that former US
President Jimmy Carter documented in his book titled Palestine Peace Not
Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, 2006). In that book, President Carter, who won
the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to negotiate peace between Israel and
Egypt, detailed Israeli violations of key United Nations resolutions, official
US policy, and an international “road map” for peace by subsidizing illegal
Israeli settlements on Arab lands and by militarized enforcement of political,
social, and economic oppression of the Palestinians.
In some respects, Israeli apartheid is even worse than South African
apartheid. Yet, oppressed South Africans, after decades of struggle, and
especially after first the Sharpeville massacre, and then the slaughter of the
children in 1976, found allies in the international community. They joined
together in a nonviolent, targeted, and highly effective boycott, divestment
and sanctions campaign without which the struggle against that system would
never have been successful. How many more massacres of Palestinians must it
take for the West, and the US in particular to rediscover that spark of moral
indignation and political integrity regarding Palestine that made them choose
the side of the oppressed in South Africa?
It is high time people who believe that apartheid and racism are illegal
call on the United States to stop subsidizing apartheid and racism under the
guise of supporting Israel. It is time for us
to quit pretending that Israel is a US partner for democracy. It is
time for an all-out challenge to the anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions)
laws and resolutions that have been introduced in thirty-two U.S. states. It is
time, once and for all, to call out the ruse, whether enshrined in law or
propaganda, that criticism of the apartheid Israeli regime is tantamount to
anti-Semitism: as B’Tselem and Yesh Din make clear, anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism cannot and must not be falsely equated. It is high time for the
US, if it is to be a creditable force for “democracy,” to recognize Israel for
what it is: an apartheid regime that depends on US financial and political
support to maintain the oppressions it inflicts on Palestinians.
It’s utopic, but many call on the Biden-Harris administration to end U.S.
support for the Israeli regime’s apartheid policies and practices.
What is less utopic is to urge other persons who believe in justice and the rule of law to join the rising chorus of voices in Israel, such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and around the world, who are making the same demands.
PALESTINA
It
has been a year since President Donald Trump and his pal, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, unveiled their “Deal of the Century” to a crowd of
supporters and financial backers.
Their
plan envisioned Israel, with an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, being
sovereign over historical Palestine and commanding total control over the wide
network of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.
The
proposed Peace Plan was a sham, devised by Trump’s lieutenants to appease
Israel and please his conservative evangelical base.
The
“deal” was not a deal at all, since it was not negotiated with the
concerned party, the Palestinians.
Utterly
shortsighted, it also violated international law, broke with long-standing US
policy and principles, and torpedoed whatever was left of Washington’s
suitability as a mediator.
But
it was all in line with Trump’s record of supporting Israel’s military
occupation and legitimising its illegal settlements while offending the
Palestinians and delegitimising their struggle for freedom.
In
2017, the Trump administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It
moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and
also closed the representative office of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) in Washington, DC the following year.
It
also froze all assistance to UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with supporting
millions of Palestinians living as refugees and quit the UN Human Rights
Council (UNHRC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) under the pretext of bias against Israel on account of its policies in
occupied Palestine.
Alas,
Congress kept mostly silent. And so did much of the world, including the Arab
world. Even though many vehemently rejected Trump’s dealing and wheeling over
Palestine, they could or would do little or nothing to stop him, for fear of retaliation.
Long
before a vengeful Trump administration began to take down names of those who
would not back its policies in Congress, like a bully, it “took down names” of
countries which did not back its Israel policies at the UN.
The
Trump administration went on to cynically exploit the ambition or vulnerability
of the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to
nudge them to normalise relations with colonial Israel despite its continued
assault on the Palestinians and against the will of their peoples.
The
reversal of the long-held conventional wisdom that a Palestinian state is a
prerequisite for Arab normalisation exposed the utter weakness of the Arab
regimes and rendered any peace process superfluous.
Why
would Israel negotiate with the Palestinians if it could dictate its terms to
them; why compromise when belligerence is rewarded with more concessions?
So the peace process was pronounced dead. Yet again!
After all, it had also been pronounced dead after Clinton’s 2000 Camp David
summit failed to save it; after George W Bush’s Roadmap failed to revive it,
and after the Obama Administration all but gave up on it.
Alas,
with each obituary, violence broke out in frustration as Israel unleashed
military campaigns including two major offensives against Gaza. Whether it
acted in vengeance, or to “mow the lawn”, ie cut the Palestinians to size,
Israeli aggression led to mayhem and the death of thousands.
And
yet, there is no giving up on the spectacle; no letting go of the diplomatic
charade which, in fact, killed the two-state solution, by allowing Israel to
deepen its military and civilian entrenchment in the prospective
Palestinian state.
The
peace process is dead; long live the peace process.
For
it is now Biden’s turn to revive the peace procession.
His
administration has promised to redress some of the defects of the Trump
approach by improving relations with the PLO, reopening the US consulate in
East Jerusalem, and restoring financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority
(PA) so that it could put the show back on the road.
The
move is commendable and is sure to be welcomed everywhere, except perhaps in
Israel, where the Netanyahu-led government continues to embrace all that is
Trump and oppose all that Biden stands for.
That
is why it is high time for the US president to shun this corrupt Israeli prime
minister, who has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of
trust. And who, like Trump, has undermined the electoral
process purely for personal gain and glory.
Netanyahu had basically taken Trump’s side during the
elections, and kept his joint photo with Trump on his official Twitter account,
well after his mob attacked the Capitol.
Biden
surely remembers how Netanyahu, rudely and against all protocol, incited Congress
against the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear question
The
president must also respond to Netanyahu’s most recent provocation of
announcing new settlement expansion on the eve of his inauguration, by speaking
out against the illegal Israeli settlements, as he did in the past.
Lest
he forgot how Netanyahu humiliated him personally as he visited Jerusalem in
2010 to restart the peace process, by announcing dramatic new plans for illegal
settlement expansion in East Jerusalem.
If,
as to be expected, words do not work, the US must act to censor Netanyahu or
his potential replacement after the March elections.
If
he truly wants to restore US diplomatic credibility, Biden must be ready to
leverage US financial and military assistance to Israel, which amounts to more
than half of the US’s entire foreign military financing.
It
is outrageous that Biden appears to think such a step would be “outrageous”
when it is the only practical way to induce Israel to end its occupation and
save it from its worst demons.
The
use of such leverage does not undermine an alliance; it helps save it before it
is too late. And it does not only apply to US-Israel relations. Biden must use
Washington’s leverage with Saudi Arabia to end its war in Yemen, and use its
leverage with Egypt to end the wide human rights abuses there, etc.
Likewise,
if Biden refuses to use Washington’s leverage, Israel will continue to deepen
its occupation and move further to the right, making any solution of any kind
impossible without greater violence.
The
Biden administration needs to drop the pretence that $40bn of US military
support for Israel safeguards its security and moderates its position when the record
shows it only safeguards its occupation and hardens its posture.
Pursuing
the same damn policies again and again for more than half a century and
expecting different results is indeed madness.
Truth
be told, the Middle East region is in such turmoil, there may not be a
geopolitical justification or strategic interest why Biden should invest big
political capital on Palestine.
But
there is a moral imperative that could no longer be muddled or ignored. One
that is widely embraced by the Democratic Party and greater segments of the
American Jewish communities.
Washington’s
unconditional support for Israel has come with a heavy price for Palestine in
terms of countless human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against
humanity, in the form of an apartheid system, which expanded under Republicans
and Democrats alike.
If
the show must go on, it needs to take a different, more confident approach
based on fairness and common sense; one that, for a starter, recognises the
need for equal rights among the equal number of Jews and Palestinians now
living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
If he is truly serious about the peace rather than the process, Biden should make it clear to Israelis and Palestinians ahead of their upcoming elections, that the US will stand with those who stand for freedom and justice for all, not the few.
INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix
Palestinian
Center for Human Rights
International
Solidarity Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom
Defense for Children
Breaking the Silence
BRASIL
AOS FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
