Trump's «deal»: consequences and responses

Overview

The plan of the American president Donald Trump, styled “the deal of the century”, stipulates that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state with the whole of Jerusalem as its capital, relinquish the right of return, accept the annexation of the Jordan Valley and the illegal settlements, and live in bantustans or enclaves. Though the deal changes little of the reality on the ground for Palestinians, it contributes to legitimising the Israeli colonial project and emboldens Israel to continue seizing Palestinian land at an accelerating pace and displacing and uprooting yet more Palestinians — which aims, according to Al-Shabaka's policy fellow in Palestine Yara Hawari, at “total Palestinian surrender”. Nor does Israel pause in those pursuits even amid the COVID-19 pandemic the world is bent on confronting.

In this roundtable, a group of Al-Shabaka's policy analysts discuss the deal's repercussions for Palestinians, and set out the steps taken — or that ought to be taken — to confront it, with a focus on the bonds among Palestinians around the world.

Munir Nuseibah, Omar Shaban, and Inès Abdel Razek take up the city of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank respectively, recount the Palestinian responses to the deal (or their absence), and call for a renewal of the Palestinian leadership to take on the present challenges. Shaban shows that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas squandered a favourable opportunity to create a unified Palestinian front had they acted differently.

Jaber Suleiman and Oraib al-Rantawi discuss the deal's repercussions for the refugees and their rights. Suleiman takes up the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and highlights some of the cooperative efforts among Palestinian refugee communities around the world to counter the deal, while al-Rantawi takes up the deal's repercussions for Jordan, laments the scarcity of cross-community bonds, and urges their strengthening. Randa Wahbe writes about Palestinians in the diaspora and the United States, calling on Palestinian Americans to invest their influence and power in reviving the demand for freedom and the right of return. She sets out the steps required to achieve that, including demanding that they have an audible voice and say within the wider Palestinian community — building on the idea of bonds raised by Suleiman and al-Rantawi.

Jerusalem

Munir Nuseibah

Jerusalem has groaned under the weight of harsh Zionist colonial policies since UN General Assembly resolution 181 of 1947, which recommends partitioning Palestine into two states and keeping Jerusalem a separate entity under United Nations administration. Among what the city suffers are mass displacement and the seizure of property, restrictions on movement, and segregation in the urban space. The occupation authority casts Jerusalemites as “permanent residents” of Israel — a peculiar civil status the authorities have persistently revoked and restricted on a wide scale.

Trump's “deal” deepens Jerusalemites' fears for the future. Israel, of course, preceded Trump's intervention when it annexed West and East Jerusalem and a number of surrounding neighbourhoods after the wars of 1948 and 1967 respectively. What Trump's deal offers is an opportunity for Israel to argue that this annexation was legitimate because the world's superpower now recognises it. This position grants Israel additional cover to seize Palestinian land and uproot its people with the aim of producing a Jewish demographic majority in the city.

The proposed plan severs Jerusalem from its Palestinian surroundings and makes it an exclusively Israeli city. Despite the uncertainty enveloping the fate of the Palestinians who inhabit the city and hold Israeli residency permits, Israel will most likely severely restrict their ability to move between the two sides of the separation wall. Israel likewise keeps expanding the building of illegal settlements in and around Jerusalem with the aim of imposing further obstacles to natural Palestinian growth. Palestinians also fear for the city's holy places, above all the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which faces continual Israeli restrictions and attempts aimed at changing its identity from an Islamic site to a Jewish one.

Beyond that, Jerusalemites fear the deal's trajectory overall, for it encourages Israel to persist in barring the refugees and the displaced from returning, and in partitioning Palestine into ever smaller enclaves, in tandem with erecting colonies exclusive to Jews across the whole of Palestine.

At the same time, Jerusalemites face a leadership crisis. The initial official Palestinian reaction, wholly rejecting Trump's plan, was a good start — but it is not enough. Years of Israeli political persecution have succeeded in curtailing active official representation; today there is scarcely a clear actor with the capacity and authority to lead the people. This leaves Jerusalemites in a state of watchful waiting, unsure how Israel will translate its mounting impunity into new facts on the ground.

The Palestinian leadership and Palestinian civil society must rethink their entire strategy and the meaning of liberation, for Israel is proceeding with the familiar colonial methods of proposing agreements with the indigenous population in order to buy more time, and then stealing more land and drawing new borders. The time has come to revisit the goals of Palestinian liberation with a focus on ending the colonial regime rather than partitioning the land.

