Nada Elia: It is likely President Trump had no clue what his “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel” declaration heralded. He may have been aspiring for “the deal of the century,” when all he has done is unwittingly announce the end of a farce. With the cumbersome “peace process” out of the way, we can focus on the real solution: grassroots activism and global solidarity.
American UN Ambassador Nikki Haley says that recognition of Jerusalem is about ‘not picking sides’. Yes, she and Trump are behaving recklessly. But they are continuing a policy of pandering to Israel that has been going on for many decades, under the mask of ‘peace talks’ and a supposed ‘honest broker’, the US.
Scores of Palestinians suffered tear gas inhalation as Israeli forces suppressed protests of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Soldiers responded to a protest at al-Aida camp “by showering” it with gas, Ma’an reports. Last month, a UN official, Pierre Krähenbühl, said “health experts suggests residents of Bethlehem’s ‘Aida camp are exposed to more tear gas than any other population surveyed globally.”
NYT columnist Max Fisher is realistic when he says in the wake of Trump’s Jerusalem decision that Israel must choose apartheid or granting “Palestinians full rights, establishing a pluralistic democracy that is no longer officially Jewish.” More journalists should be so honest about the death of the two-state solution.
Marc Ellis writes, “Seeing Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration as an end game, as if Trump’s Hanukkah gift came from out of the blue, is a mistake. When celebrated, it gives him too much credit. When lamented, it places too much blame on him. Jerusalem has been in stalemate since the formation of the state of Israel: West Jerusalem colonized by Israel since 1948; East Jerusalem colonized by Israel since 1967. Trump’s Hanukkah gift comes at the end of this colonization. It gives a green light to the final phase of Judaizing Jerusalem.”
On Friday, Israel commenced yet another bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip. The corporate media tried to absolve Israel by deploying the language of reprisal, such as the BBC headline “Israel strikes Gaza Hamas sites after rocket attacks”. Steven Salaita writes that efforts to render Israel perpetually embattled aren’t simply tricks of perspective; they also reinforce tendentious discourses: “What first looks like standard reportage—a delivery of apparent facts, complete with views from both sides—is actually stock dissimulation that (intentionally or not) confers responsibility for harming children not on the Israeli bombers, but on the people who endured their detonation.”
Think what you may of their incendiary words and actions, Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu continue to give us a series of political and philosophical lessons. This past week, the theme of their pedagogy of oppression (to paraphrase the great Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, who coined the term the pedagogy of the oppressed) was neither Jerusalem nor the long-dead Israeli-Palestinian peace process nor, even, the meaning of international recognition and legitimacy. They taught us about the nature of facts.
“My aim is not to resolve the conflict. My aim is to secure a Jewish democratic Israel . . . the Zionist vision that came true 70 years ago,” Gilead Sher, an Israeli negotiator at Camp David in 2000, says. Settlers, he says, are much happier with the status quo. If you ever wondered why there has been no peace deal, here’s your answer.
Trump’s Jerusalem announcement has created a great opportunity for those working for justice. It has exposed the failure of the British Jewish establishment, which supported occupation and abdicated political and ethical responsibility to lobby for 2-States. Now it will find itself defending apartheid and injustice without the cover of a peace process to protect its reputation.
Yasin, a veteran of demonstrations at Gaza border with Israel, gives advice to newbies Mohammed and Muammar: “Listen carefully, you have to run against the wind once you see white smoke and pay careful attention to your testicles of being hit by a bullet. Otherwise you will lose everything as we lost Jerusalem.”