(Washington, D.C.; 1/31/2020) The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) condemns in the strongest terms possible the farcical plan proposed by impeached President Donald Trump and indicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to broker “peace” in the Holy Land through the “piecing” apart of Palestine — both as to its rightful land and the basic human rights of its people — and the pasting together of an internationally illegal Israeli apartheid state and system.
For three years the world has waited for the Trump Administration to unveil its self-styled “Deal of the Century” only to find it a literal cut-and-paste job from the worst possible, one-sided Israeli proposals floated by its most flagrant propagandists, including language virtually plagiarized from Netanyahu’s own warped book “A Durable Peace.”
The Trump-Netanyahu proposal issues terms of complete surrender and utter subjugation to the long-beleaguered and oppressed Palestinian people, whom it asks to bless
- Land theft committed by the Israeli colonialist project
- Unfettered annexation of Palestinian property
- Severance of any semblance of sovereignty, including the right to self-governance and their own defense
- Invalidation of the right of 7 million exiled Palestinians to return to their own lands and homes
As a further abject demonstration before the world of their complete capitulation and betrayal, the plan demands that Palestinians
- Surrender to their illegal occupiers the entire Jordan Valley
- And, against their own sovereign aspirations and on behalf of 1.8 billion Muslims, that they cede Jerusalem unconditionally to the Israelis and forsake Islam’s inviolable holy site of Al-Aqsa Mosque
Yet even if the perpetually humiliated Palestinians assent to this further futile humiliation, all they are guaranteed by the Trump-Netanyahu fiat is the “honor” that their occupiers may deign to negotiate with them. Negotiate what? Perhaps outright enslavement, for this more accurately titled “Steal of the Century” is surely slavery by other means.
The world has seen this expression of supremacy before — and, horrifically, on “better” terms — in Apartheid South Africa and its infamous Bantustans.
No. The timing of this unilateral declaration of the Trump-Netanyahu intent to politically and spiritually pulverize the Palestinians and extinguish them as a people had other real objectives: To bolster a criminally indicted Netanyahu in his perpetual campaign for political power to escape jail time for his alleged corruption; and for Trump to hold yet another right-wing election rally in the midst of his own impeachment trial. This announcement, attended only by the most extreme supporters of both extremist politicians, proved little more than a joint Trump-Netanyahu campaign event at American taxpayer expense — a teeming swamp if ever there was one.
The Trump-Netanyahu fake news special, however, fooled no one.
The United Nations immediately rejected the plan:
The position of the United Nations on the two-State solution has been defined, throughout the years, by relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions by which the Secretariat is bound. The United Nations remains committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis in resolving the conflict on the basis of United Nations resolutions, international law, and bilateral agreements and realizing the vision of two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.
Some 33 former high-ranking European leaders — including 25 former foreign ministers, six previous prime ministers, and two former NATO secretary generals — didn’t even wait for the plans formal release but published an open letter last April urging European leaders to reject any plan not fair to the Palestinians, saying the US no longer abides by international standards regarding the conflict and has “demonstrated a disturbing indifference to Israeli settlement expansion.”
That is the point of the plan, according to Tareq Baconi, an analyst for Crisis Group. It intended to set forth “parameters that are impossible for Palestinians to accept, and effectively provides Israel with a blueprint to sustain the one-state reality that exists on the ground.”
Hagai El-Ad, executive director of B’Tselem, the internationally respected Israeli rights group, put it more bluntly:
What the Palestinians are being ‘offered’ now is not rights or a state, but a permanent state of Apartheid. No amount of marketing can erase this disgrace or blur the facts. The reality on the ground is already one of full Israeli control over the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea and everyone living in it. It is a reality of one, inherently undemocratic, state.
Palestinian-American legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat said of the plan: “They want to put us in permanent, high-tech cages and call it peace.”
Indeed, no sooner than the plan was released Netanyahu’s interim government announced that formal annexation of 131 internationally illegal Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank would commence on February 2.
The Trump-Netanyahu plan intends to further economically bludgeon the already impoverished Palestinians to coerce them into accepting its terms of surrender. This, after Trump cut life-sustaining aid to the Palestinians by defunding the vital UN Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, as well as the USAID mission to the West Bank and Gaza.
The Israelis have been complicit in this economic assault to soften up the Palestinians for acceptance of the plan by withholding taxes mandated by the Oslo accords on behalf of the Palestinians, which the occupiers collect as imposed overseers.
In June, the plan calls for a “workshop” in Bahrain that will seek to raise some $30 billion ostensibly for the Palestinians, if they accept the plan’s terms of surrender. Yet even this money is slated for diversion to Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon to encourage them to support the plan, as well as to the oil-producing nations Trump and Netanyahu will bill for its costs. Indeed, Trump’s plan calls for the Palestinians to pay much of this money to the Israeli military for its “protection” of them, since it disallows what will be named “New Palestine” from forming or arming its own armed forces.
Yet even the World Bank acknowledges that such sums would be a pittance, barely able to sustain some public sector salaries for a few years, when compared to what freeing Palestinians of Israeli occupation and giving them full sovereign control over their borders, trade, and resources would do; namely, create an economic boom that would at least triple the size of the Palestinian economy almost overnight.
Moreover, the Gulf welfare program the plan envisions for Palestinians would position the Israelis and the U.S. as the comptrollers for all funding to the Palestinians, affording them a perpetual means of coercion and corruption, a status the Palestinians and the world know only too well both would continually use with no moral qualms.
The plan further bars Palestinians, burgeoning in their population growth, from buying Israeli homes or building new homes without Israeli permission. It would then compel Palestinians without homes to “migrate” to the disconnected cantons to live, depriving them of Israeli citizenship. Indeed, the plan will enable Israelis to strip Palestinians of Israeli citizenship en masse, relegating them to the quasi-Palestinian citizenship it would, on paper, create.
The Trump-Netanyahu plan seeks neither peace, nor prosperity, nor the pursuit of happiness for the Palestinians but rather their ruthless pacification in a state of bondage through wretched economic destitution and the perpetual threat of brutal coercion. It is ironically reminiscent of Pharaoh’s archetypal subjugation of the Children of Israel, for its true intent is to destroy the spirit of humanity in the Palestinians by savagely stripping them of even the aspiration of their God-given right to human dignity, individual freedom, and communal self-realization.
Scholar and sociologist Baruch Kimmerling warned fellow Israelis before his death in 2007 against committing what he called their collective “politicide” by means of the continued pursuit of precisely this kind of policy — a plan that offers a fig leaf of “limited autonomy” to the Palestinians, while hiding its real design of forever denying Palestinians their communal right of self-determination.
If this plan is, indeed, the Deal of the Century, then it is so only in the sense of perpetrating the most brazen extortion and quashing of the human and political rights of a people since the establishment of the League of Nations in 1920 as predecessor to the United Nations in the interest of keeping world peace.
This plan is utterly morally reprehensible and fundamentally destructive. Far from a call to peace, it is the death knell of peace in the Holy Land and the Middle East. It will inevitably lead to escalating violence, widespread slaughter, and untold ruin — not only in Palestine, but in the entire region and throughout the world as its conflict inexorably sucks nation after nation into its vortex.
The US Council of Muslim Organizations denounces Trump’s Deal of the Century for what it truly is, the most dangerous, unethical, inhumane, morally bankrupt gambit for naked power perpetrated in a lifetime. We urge the member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and all nations and leaders to reject it in the interest of mediating a lasting peace.