The Gaza Strip

Omar Shaban

Many residents of the Gaza Strip voice their rejection of Trump's “deal”, though they believe its effect on the Strip will be smaller compared with the West Bank and Jerusalem. Palestinians in Gaza organised popular protests to reject the deal, and turned out in massive public demonstrations joined by demonstrators of every stripe to express their rejection and condemnation of this plan.

Palestinian political officials reject the deal utterly — including President Mahmoud Abbas, the leaders of Hamas, and all the political factions and armed groups in Gaza — though this rejection remains confined to press statements and political speeches. The Palestinian Authority has addressed many international, Arab, and Islamic actors to affirm the Palestinian rejection of the deal.

Some actors, such as the former head of Hamas's political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, demand that the Palestinian Authority take bolder steps — withdrawing from the Oslo accords, dissolving the Palestinian Authority, and implementing the many decisions issued by the PLO's Executive Committee and National Council calling for severing relations with Israel and ending the obligations toward it, above all security coordination. Even before the deal was announced, others denounced the positions of certain Arab regimes and politicians who called on the Palestinians to bide their time and consider the plan before rejecting it.

Had the Palestinians treated the unjust deal as an opportunity to advance toward internal reconciliation, it would have been a blessing in disguise Click To Tweet

On another front, some voices in Gaza emerged on social media to say the deal could bring better solutions for the Strip than the wretched reality running for 14 years of blockade, unemployment, wars, and despair. The hardship produced by the blockade and the repercussions of the division between the Palestinian Authority and the West Bank have driven people to look at this iniquitous deal as an alternative less cruel than their miserable reality.

And though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas both reject the plan, each accuses the other of covert collusion in “passing” the deal, or of failing to take serious steps to thwart it. These accusations spoiled the opportunity to achieve Palestinian consensus — after the Palestinian street had earlier been somewhat optimistic at the concord of the divided Palestinian parties when they all rejected the deal and boycotted the Bahrain economic conference held in June 2019. Yet that rejection was never translated into practical steps toward unity.

The United States dared to take its position because of the Palestinian division, assuming that the fragmentation of the political system had weakened the support flowing from the Arab and Islamic actors. And though the Palestinian Authority and Hamas both understood the catastrophic effects of the division, neither took serious steps to end it. Despite Abbas's declaration in January of his intention to send a PLO delegation to the Gaza Strip for talks to restore unity, he has not done so to this day.

Trump's deal demands the development of a Palestinian strategy that secures a unified, effective national position embracing all Palestinians, and a plan of action neither slack nor extreme. Had the Palestinians treated the unjust deal as an opportunity to advance toward internal reconciliation, the saying “a blessing in disguise” would have applied to it. But that did not happen — and it seems the feeders of division are stronger than the factors of rejecting the deal. This is yet another opportunity squandered by the Palestinian political system in its entirety.

The West Bank

Inès Abdel Razek

Palestinians in the West Bank see the American administration's “deal of the century” as stillborn: it did not surprise them, but rather lays bare the one-state apartheid reality they have never ceased living, and gives a green light to annexing Palestinian land de jure after it had been annexed de facto. For decades the great powers have treated the Palestinians with similar contempt, taking decisions over their heads or without consulting them. This plan amounts to another humiliation of the Palestinians, dictating to them what is “good for them” instead of securing recognition of their fundamental rights.

Trump's deal has further eroded Palestinians' trust in Western interlocutors and partners — including the European countries that welcomed the plan as a sincere attempt and failed once again to hold Israel to account for its violations of human rights. After these reactions, Palestinians grew more convinced that no one can be relied upon but themselves, and that they need a plan. Yet the great majority at present do not trust the capacity of the leaderships of the PLO or the Palestinian Authority to produce a strategy that defends their rights and changes the current reality.

Trust is scarcer still among the West Bank residents living in the areas under the Palestinian Authority's administration, where most people live a life dictated by the hardship of the occupation, which has already turned communities into scattered enclaves. The farmers, the workers in the settlements, the shopkeepers, and the National Authority's employees do all they can for their families and households, working around the obstacles before them — roadblocks, water cuts, limited income — in conditions they know Israel controls and the Palestinian Authority accepts. This unrelenting cycle of daily life most likely explains why the people of the West Bank did not rise up after the Trump administration announced the deal.

By contrast, the settlers and the Israeli authorities showed a clearer reaction: since the deal's announcement we have seen a surge in home demolitions; the issuing of permits for building new settlements, such as the resumption of projects in the E1 and E2 corridors; and the seizure of land and outposts, as happened at Jabal al-Urma/Beita south of Nablus. The popular-resistance committees continue to confront these acts, enduring for it daily assaults by the army and the settlers.

Trump's plan marks the end of the “two-state solution” — that hollow slogan the United States and Israel never seriously pursued. And while there is no consensus among Palestinians on whether they want to live in two states, one state, a federal state, or otherwise, they are unanimous in their desire for freedom, dignity, and justice regardless of the administrative arrangement adopted. Palestinian identity and the right to self-determination cannot be severed from Palestinians' attachment to their homeland — the area stretching between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — as environment, heritage, history, and culture. This is what Trump's plan ignores, aiming instead to redefine freedom as the receipt of “economic incentives”, however racist and iniquitous the regime granting those incentives may be.

Lebanon

Jaber Suleiman

The section of Trump's plan devoted to the Palestinian refugees reveals its aim of imposing solutions to the refugee question that ignore international law and the relevant United Nations resolutions — above all General Assembly resolution 194 — by calling for a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis stipulating “the end of, and release from, all claims relating to refugee or immigration status.”

To achieve this aim, Trump's vision adopts dangerous approaches: rejecting UNRWA's multi-generational definition of the “Palestine refugee”; working to end UNRWA's mandate; dismantling the refugee camps in the region; liquidating the right of return; denying the Palestinian refugees' right to appropriate and just reparation/compensation; and seeking to permanently resettle these refugees in the Arab countries where they reside. Ironically, Trump describes this solution as “fair, honest, and realistic”.

The plan focuses on the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, highlighting the depth of their social, economic, and spatial marginalisation and their ambiguous legal status, which deprives them of nearly every basic human right. Trump justifies his demands to integrate the Palestinian refugees into the Lebanese host society by claiming it is a durable solution that could end their suffering.

The question of integration, or tawteen (permanent resettlement), contained in the plan compounds Lebanese fears over the Palestinian presence — the Lebanese state moving to lay down still more discriminatory policies toward the refugees. The labour ministry's plan issued in July 2019, for example, imposes stricter restrictions on the work of Palestinians, whom the law classifies as foreigners. That plan provoked sweeping, unprecedented protests among the Palestinian refugees, who rejected it, denounced any linkage between basic human rights and resettlement, and declared their hold on the right of return — indeed the rejection of tawteen counts among the fixed principles of Palestinians in Lebanon.

Confronting Trump's deal demands a new Palestinian national strategy that redefines the Palestinian national project and renews the Palestinian national movement Click To Tweet

Instead of imposing further restrictions, the Lebanese government ought to change its policies toward the Palestinian refugees so as to comply more fully with international law, granting them a wider set of basic human rights without naturalising them. This is the most effective means, for it would secure the Palestinians in Lebanon temporary protection and ease their daily suffering while enabling them to struggle for return to their homeland — thereby calming Lebanese fears of resettlement.

The Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon, through its civil institutions, never ceases coordinating with its counterparts in Palestine and the diaspora over the threats targeting the Palestinian refugees. For example, the Refugee Rights Center (Aidoun) in Lebanon, in coordination with the Palestinian centre BADIL for residency and refugee rights in Bethlehem, organises an annual training course in Beirut on the status of Palestinian refugees in international law, joined by Palestinian and Lebanese human-rights activists. The 2019 course focused on the repercussions of Trump's deal and its vision toward the refugees.

These two centres and the other Palestinian non-governmental organisations raised these issues in regional and international forums and events over the past year — including the workshop of the Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development organisation on the Palestinian refugees held in Amman in October 2019, the Bruno Kreisky Forum convened in Vienna the same month to discuss the question of the Palestinian refugees and the diaspora communities, and the workshop of the Academic Friends of UNRWA organised by the University of Exeter in February 2020. These events exemplify the intensive efforts the refugee communities in Palestine and the diaspora exert to defend refugee rights, and can be used as a tool to confront Trump's vision.

Jordan

Oraib al-Rantawi

It can be said that every clause of the deal and its contents touches directly the Palestinians in Jordan, who number 4.4 million across their different legal statuses, forming nearly two-thirds of Jordan's population and a third of the world's Palestinians. The deal, for example, deprives more than a million displaced persons in Jordan from the West Bank and the Strip of exercising their right to return to their cities and villages — indeed it makes their right to move between Jordan and the occupied Palestinian territory more dependent on Israeli approval, because the deal recognises direct Israeli security control over the borders and international crossings. These restrictions will tighten if Israel fulfils its promise to annex the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea. It is not only their right of return that the deal threatens, but their right to visit their kin in the occupied territory.

