Palestinians condemn Pompeo’s visit to settlement winery

In a first for a top American diplomat, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected to visit the Psagot Winery on Wednesday, located in the illegal Israeli settlement of Psagot in the central occupied West Bank district of Ramallah.

Pompeo’s visit to Psagot, which was never officially confirmed by the US administration, is planned as part of his three-day visit to Israel which began on Wednesday with meetings between Pompeo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Foreign Minister of Bahrain Abdullatif al-Zayani.

In addition to Psagot, Pompeo is also expected to visit the occupied Golan Heights, another violation of  long-standing State Department policy for both Democrats and Republicans.

On Wednesday morning hundreds of Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside Psagot, waving Palestinian flags and carrying posters saying things like “Pompeo Go Home.”

Dozens of Israeli soldiers stationed on the outskirts of the settlement fired tear gas and other crowd dispersal measures at the protesters, who were peacefully demonstrating several hundred meters away from the boundaries of the settlement.

“We want to send a message to the defeated Trump administration and to tell them that stolen land is not a tourist site,” Munif Treish, a member of the al-Bireh municipality told journalists following the protest.

Treish called Pompeo’s visit to Psagot, or Jabal al-Taweel as it’s known by its Palestinian residents and landowners, “a crime from all perspectives,” adding that it was a clear attempt to gain legitimacy for settlement activities in the West Bank.

Moussa Jwayyed, a former al-Bireh city council member said that Pompeo’s visit to the settlement was a last-ditch effort on part of the Trump administration to give a “gift” to the Israelis, before Trump is “thrown into the dustbin of history.”

“The latest [resolution] by the United Nations Security Council number 2334 of December 2016, was very clear by declaring all settlements in the West Bank as illegal,” Munif Treish said, highlighting the fact that the land on Jabal al-Taweel is privately owned by dozens of residents of the al-Bireh town.

“We have all the documents, we have all the deeds even from the Civil Administration Land Registry, proving that all the land belongs to Palestinian people,” he said.

Despite having the deeds to the land, landowners like Abdel Jawab Saleh, the former mayor of al-Bireh, have been unable to access their lands on Jabal al-Taweel for decades.

“My family has several dunams of land on Jabal al-Taweel,” Saleh told Mondoweiss. “I remember when I was a child, I would go to the mountain with my mother and play in the local spring.”

“I grew up there as a child, and then when I was mayor during the 1967 war, Jabal al-Taweel used to be my sanctuary,” Saleh said. “It was like therapy to me.”

Saleh said he was living in exile when the settlement was established in 1981, and upon his return in the 1990’s to Palestine, he was devastated to find that the land of his parents was totally inaccessible to him.

Saleh said it was an “insult” to him and his family, that Pompeo was visiting an illegal settlement, whose “existence is a war crime,” all while him, his family, and neighbors are unable to go to the land.

“This visit is a symbol of the Israelis plan to one day forcibly expel all Palestinians from this land, and America’s partnership in this genocide,” he said.

Turning stolen grapes into wine

One of the major sticking points for Palestinians protesting against Pompeo’s visit, was his reported plan to visit the Psagot Winery, which boasts major investors like the Falic family of Florida, who own the chain of Duty Free Americas shops.

The AP reported that over the past decade, the family has donated at least $5.6 million to settler groups in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, and least $1.7 million to pro-Israel politicians in the U.S., including Trump, since 2000.

His visit to the site on Wednesday was largely viewed as a step to further court evangelical Christians and other staunch supporters of Israel, should he pursue a political career following the end of the Trump presidency, the AP noted.

Last year, following Pompeo’s announcement that the US no longer considered settlements to be illegal, despite countless international resolutions stating otherwise, the Psagot Winery created and advertised a new red wine in Pompeo’s name.

“I would like to tell Pompeo, and all Americans, that when you drink that wine, you are drinking the blood of the Palestinian people,” Saleh told Mondoweiss. 

Tamam Quran, a young graduate student from al-Bireh, told Mondoweiss that while she has never been able to visit Jabal al-Taweel, where her family owns several acres of land, she grew up hearing stories of the sprawling grape vines from her grandmother.

“Our grandparents are the ones who planted this land with grapes, and now it’s being used and sold by the settlers,” Quran said. 

“I grew up hearing stories of how my grandmother and her father would go to that land and pick the grapes off the vines that are now being used to make wine,” she said, adding that while Pompeo can go and taste the wine produced on Jabal al-Taweel, if she were to step foot on her grandparents’ land, she would be “taken away in handcuffs.”

On the night before Pompeo’s visit, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy published a call to boycott Psagot wine and ban it from the US. 

“Through international trade, these illegal settlements are thriving economically on the back of human rights violations,” the petition reads. “[Pompeo’s] visit to the settlement and the winery is an endorsement of this system of injustice and a recognition of the vision of ‘Greater Israel’ in which Palestinians would forever be unfree and unequal under total Israeli control.”

“It is time to stand up to the Trump administration. It is time to stop financing oppression. It is time to ban Psagot wine from the U.S. as a loud message for justice, freedom, and rights for all.”