MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Dirty Deals: Israel & Bahrain & UAE

The signing of the deal normalizing relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates caused a stir in the Middle East. It seems Israel is increasingly gaining political ground in the region, expanding trade and financial relations, and solidifying an Arab-Israeli axis against Iran and to accomplish Shimon Peres and the Zionist Project aim to conquer the Arab market in order to dominate the Arab world. All of this is happening against the will of the Palestinian people and without any concession from the Israelis.

These developments have raised a number of important questions on the political scene in the Middle East. Does this diplomatic success for Israel mean that the Palestinian question has been completely sidelined in Arab politics?

Have Palestinians lost their “veto power” on the normalisation of relations between Arab states and Israel?

Will the UAE be able to bypass the Palestinians, the original owners of the cause, and come up with a “solution” to the Palestinian issue?

For decades, there has been a consensus among Arab states that any dealings with Israel have to be conditioned on a “land for peace” arrangement that includes its withdrawal from the territories it occupied during the 1967 war. That is, the Israelis would have to give up occupied territory for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in exchange for normalising relations with Arab countries.

This consensus gave an unspoken “veto power” on normalisation to the Palestinians, making the resolution of the Palestinian issue the only way in which Israel would be accepted in the Arab world.

What the Emirati-Bahraini-Israeli agreement has done is basically sideline this past Arab consensus on how to deal with the Palestinian issue and make public what has been going on informally for years – the normalisation of relations between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

It demonstrates Emirati and Bahraini disregard for the long-term Arab position of “land for peace”. Abu Dhabi and Manama have effectively given the Israelis what they want – open political relations, trade, and backing for their anti-Iran confrontation efforts – without any real concessions on the Palestinian issue.

For the Palestinians, , this is a clear attempt to preserve the status quo and allow the Israelis to continue stealing Palestinian land, demolishing Palestinian homes, imprisoning and killing Palestinians and altogether solidifying their apartheid rule. Contrary to what the Emiratis have claimed, this deal has not stopped the annexation of Palestinian lands on the ground.

The Israelis do not hide their optimism that establishing full diplomatic relations with the UAE and Bahrain will open the door to establishing full relations with other countries, such as Oman, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and perhaps Sudan. If these normalisation deals continue, then it would mean that the Palestinians have lost their “veto power” on normalisation with Israel and their cause has lost its political value to the Arab regimes.

While the deal is indeed bad news for the Palestinians, it is important not to exaggerate its significance. Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv and Washington have touted it as a “peace for peace” (as opposed to “land for peace”) initiative, trying to equate it to the peace agreements Egypt and Jordan concluded with Israel in the past. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the architect of the deal, like most Israelis, knows very well that any such comparison is unrealistic.

After all, neither Bahrain nor the UAE has actually been at war with Israel and they also have no common borders, unlike Jordan and Egypt, which waged deadly wars against the Israelis. The peace deals that the two countries signed with Israel not only put an end to hostilities but also forced Israel to withdraw from territories it had occupied.

Nothing of such political importance was contained in the “peace” deal that Bahrain, the UAE and Israel signed last month.

As bad as this deal is for the Palestinians, it does not make the Palestinian issue go away. Despite all the noise and PR, Israelis very well realise that normalisation of relations with Gulf nations will not “get rid of” millions of Palestinians. It cannot erase them from history or from reality.

There seems to be some hope among some moderate Israelis that the UAE, the new self-declared “peacemaker” of the region, could use the deal as a stepping stone and wield its influence to help resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a recent article, former Israeli diplomat, Nadav Tamir, wrote about the possibility of Abu Dhabi initiating new negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Tel Aviv to produce a settlement that includes a separate Palestinian state.

The success of such an initiative, however, is highly unlikely, given that the relations between Ramallah and Abu Dhabi are at an all-time low. The PA has made it clear it considers the Emirati deal with Israel a “betrayal” and has issued strongly-worded condemnations.

If the UAE fails to play a useful role in reaching a settlement with the Palestinians, Tamir fears that the agreement with the UAE could turn from a tactical achievement to strategic harm.

In the short-term, normalisation with Israel only adds to the isolation of the PA and could benefit Hamas – something that is not in the interest of Israel, which has long used the authorities in Ramallah to indirectly depoliticise and control the Palestinian population. In the long run, Arab normalisation with Israel without concessions on the Palestinian issue takes away the main Arab leverage to enforce a two-state solution, which could backfire.

