November 7, 2024
David Hearst
Conventional
wisdom has it that Trump 2.0 will be a disaster for Palestinians, because Trump
1.0 all but buried the Palestinian national cause.
And it is indeed
true that under Donald Trump’s first term as president, the US was wholly
guided by the Zionist religious right - the real voice in his ear, either as
donors or policymakers.
Under Trump and
his son-in-law adviser, Jared Kushner, Washington became a policy playground
for the settler movement, with which the former US ambassador to Israel, David
Friedman, was unashamedly aligned.
Consequently, in
his first term, Trump upended decades of policy by recognising Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel and moving the US embassy there; he disenfranchised the
Palestinian Authority by closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) office in Washington; he allowed Israel to annex the Golan Heights; he
pulled out of the nuclear accords with Iran; and he assassinated Qassem
Soleimani, the most powerful Iranian general and diplomat in the region.
Even more
damaging for the Palestinian struggle for freedom was Trump’s sponsorship of
the Abraham Accords.
This was - and
still is - a serious attempt to pour concrete over the grave of the Palestinian
cause, constructing in its place a superhighway of trade and contracts from the
Gulf that would make Israel not just a regional superpower, but a vital portal to
the wealth of the Gulf.
On 6 October
2023, the day before the Hamas attack, the Palestinian cause was all but dead.
The Palestinian struggle for self-determination felt like the baggage of an
older generation of Arab leaders, which was being unceremoniously dumped by the
new generation.
All the
diplomatic talk was of Saudi Arabia’s impending decision to normalise relations
with Israel, with the picture of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman shaking
hands in public with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dangling as the
prize lying just behind the next corner. One more push, and it would be in the
bag.
If that charge
sheet is not long enough, it could easily be argued that Trump’s second term
will be even worse for Palestinians than his first was.
Wildest impulses
This time
around, and with the Republican party projected to have control over both
houses of Congress, there will be no adults in the room to correct the
president’s wildest impulses.
After all, did
Friedman not just publish a book entitled One Jewish State: The Last, Best
Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, in which he argues that
the US has a biblical duty to support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank?
“Palestinians,
like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections … Palestinians will be
free to enact their own governing documents as long as they are not
inconsistent with those of Israel,” Friedman writes.
So will Trump
2.0 not simply presage yet more territorial changes, such as the annexation of
Area C of the occupied West Bank, the permanent division of Gaza, the return of
Israeli settlements to northern Gaza, and the clearing of the border area in
southern Lebanon?
All of this
could, and no doubt will, come to pass under a second Trump term, with no
brakes.
I do not for one
second underplay or underestimate the sacrifice in blood that Palestinians have
paid so far - the death toll in Gaza could easily be three times higher than
the current official figure - or could yet pay for all that is about to come.
But in this
column, I will argue that the settler movement, backed by a second Trump term,
is in the process of burying any chance that Israel will prevail as an
apartheid Jewish minority state in control of all the land from the river to
the sea.
Irreversible
consequences
Let me make two
points about the situation that existed on 6 October, before I go on to deal
with the irreversible consequences of everything that has happened since. And
make no mistake - they are irreversible.
The first is
that in allowing Netanyahu to claim total victory, the US administration under
a first Trump presidency buried not just the prospect of a two-state solution,
but along with it, the Zionist dream of a liberal, secular, democratic Jewish
state.
The liberal
version of this state had been the main vehicle of Israeli expansion, with its
salami slices making ever-deeper inroads into historic Palestine. By killing
it, the liberal fig leaf dropped from the Zionist project, and the religious
Zionist forces who were once regarded as fringe and even as terrorists, such as
far-right politician Itamar Ben Gvir and the Kahanists, became mainstream.
This
fundamentally altered the whole project to establish Israel as the dominant
state between the river and sea. It suddenly became the only state, and one
that was governed by religious fanatics; by people wishing to level the Dome of
the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque.
It became a
state governed by the religious dogmas of Jerusalem not by the European
Ashkenazi internet geeks and sophisticates of Tel Aviv. Under the first Trump
presidency, the rift between these two camps became irreconcilable and
fundamentally destabilising.
The second
change that the first Trump presidency brought about, or rather completed, took
place in Palestinian minds.
A whole
generation of Palestinians born after the Oslo Accords came to the conclusion
that all political and non-violent ways of seeking an end to the occupation
were blocked; that there was no longer any meaning in recognising Israel, let
alone trying to find anyone in it to talk with.
Talking to
Israel became a meaningless exercise. The political route was blocked not only
inside Palestine, but outside it.
To their eternal
shame and discredit, US President Joe Biden and his secretary of state, Antony
Blinken, kept all the “achievements” of the first Trump presidency in place -
first and foremost the Abraham Accords.
Biden's
humiliation
Trump’s big
boast during his first term of office was that he made all these changes to the
status quo of the Palestinian conflict, and the sky did not fall in.
But the sky did
fall in on 7 October, and everything that Trump and Biden had done before that
contributed to the Hamas attack, which provided the same shock to Israel that
9/11 provided to the US.
After the Hamas
attack, it was impossible to ignore the Palestinian cause. It moved from the
periphery of global human rights causes to the very centre.
But Biden didn’t
get it. An instinctive Zionist, he allowed Netanyahu to humiliate him. His
first reaction to the Hamas attack was to give Israel everything it wanted,
thwarting all international moves at the United Nations for a ceasefire. His
second reaction was to draw red lines, which Netanyahu proceeded to ignore.
Biden told
Netanyahu not to reoccupy Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. Netanyahu did it
anyway. Biden told Netanyahu to allow aid trucks into Gaza, and Netanyahu
mostly ignored him. Biden told Netanyahu not to invade Lebanon; Netanyahu did
it. Biden told Netanyahu not to attack Iranian nuclear and oil facilities, and
Netanyahu listened to him - for now at least.
It’s not a
scorecard of total humiliation for Biden, but when the history of this period
is written, Biden will emerge as a weak leader.
He also emerges
as a leader who facilitated genocide. The amount of heavy bombs that the US
supplied, and that Israel used against overwhelmingly civilian targets in Gaza
and Lebanon, over the past year far outweighs the US’s own use of such bombs
during the entire Iraq war.
If the Israeli
state has fundamentally changed after 7 October, so too has the Palestinian
mindset.
The scale of the
killing - the official Palestinian death toll from the war has exceeded 43,000,
and the real count could be several times higher, with the degree of
destruction rendering most of the Gaza Strip uninhabitable - has crossed all
red lines for Palestinians, wherever they live.
No room for
negotiations
From now on,
there is no talking or negotiating with a state that does this to your people.
The only two votes in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that secured
unanimity among Jewish Israeli MKs included legislation to veto a Palestinian
state, and a law banning Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
These two votes
alone told Palestinians that they would be deluded to think that a
post-Netanyahu government would bring any relief from occupation. In a deeply
divided Israel, the only thing that all Jews could agree on were two measures
that fundamentally made life impossible for Palestinians, the majority of the
population.
In such extreme
conditions, there are only two alternatives: to do nothing and die, or to
resist and die. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, believe in the latter.
Consequently,
Hamas is at the height of its popularity in areas where the Muslim Brotherhood
was on 6 October at its weakest: in the occupied West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and
Egypt.
Walk around
Nablus’s old city and ask people who they support. The answer will not be the
defunct Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. By a substantial margin, it will
be Hamas, a group that is proscribed in the UK and other countries as a
terrorist organisation.
In Jordan, Hamas
is praised by the whole population, East Bankers and Palestinians alike,
because Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank is seen as an existential
threat to the kingdom.
Walk into a
Palestinian home for dinner on Friday, and everyone will tell you that this
death toll, and the deaths under a second Trump term, are the price to be paid
for liberation from occupation.
This generation
of Palestinians has shown a degree of fortitude that no previous generation
showed. They are not cutting and running, like former President Yasser Arafat’s
PLO did when surrounded by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982.
No one in Gaza
is fleeing to Tunisia, and few to Egypt, which is just across the border - and
far fewer than Netanyahu intended. Palestinians are not raising the white flag.
They are staying, and fighting, and dying where they live.
'Time for
complete victory'
This is the
answer to those who argue that looking at the long term is all very well, when
the short-term duty is simply to survive. There is no short term for
Palestinians any more. It’s over. There is nothing left.
The short term
means returning to your tent. It means going back to your home in the occupied
West Bank, knowing that tomorrow you could be burned out by settlers armed by
Ben Gvir. There is no going back. Palestinians have all lost too many family
members for surrender to be considered an option.
Viewed from the
perspective of a Palestinian farmer clinging to his stony ground in the face of
repeated settler attacks in the hills of South Hebron, it’s a toss-up as to
whether Kamala Harris as US president would have made any difference. If
anything, she could well have been an even weaker influence on Netanyahu than
Biden was.
So we have ended
up with Trump once again.
The settler
right are popping bottles of champagne in celebration. Speaking in the Knesset,
Ben Gvir welcomed Trump’s election victory, saying that “this is the time for
sovereignty, this is the time for complete victory”.
Netanyahu is
also using this period to clear out the stables in his government by sacking
his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
Trump thus has
two clear paths when he assumes power next January, assuming that Biden
continues to fail to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. He can either carry on where
he left off, and continue to allow the US to be led by the nose by the
Christian evangelical right, or he can do what he strongly hinted he would do
to the Muslim leaders he met in Michigan - which is to stop Netanyahu’s war.
Either path is
littered with elephant traps.
Fires of
regional war
Letting
Netanyahu and his alliance with Ben Gvir achieve “total victory” would mean, in
reality, the ethnic cleansing of two-thirds of the occupied West Bank, with a
huge refugee influx ending up in Jordan - an act that would be seen in Jordan
as a cause for war.
It would mean
the expulsion of Palestinians from northern Gaza and the permanent destruction
of southern Lebanon, with the assumed right of Israel to continue bombing
Lebanon and Syria.
Each of these
actions would lead to more war, which Trump has pledged to stop. Remember that
one of the last things Gallant said before he was sacked was that a war in
Syria to cut Iran’s supply lines was inevitable.
Letting
Netanyahu think he can achieve “total victory” only means feeding the forest
fires of a regional war.
Nor would
getting Saudi Arabia to recognise Israel, putting the cherry on top of the cake
of the Abraham Accords, make any difference - although I strongly doubt whether
Mohammed bin Salman would be stupid enough to do this anymore.
The reality is
that such deals have no meaning while Palestine does not have its own state,
and while each Arab leader feels the anger of their own population on
Palestine.
But forcing
Netanyahu to stop the war, in the way a strong Republican president like Ronald
Reagan forced Israel stop the bombing of Beirut four decades ago, would also
have seismic consequences.
It would stop
the religious Zionist project in its tracks. It would feed the growing
dissatisfaction within the Israeli army’s high command, who have already
signalled they have achieved all they can in Gaza and Lebanon, and are
suffering from war fatigue.
Stopping the war
would present Netanyahu with his biggest political peril, as doing so before a
return of the hostages would be tantamount to a Hamas and Hezbollah victory.
Hope for the
future
One year on,
there is still no credible project to install a government in Gaza that would
allow the withdrawal of Israeli troops. The moment they do, Hamas re-emerges.
The only government of post-war Gaza that could succeed would be a technocratic
government that is agreed with Hamas - and that in itself would represent a
huge humiliation for Netanyahu and the army’s vow to crush the resistance
movement.
Whatever Trump
does, the scale of Palestinian resistance during this war has demonstrated that
the agency in the conflict does not lie with extremist leaders in Israel or
Washington. It lies with the peoples of Palestine and across the Middle East.
And that is the
biggest hope for the future. Never before in US electoral history has Palestine
been a factor in turning the youth vote away from the Democratic Party.
Henceforth, no Democratic leader wishing to rebuild their coalition can ignore
the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim vote.
It may be that
as Biden departs, we have seen the party’s last Zionist leader. That in itself
is of immense significance for Israel.
The irrational,
quixotic, transactional occupant of the White House - the president who insists
that his advisers reduce all their analysis to one sheet of A4, which they are
lucky he actually reads - will only accelerate the destruction of the status quo
in the Middle East that he started in his first term.
With much help
from Netanyahu, Trump has already killed the dream of Zionist liberal democracy
that lasted for 76 years.
This is some
achievement in itself. In a second term, he will only hasten the day the
occupation ends.
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