Even Christine Lagarde of the IMF questioned the effectiveness of Jared Kushner’s proposal for $50 billion investment in Palestinian prosperity, saying without a political solution to the Palestinian issue, investments will not succeed. Her skepticism was widely shared.
Mustafa Barghouti talks with Mondoweiss about the Trump administration’s Bahrain economic summit and “deal of the century.” “Everything they’ve done, and everything they’ve declared, shows they are trying to kill the two-state solution and the rights of Palestinians to have a state of their own,” Barghouti says. “They advocate sustaining occupation and apartheid.”
On Tuesday Palestinians in the Gaza Strip cursed at Arab officials and burned placards of President Donald Trump in protest of the administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” summit in Bahrain to discuss economic aspects of the long-awaited “deal of the century.” Yasmin Abu Arafa, a civil rights activist, told Mondoweiss: “After long years of struggle and fighting, a new Oslo seems to be imposed upon us by the U.S. But this will not happen again as in 1993.”
Aya Al Ghazzawi says that the Trump administration Bahrain conference is another step in the continual dehumanization of the Palestinian people. “It says that the blood of the Palestinian martyrs and the people’s long suffering can be bargained upon,” Al Ghazzawi writes, “That money can make up to Palestinians for the ongoing ethnic cleansing which began in 1948. That the incremental genocide inflicted by Israel on Palestinians can be forgotten for crumbs of bread and a trivial sum of money.”
The US ambassador to Israel recently argued that Israel has the right to annex much of the West Bank. Jonathan Cook writes that Israeli officials have been preparing for this moment for more than half a century, since the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza were seized back in 1967.
The framing of the Palestinian struggle within diplomatic language as a “conflict” serves to convert settler-colonial violence and genocidal erasure of the indigenous people into a diplomatic dispute. Denijal Jegic writes, “as long as settler-colonial erasure remains the underlying structure, no economic relief or political measure could effectively benefit Palestinians.”
Jared Kushner unveiled over the weekend the first part of his widely criticized “deal of the century”, drawing ire from Palestinian leaders and sparking protests in cities across Gaza and the West Bank.
Netanyahu named an illegal settlement in the Golan Heights after Donald Trump, saying he had “torn the mask off this hypocrisy which doesn’t recognize the obvious,” and Trump promptly thanked Netanyahu for the “great honor.”
South Bend Mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg said he’d keep the US embassy in Jerusalem if he was elected. The comments came just one week after Buttigieg publicly denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex sections of the West Bank and said there were signs that Israel’s government was “turning away from peace.”
On Wednesday, six members of Congress introduced a bipartisan bill to create a $50 million annual fund to “facilitate and finance joint economic ventures and people-to-people exchanges between Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans.” While the bill could be seen by well-intentioned members of Congress as a last-ditch attempt to revive the moribund prospects for a two-state resolution, Josh Ruebner says it should more accurately be seen as consistent with the Trump administration’s “deal of the century,” which appears in all likelihood to preclude the possibility of Palestinian statehood.