A deeply weakened PA is likely to collapse and leave the administration of Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank to their occupier – Israel. Such a development would only further put to the fore the apartheid practices of the Israeli state, giving full rights to Israeli Jews, while oppressing and discriminating against the native Palestinian population.

This would likely provide even more fuel into the transnational grassroots opposition to Israeli occupation and apartheid, which is already putting significant pressure on Israel to give the Palestinians their rights.

In this sense, the continuing denial of statehood to the Palestinians by the Israeli right-wing ruling elite and the collapsing support for Israel among younger generations of Americans and Western Europeans puts the country even more firmly on a path towards a one-state solution, where Israelis and Palestinians would enjoy equal rights. This would effectively mean the end of the Zionist dream of a Jewish state on all of historic Palestine.

The current Israeli political leadership is too short-sighted to see these potential developments. Netanyahu is enjoying the image boost the normalisation deal gave him and is probably hoping this would secure his re-election once the ruling coalition collapses and allow him to continue dodging jail over the corruption crimes he is being tried for. His premiership may well go down in history as the one that laid the groundwork for the end of the exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

Thus, what may seem like a major loss for the Palestinian cause may turn out to be more harmful for the Zionist project. Sooner or later, the Israelis will have to face to consequences of denying Palestinian statehood.

PALESTINA

A Zionist-led war on a Palestinian cultural festival in Rome has exposed the fragility of the Italian political system when it comes to the conversation on Palestine and Israel. The sad truth is that, although Italy is not often associated with a ‘powerful’ pro-Israel lobby as is the case in Washington, the pro-Israel influence in Italy is just as dangerous.

The latest episode began on September 24, when the Palestinian community in Rome announced plans to hold ‘Falastin – Festival della Palestina’, a cultural event that aims at illustrating the richness of Palestinian culture in all of its grandeur. The idea behind it is not to simply humanize Palestinians in the eyes of ordinary Italians, but to explore commonalities, to cement bonds and to build bridges. However, for Israel’s allies in Italy, even such unthreatening objectives were too much to bear.

The festival, sponsored by II Municipio of Rome – one of the administrative subdivisions of Rome central municipality – found itself at the center of a major – and ludicrous – controversy.

On September 25, an odd pro-Israel post appeared on the Partito Democratico II Municipio – the center-left Italian political party that controls that particular subdivision. Without any context or marking any specific occasion, the post, which displayed the Israeli flag, celebrated the friendship between the Democratic Party and Israel while condemning the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS).

The haphazardness of the post and the strange timing suggested that the Democratic Party is under attack for its sponsorship of the Palestinian festival. Overwhelmed by angry comments on social media, the Party’s Facebook page abruptly removed the anti-Palestinian post without much explanation.

But clarity followed soon when, on September 30, the Jewish Community of Rome issued a statement expressing outrage at the II Municipio for allegedly sponsoring ‘an anti-Semitic festival’. Taking advantage of the deliberate distortion between anti-Semitism and the legitimate criticism of apartheid Israel, the Community’s representatives raged on about BDS and the alleged boycott of Jewish businesses.

The statement, part of which we translate here, claimed that “… the BDS Movement will attend the initiative (The Festival), and this is unacceptable and dangerous (because) the boycott movement denies the very existence of the state of Israel and it is linked to the terrorist groups of Hamas and Fatah.”

Aside from the unsubstantiated – more accurately, completely fallacious – claims, the statement referenced the ‘IHRA definition of anti-Semitism’, further explained below, which was accepted by the Italian government as well as the French and Austrian parliaments. Based on that logic, the statement concluded that, one, “the BDS movement is anti-Semitic” and, two, “the II Municipio is legitimizing anti-Jewish hatred”.

In a clearly coordinated move, the Wiesenthal Center, which often poses as a progressive organization, also went on the attack. On the same day that the Jewish Community of Rome released its statement, the Center dispatched a letter to Italian Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, also recounting the same false claims of BDS’ alleged anti-Semitism, the IHRA definition and so on.

The Center stooped so low as to compare the BDS movement to Germany’s Nazi program. It claimed that the Palestinian boycott movement was, in fact, inspired by the Nazis’ boycott of Jews, referencing the slogan “Kaufen nicht bei Juden” (Do not buy from Jews).

The fallout was quick and, judging by the typical gutlessness of European politicians, predictable as well. II Municipio councilor, one Lucrezia Colmayer, abruptly declared her resignation, “distancing” herself from the decision of II Municipio President, Francesca Del Bello, for sponsoring the Festival.

“With this gesture, I want to renew my closeness to the Jewish Community of Rome, with which I shared this important cultural and administrative path,” Colmayer wrote.

Del Bello soon followed with her own statement. “I apologize if the sponsorship of the II Municipio to ‘Falastin – Festival della Palestina’ … offended the Jewish community and led a councilor to resign,” she wrote, rejecting Colmayer’s resignation and inviting her to return to the Council.

Fortunately, despite all obstacles, “the Festival was a great success,” Maya Issa, a member of the Palestinian Community of Rome and Lazio, told us.

The Festival “was a way for people to learn about Palestine and to see Palestine under a different light. The atmosphere was magic – Palestinian colors, scents, food, Dabkah, art and literature”.

The good news is that, despite the well-coordinated Italian Zionist campaign, the Palestinian Festival still went ahead and, according to Issa, “many Italian politicians understood our message and they decided to participate”.

Now that the Festival is over, the pro-Palestinian groups in Italy are ready to counter the false accusations and the defamatory language lobbed at them by the pro-Israel camp.

“We will respond with the truth and we will refute all the false claims, especially the lies about the BDS Movement,” Issa said, adding “we, the Palestinian community, must resist, along with all those who support true democracy and freedom”.

There is no doubt that the Palestinian community of Italy is more than capable of achieving this crucial task. However, two important points must be kept in mind: First, the “IHRA definition of anti-Semitism”, also known as EUMC, has been deliberately misused by Zionists to the point that a genuine attempt at curbing anti-Jewish racism has been transformed as a tool to defend Israeli war crimes in Palestine, and to silence critics who dare, not only to censure Israel’s illegal actions, but to even celebrate Palestinian culture.

Of particular significance is that the very person who drafted that ‘definition’, US attorney Kenneth S. Stern, has condemned the misuse of the initiative.

In a written statement submitted to the US Congress in 2017, Stern argued that the original definition has been greatly misused, and that it was never intended to be manipulated as a political tool.

“The EUMC ‘working definition’ was recently adopted in the United Kingdom, and applied to campus. An ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ event was cancelled as violating the definition. A Holocaust survivor was required to change the title of a campus talk, and the University (of Manchester) mandated it be recorded, after an Israeli diplomat complained that the title violated the definition,” he wrote.

“Perhaps most egregious,” Stern continued, “an off-campus group citing the definition called on a university to conduct an inquiry of a professor (who received her PhD from Columbia) for anti-Semitism, based on an article she had written years before. The University (of Bristol) then conducted the inquiry. While it ultimately found no basis to discipline the professor, the exercise itself was chilling and McCarthy-like.”

A second point to also consider is that Italian politics has reached the point that, on many issues, it has become difficult to easily distinguish between supposedly progressive parties and the populist ones. Palestine, in the new Italian political discourse, especially that of the Democratic Party is, perhaps, the most obvious case in point.

This is particularly disturbing, considering that Partito Democratico was, itself, the ideological culmination of parties that existed during the era of Italy’s First Republic (1948-1992), which were known for their strong stances in favor of Palestinian rights and self-determination and strong opposition to Israel’s violations of international law.

This is no longer the case, as the party’s stance on Palestine now hardly deviates from the stifling mantra, “Due popoli due stati” – “Two people two states”.

The new era of Italian politics makes it possible for the likes of Lia Quartapelle – a Democratic Party MP – to pose as a human rights defender on the global stage while referring to Israel as “an extraordinary exception, a plural democracy in a region that fed sectarian and fundamentalist policies”. Her statement is not only wrong and deluding, it also embodies a deep-seated form of anti-Arab sentiment, if not, arguably, outright racism.

The attempt at shutting down the Palestinian Festival is a microcosm of Italy’s foreign policy agenda in Palestine and Israel, where Rome offers Palestinians nothing but empty rhetoric, while practically remaining subservient to the chauvinistic and racist right-wing agenda of Tel Aviv.

Italians must understand that this is no longer just a conversation on Palestine and Israel, but one that directly affects them and their democracy, as well. Italy is a country that brought, then fought and defeated fascism; allied with, then fought and defeated Nazism. Once more, they are presented with the same stark options: siding with Israeli racism and apartheid or upholding the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom.