Palestinians have responded to US President Donald Trump’s peace plan with a resounding “no,” expressing their frustrations with what they have dubbed as the “fraud of the century.”
From social media to the streets, Palestinians in the occupied territory and in the diaspora have rejected Trump’s vision for the region, criticizing the plan for granting unilateral concessions to Israel and further depleting the size of a future Palestinian state.
Palestinian leaders and members of rival factions showed a rare display of solidarity, with Abbas denouncing the plan in a meeting that included Hamas and Islamic Jihad representatives.
In the streets of Ramallah, Palestinians from rival factions called for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah so the two ruling parties could present a united front against the Americans and Israelis.
As protests dragged into the late part of the night on Tuesday, it became overwhelmingly clear that Palestinians don’t plan on accepting any deal put forward by Trump, and would do everything in their power to stop his vision from becoming a reality.
‘The worst we have ever seen’
Demonstrations across the occupied Palestinian territory drew crowds of thousands of Palestinians of all ages and genders. In Gaza, protests kicked off even before Trump’s press conference Tuesday, and lasted well into the night and Wednesday morning.
In Gaza City, protesters waved Palestinian flags and carried banners saying “No to the peace plan” and “Palestine is not for sale.”
“We refuse Trump and Netanyahu’s decisions, and we will continue protesting in defiance of this unjust proposal,” Mohammed Abu Taima told Mondoweiss outside a demonstration in Gaza City on Wednesday.
Another protestor called Trump an “imbecile” who “has no right to decide the future of the Palestinian people.”
“We will decide our future, not Trump or Netanyahu, or anyone else for that matter,” Issa Abu Jazar said. “We have a right to Jerusalem, a right to return, and a right to this land. No one can take that away from us.”
Businesses and government offices shuttered their doors across Gaza on Wednesday as part of a general strike in protest against the peace plan.
In the West Bank, protests from the north to the south were suppressed by Israeli forces, who were deployed across the territory ahead of Trump’s announcement in anticipation of increased tensions.
In Ramallah, thousands of protestors marched from the Manara Square in the city center to the grave of Yasser Arafat, burning images of US dollars to symbolize the rejection of the US attempts to “buy Palestinians” with economic incentives.
“Israel is practically the 51st state of the US,” Mo’in Ahmad told Mondoweiss. “America would never do anything that’s not in the interest of Israel. So how can this [plan] possibly be fair for the Palestinians?”
Dozens of protestors set off to the, and northern part of Ramallah to demonstrate outside the Israeli DCO checkpoint, where they were met with heavy tear gas fire from Israeli soldiers. Several people were treated by volunteer medics on the scene after collapsing from overexposure to tear gas.
On Wednesday, protests continued across areas in Bethlehem, the Jordan Valley, Ramallah, and Hebron. Local media reported that a 14-year-old was injured by a rubber bullet in Hebron, and that two protesters were allegedly injured with live fire outside of Ramallah.
By Wednesday evening, the Palestinian Red Cross reported that at least 41 Palestinians were injured by Israeli forces while protesting against Trump’s peace plan.
Protesters in Bethlehem burned the American flag and photos of Trump, shouting slogans like “Palestine is an Arab country” and “our demands are enshrined in law.” Some protesters demanded reparations from the Us and international community.
“Get out of our land!” protesters chanted as they marched towards a permanent Israeli military base at the northern end of the city, where Israeli jeeps fired dozens of rounds at protesters, many of whom were young children in attendance with their families.
“Trump cannot just decide that I no longer have a right to return to my original village from 1948,” Wijdan al-Azza, 60, a resident of a local refugee camp told Mondoweiss at the protest.
“In my life I have seen a lot of peace plans from different governments around the world,” she said. “But contrary to what Trump claims, this is actually the worst one we have ever seen.”
Palestinian leaders sound like a broken record
Much like the response of the citizenry, the official Palestinian response to Trump’s plan did not deviate much further than its previous criticisms of the deal.
Abbas continued to call the plan the “slap of the century”, and said he would maintain his boycott of the US administration that began in December 2017 after Trump recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
On Wednesday, chief Palestinian negotiator met with the heads of the EU missions in Palestine, and said the meeting “focused on concrete measures that have to be taken.”
“The Annexation Plan is an attack against international law and the international system as a whole. This is a moment of truth #PeaceNotApartheid,” Erekat tweeted.
Today’s meeting with the EU Heads of Mission focused on concrete measures that have to be taken. The Annexation Plan is an attack against international law and the international system as a whole. This is a moment of truth #PeaceNotApartheid pic.twitter.com/T7hXkJNNNR
— Dr. Saeb Erakat الدكتور صائب عريقات (@ErakatSaeb) January 29, 2020
Palestininian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh called on the international community to reject Trump’s plan, saying “It gives Israel everything it wants at the expense of the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people.”
The so-called "deal of the century” is neither based on international legitimacy nor international law. It gives Israel everything it wants at the expense of the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people. https://t.co/nF2v2YUWfo
— Dr. Mohammad Shtayyeh د. محمد اشتية (@DrShtayyeh) January 28, 2020
While Palestinian demonstrators called for a return to the days of the intifada and demanded the cancellation of the Oslo Accords — a threat made several times by Palestinian leaders in recent months — many were dissapointed to see the leaders sitting in cabinet meetings and discussing plans of action, rather than following through on any of their promises.
Social media storm
Following the release of the plan, social media was inundated with criticisms of the plan, specifically regarding the “conceptual map” showing the proposed re-drawn borders of a “two-state” solution.
This is the map folks https://t.co/XhAgudYE9B
— (((YousefMunayyer))) (@YousefMunayyer) January 28, 2020
Side-by-side comparisons of the proposed Palestinian state with the apartheid-era South African Bantustans went viral, as activists and scholars criticized Trump and Netanyahu for advocating for an apartheid-like system in Palestine.
30 years after the fall of South African apartheid, Trump and Netanyahu are imposing their own #apartheidplan on Palestinians, complete with segregated Jewish-only settlements built on stolen Palestinian land. pic.twitter.com/OhoTAQykgO
— IMEU (@theIMEU) January 28, 2020
People slammed Trump’s idea of connecting small Palestinian enclaves with a series of roads and tunnels, criticizing the fact that his idea of a future Palestinian state would be one without any sovereignty over its borders.
They want to put us in permanent, high-tech cages and call it peace. #DealOfTheCentury #ApartheidDeal #Palestine #PalestinianFreedom
— Noura Erakat (@4noura) January 28, 2020
One of the major criticisms voiced by those opposed to the plan was the lack of inclusion of Palestinian voices in the proposal, and the notion that Palestinians should agree to a plan that inherently ignores the core issues of their struggle, or else they are enemies of peace.
Netanyahu logic: If Palestinians agree to land theft, annexation, no refugee return, subjugation and no means of defense, Israel will negotiate with us.
— Diana Buttu (@dianabuttu) January 28, 2020
Khadija Hmeid contributed to this report from Gaza. Akram al-Waara contributed to this report from Ramallah.
https://www.juancole.com/2020/01/palestinians-against-humanity.html
“Top 5 ways Trump plan for Palestinians is a Crime against Humanity” by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, January 29/20
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – “On Tuesday, an American president being impeached for abuse of power announced a historic plan for Israel-Palestine alongside an Israeli prime minister who was just indicted for bribery and corruption. (The Israeli parliament declined to grant Netanyahu immunity, and he withdrew the request, allowing the formal indictment to be filed.)
“The plan was drafted by a team allegedly led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has no real government position and is a far right wing Israel nationalist, in consultation with the far right wing Likud government of Israel, headed by PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The Palestinians declined to be involved in what was obviously a crooked and fixed process that gave away their East Jerusalem to Netanyahu before it even got going.
“Just as the Palestinian people were not consulted in 1917 when the British cabinet adopted the Balfour Declaration, designating geographical Palestine as a site for a ‘homeland’**[see below] for the Jewish people, so the doomed-to-failure Trump plan also did not consult them about their own fate. It is no longer the age of Western Empires when pudgy men in pinstripe suits in the drawing rooms of London and Paris drew the borders of other people’s countries and dictated the forms of their political lives.
“If you want to know what Iran is really about, it is mostly a protest against these imperial injustices. For that reason, the Trump Plan is a huge boon to Iran, since it makes transparent precisely the ‘global arrogance’ of Washington that Iran is always going on about.
“In turn, imperial practices were and are underpinned by a latent White Nationalism, such that they attempt to keep the brown and black people subordinate and to reserve wealth and privilege and global power to the ‘white’ European and European-descent nations. Even though Jews in twentieth-century Europe and the United States were often seen as ‘not Aryans’ and ‘not White,’ nowadays the usefulness of Israel to imperial designs on the region has led to the Israelis being coded as ‘white’ and the Palestinians as ‘brown.’ If you want to understand how millions of people can daily be screwed over as the Palestinians are, it isn’t actually much more complicated than that.
“About 5 million stateless Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation (the Palestinian West Bank) or under Israeli military siege (the Gaza Strip). Some 400,000 stateless Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are from families that were expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by militant Zionist militias. Another 400,000 stateless Palestinians in Syria are from families expelled from the British Mandate of Palestine by Zionist militias. About 40,000 stateless Palestinians in Jordan are from families . . . you get the picture. That is, About 6 million stateless Palestinians are being kept without basic human rights by Israel’s refusal to allow them to return to their homes and by Israel’s refusal to allow the Palestinians to establish a genuine state to which the refugees could return.
“Although the Trump Plan uses the diction of allowing a Palestinian ‘state,’ the entity proposed does not have control over its borders or airspace or coastal waters and cannot make treaties with other states or go to the United Nations over continued Israeli violations of international law. In other words it is not a state at all. It is a Bantustan of the sort the Apartheid South African government created as a way of unloading its African population so that they could be stripped of South African citizenship.
“Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas is said to have reacted to the Plan’s unveiling by calling Trump a ‘dog, the son of a dog.’
“The Trump Plan is full of measures that constitute War Crimes in international law, and a systematic pattern of War Crimes is categorized as a Crime against Humanity. The latter term is the one appropriate to the Trump Plan. Here are the War Crimes the Plan proposes
“1. Israel has flooded 400,000 of its citizens into the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where they have stolen Palestinian land and built squatter-only settlements on it, where Palestinians are not allowed to live. These Israeli squatters are often armed and some of them routinely stage attacks on Palestinian villages or commit sabotage against Palestinian orchards and agriculture.
“This squatting on Palestinian land contravenes the Fourth Geneva Accord of 1949 on Occupied Territories, which forbids transferring populations from the Occupying Power into the occupied lands.
“’The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’”
“This rule was to prevent the repetition of the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, which occupied other lands and sent Germans in to settle them.
“The Trump plan rewards Israel’s illegal activities, saying “Approximately 97% of Israelis in the West Bank will be incorporated into contiguous Israeli territory.”
“2. The Trump Plan allows Israel to annex about a third of the Occupied West Bank, on which Israeli squatters have squatted. Annexation is an act of aggression, forbidden by international law. By the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel cannot actually deprive Occupied Palestinians of their land rights by simply declaring those lands ‘annexed.’
“3. The Plan envisages depriving many Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage of their Israeli citizenship, which amounts to denaturalization. Since they would be instead given ‘citizenship’ in a ‘state’ that no one will recognize and which is a Bantustan rather than a state, in which they will enjoy no actual rights over their own property because Israel won’t permit the Bantustan to so guarantee them, that would amount de facto to forcing these Israeli citizens into statelessness, which contravenes the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed by 75 member states.
“4. The Plan envisages that the Palestinian Bantustan will be disarmed, which means that Palestinians will be deprived of the right of self-defense. The Right of Self-defense is recognized in Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter:
“Article 51. ‘Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.’
“Palestine was in 2012 granted by the UN General Assembly non-member observer state status, like the Vatican, which puts it under the authority of the Charter.
“5. The enclaves to which the Palestinians would be consigned give them no control over their lives, as B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization pointed out,
“’With no territorial contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel’s goodwill for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence their future. They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel’s draconian permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development. In this sense, not only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way, but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and gives it recognition.’
“Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to freedom of movement into treaty law: ‘(1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and freedom to choose his residence.’
“Actually a whole book could be written about all the ways the Trump Plan for the hapless Palestinians contravenes international law. Since the over-all rubric is Apartheid, and Apartheid is a War Crime in the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, the whole plan is a series of War Crimes, which amount in the aggregate to a crime against humanity.
[** To be precise, the text of the 1917 Balfour Declaration states “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish peoples…,” i.e., not a ‘homeland’ for the Jewish peoples.]
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=AqeyHu_rPow&feature=emb_logo
Analyst says Trump’s Mideast Plan is “dead on arrival.”
Rejection of an offer for the 8th time with no counter offer made.
It’s pretty plain by now that intransigence continues to get in the way of common sense.
and in Montreal
“Jewish Group Applauds Montreal City Council for Abandoning Controversial Definition of Antisemitism
January 28, 2020 IJV Canada”
https://www.ijvcanada.org/jewish-group-applauds-montreal-city-council-for-abandoning-controversial-definition-of-antisemitism/
@gamal, et al
More good news from Canada:
https://zoa.org/2020/01/10436132-zoa-criticizes-canadas-changing-policy-voting-for-anti-israel-un-resolutions/
“ZOA Criticizes Canada’s Changing Policy & Voting for Anti-Israel UN Resolutions”
Zionist Organization of America, Jan. 23, 2020.
“The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has criticized the Canadian Government of Justin Trudeau for voting in favor of a series of biased and hostile anti-Israel United Nations General Assembly resolutions sponsored by various Arab states and other undemocratic, human-rights abusing regimes.
“The ZOA believes that, as a matter of principle and morality, no genuinely democratic, human rights-observing country should dignify the assault of human rights abusers upon the Middle East’s only practicing democracy. The ZOA regards the willingness of Canada and other free societies to do so as indicative of a cowardly effort to ingratiate themselves with autocratic Arab and Muslim regimes, to the detriment of the truth, human rights and the elementary credibility of international organizations like the UN.
“Last month, the Trudeau Government, which had previously largely maintained its predecessor’s pro-Israel voting record, abruptly reversed course and endorsed a condemnation of Israel for failing to establish a Palestinian Arab state, a regime that pays Arabs to murder Jews, a resolution Canada has consistently opposed since 2006.
“Although Canada had regularly voted against or abstained on the 16 recurrent resolutions on Palestinian Arab issues which go before the General Assembly every year, including on eastern Jerusalem, sovereignty over natural resources, and Israeli ‘settlements,’ the Trudeau Government voted this year in favor of all these resolutions.
“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau originally expressed support for Israel at the UN but has also renewed funding to UNRWA that was frozen during the conservative government of Stephen Harper and, in 2018, called for a probe of Gaza violence while failing to mention Hamas’ role in the violence.
“Several Canadian Jewish groups expressed outrage over Canada’s stance while, as was to be expected, the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, welcomed Canada’s move saying, ‘Although it was a slow process … I am delighted … very significant, very positive.’ (Elad Benari, ‘Canada again votes in favor of UN anti-Israel resolution,’ Israel National News, December, 2019.)
“ZOA National President Morton A. Klein and Chair Mark Levenson, Esq. said, ‘We are appalled at the craven and cynical decision of the Trudeau Government to curry favor with the PA and other regional dictatorships by supporting a collection of vicious and false anti-Israel resolutions presented annually at the UN.’
“’Canada had the honesty and integrity to refuse to do so in past years, both under the Harper and Trudeau governments. The collapse of that principled stance this year reflects badly on Mr. Trudeau and the government he leads.’
“’Unfortunately, this is but the latest of a number of disappointing actions in respects of Israel undertaken by the Trudeau Government.’
“The ZOA notes that, while 33 nations attended the opening of the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem last year, Canada conspicuously did not and publicly opposed it. (In contrast, former Prime Minister Harper welcomed the move).
“’Last year, Canada also condemned Israeli so-called ‘excessive use of force’ in seeking to contain the mass-border violations and riots organized by the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza.’
“’When a ‘Palestine Day’ was held in the Canadian parliament, Mr. Trudeau wrote a letter officially supporting ‘with great pleasure’ and offering the ‘warmest welcome’ to this piece of Palestinian Arab agitprop. And when the Trump Administration correctly cut funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Mr. Trudeau pointedly announced that his government, which decided to end the predecessor Harper Government’s cutting of funds to UNRWA, would donate up to $25 million to make up for the shortfall.
“In short, the Trudeau Government has moved steadily towards hostility to Israel and an uncritical embrace of the Palestinian Arab agenda.
“The ZOA strongly condemns the Trudeau Government and urges it to rescind its latest, unprincipled anti-Israel moves.”
___________________________________________________________
BTW, repeated polling in Canada has demonstrated that the majority of Canadians stand with the Palestinians.