It is unlikely that Jordan will grant the Palestinians its nationality, citizenship rights, or even civil rights — preserving the country's “demographic balance”, and fearing it would send the wrong message: that Jordan is ready to go along with the projects of resettlement and the alternative homeland. This problem raises questions about the “identity crisis” besetting this principal and weighty part of the Palestinian people — meaning the Palestinians of the various legal statuses in Jordan, who are neither fully Jordanian nor fully Palestinian. A shift has been observed over the last ten years or more in the concept of “identity” among a segment of Jordanians of Palestinian origin: their Jordanian identity has come to precede their Palestinian identity, amid the blockage of the Palestinian national project and the necessities of daily life.

Israel is living a moment of strategic ascendancy, and believes the time has come to settle the outcome of a hundred years of conflict with the Palestinians by declaring victory over their national project. The “deal of the century” is that declaration of victory: the Palestinian project is at this moment suffering unprecedented erosion, standing at the brink of collapse if it has not already plunged to the bottom of the abyss, while the Palestinian national movement staggers under division, flaccidity, corruption, and detachment from its people and its publics. Confronting Trump's deal therefore demands a new Palestinian national strategy that redefines the Palestinian national project and renews the Palestinian national movement.

Among the principal obstacles to laying down that strategy is the fact that contact among the Palestinian communities has been all but severed for years. The connecting link among these communities was the Palestine Liberation Organization, today an impotent and symbolic entity. Moreover, the announcement of the deal of the century coincided with the outbreak of the corona pandemic, making contact — already difficult and rare — more difficult and rarer still. Only Hamas remains able to provide channels of contact, backed by its two regional allies, Turkey and Qatar, and resting on the Muslim Brotherhood's branching arms. The conferences of diaspora Palestinians convened in Turkey are the only standing channel of contact among the different Palestinian communities, including the Palestinians of Jordan. These bonds and channels must be strengthened in order to face the challenges of the present moment.

The United States

Randa Wahbe

Trump's “deal” confirms the firm and unwavering American support for Israel toward liquidating all the Palestinians' rights and confiscating their land and sovereignty. The world's political leaders have long impugned the Palestinians' humanity hideously when demanding they abandon the fundamental principles of their cause. But Trump inaugurated a new course in denying the Palestinians in a blatant and unbending manner. A sense of defeat gripped Palestinians as they watched Trump, in his arrogance, proclaim the annexation of the Jordan Valley, land swaps, and the declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

This moment demands of Palestinians — above all Palestinian Americans — that they not surrender to despair, and that they summon Audre Lorde's saying: “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” Trump was clear as the sun in declaring that Palestinians will no longer be able to claim rights and dignity under the established frameworks of international law and third-state obligations. And while Palestinians must certainly use these tools to their advantage, they will never be the measure of what they deserve.

They deserve more than the discourses of human rights or the international treaties that perpetuate a world order refusing to end colonialism. This is a golden opportunity for the Palestinian community in the United States to stand together and work as one community, drawing on its strength to activate the demands for the right of return and freedom. Palestinian Americans must challenge the ongoing normalisation of the violence practised upon their families in Palestine. To do so, two essential steps must be taken.

Palestinians deserve more than the discourses of human rights or the international treaties that perpetuate a world order refusing to end colonialism Click To Tweet

First, the Palestinian diaspora in the United States must rally around a progressive agenda. The Palestinian diaspora cannot view the dispossession of Palestinians in Palestine in isolation from the oppression of Black people, Indigenous peoples, queer people, and undocumented immigrants in the United States; nor can it hold itself apart from the structures that persist in practising domination over people there and displacing them. Palestinian Americans, as taxpayers and part of American society, cannot insulate themselves from their daily lived experiences — they must stand against the violence practised by the advocates of white supremacy. And struggling for the progressive agenda in the United States does not mean abandoning Palestinian identity.

The second step lies in demanding that exiled and scattered Palestinians have an audible voice and a say within the Palestinian community. Palestinian Americans often feel that their distance from the Palestinian land, and their inability to live in it, excludes them from taking part in shaping the visions for a liberated Palestine's future. Because the Palestinians are a nation scattered across the corners of the earth, they must build a platform that guarantees their voices are heard and they are represented.

The self-appointed Palestinian Authority has no right to keep denying diaspora Palestinians this right of theirs, dropping their demands because they are physically far away, while it continues to squander the Palestinian people's rights through negotiations. Palestinian Americans are an inseparable part of the Palestinians' past and future — and now, more than ever, they must assert that place of theirs.

Source: