Trump Says Recognising Jerusalem as the
Capital of Israel Will Bring Peace – it Will
do Quite the Opposite
Trump has turned away from any notion of
fairness in peace negotiations and run with
Israel’s ball
By Robert Fisk
December 13, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- I was called by an Irish radio station in
Dublin to respond to President Donald
Trump’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. What did I think was
going on inside the US President’s mind, I
was asked? And I replied immediately: “I
don’t have the key to the lunatic asylum.”
What might once have seemed an outrageously
over-the-top remark was simply accepted as a
normal journalistic reaction to the leader
of the world’s greatest superpower. And
re-listening to the speech that Trump made
in the White House, I realised I should have
been far less restrained. The very text of
the document is insane, preposterous,
shameful.
Goodbye Palestine. Goodbye the two-state
solution. Goodbye the Palestinians. For this
new Israeli “capital” is not for them. Trump
did not even use the word “Palestine”. He
talked about “Israel and the Palestinians” –
in other words, of a state and of those who
do not deserve – and can no longer aspire to
– a state. No wonder I received a call in
Beirut last night from a Palestinian woman
who had just listened to the Trump
destruction of the “peace process”.
“Remember Kingdom of Heaven?” she asked me,
referring to Ridley Scott’s great movie of
the 1187 fall of Jerusalem. “Well it’s now
the Kingdom of Hell.”
It’s not the Kingdom of Hell, of course. The
Palestinians have been living in a kind of
hell for a 100 years, ever since the Balfour
Declaration declared Britain’s support for a
Jewish homeland in Palestine, when a single
sentence – in which our beloved Theresa May
takes such “pride” – became a textbook for
refugeedom and the future dispossession of
the Palestinian Arabs from their lands. As
usual, the Arab response this week was
sickening, warning of the “dangers” of
Trump’s decision, which was “unjustified and
irresponsible” – this piece of fluff
produced by King Salman of Saudi Arabia, the
so-called protector of Islam’s two holiest
places (the third being Jerusalem, although
he didn’t quite manage to point that out) –
and we can be sure that in the coming days
many an “emergency committee” will be formed
by Arab and Muslim institutions to deal with
this “danger”. They will, as we all know, be
worthless.
But it was the linguistic analysis of Noam
Chomsky when I was at university – he later
became a good friend – which I applied to
the Trump speech. The first thing I spotted
was, as I mentioned above, the absence of
“Palestine”. I always put the word in
quotation marks because I don’t believe it
will ever exist as a state. Go and look at
the Jewish colonies in the West Bank and
it’s clear that Israel has no intention that
it should exist in the future. But that’s no
excuse for Trump. In the spirit of the
Balfour Declaration – which referred to Jews
but to the Arabs as “existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine” – Trump downgrades
the Arabs of Palestine to “Palestinians”.
Yet even at the start, the chicanery begins.
Trump talks about “very fresh thinking” and
“new approaches”. But there is nothing new
about Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, since
the Israelis have been banging on about this
for decades. What is “new” is that – for the
benefit of his party, Christian Evangelicals
and those who claim to be American
supporters of Israel – Trump has simply
turned away from any notion of fairness in
peace negotiations and run with Israel’s
ball. Past presidents have issued waivers
against the 1995 Jerusalem Congress Act, not
because “delaying the recognition of
Jerusalem would advance the cause of peace”
but because that recognition should be given
to the city as a capital for two peoples and
two states – not one.
Then Trump tells us that his decision “is in
the best interests” of the US. But he can’t
explain how – by effectively taking America
out of future “peace” negotiations and
destroying any claim (admittedly dubious by
now) that the US is an “honest broker” in
these talks – this will benefit Washington.
It clearly won’t – though it might help
Trump’s party funding – since it further
lowers American power, prestige and standing
across the Middle East. Then he claims that
“like every other sovereign nation”, Israel
has the right to determine its own capital.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. For when another
people – the Arabs rather than just the Jews
– also want to claim that city as a capital
(or at least the east of it), then that
right is suspended until a final peace comes
into existence.
Israel may claim all of Jerusalem as its
eternal and undivided capital – as Netanyahu
also claims that Israel is the “Jewish
state”, despite the fact that more than 20
per cent of the people of Israel are Muslim
Arabs who live inside its borders – but
America’s recognition of this claim means
that Jerusalem can never be the capital of
another nation. And here’s the rub. We don’t
have the slightest idea of the real borders
of this “capital”. Trump actually
acknowledged this, in a line that went
largely unreported, when he said that “we
are not taking a position on … the specific
boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in
Jerusalem”. In other words, he recognised
the sovereignty of a country over all of
Jerusalem without knowing exactly where that
city’s borders lie.
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In
fact, we don’t have the slightest idea of
just where Israel’s eastern border is. Does
it lie along the old front line that divided
Jerusalem? Does it lie a mile or so to the
east of east Jerusalem? Or does it lie along
the Jordan river? In which case, goodbye
Palestine. Trump has awarded Israel the
right to a whole city as its capital but
hasn’t the slightest idea where the eastern
border of this country is, let alone the
frontier of Jerusalem.
The world was happy to accept Tel Aviv as a
temporary capital – as it was to pretend
that Jericho or Ramallah was the “capital”
of the Palestine Authority after Arafat
arrived there. But Jerusalem was not to be
recognised as the Israeli capital even
though Israel claimed it was. Then we have
Trump stating that in this “most successful”
democracy, “people of all faiths are free to
live and worship according to their
conscience”. I trust he won’t be telling
that to the more than two and a half million
Palestinians in the West Bank who are not
free to worship in Jerusalem without a
special pass, or the population of besieged
Gaza who cannot hope to reach the city. Yet
Trump claims his decision is merely “a
recognition of reality”. I suppose his
ambassador in Tel Aviv – soon, presumably,
in Jerusalem (if only, so far, in a hotel
room) – believes this tosh; for it was he
who claimed that Israel only occupied “2 per
cent” of the West Bank.
And this new embassy, when it is eventually
completed, will become “a magnificent
tribute to peace”, according to Trump. Given
the bunkers into which most US embassies in
the Middle East have turned, it’s going to
be a place with armoured gates and
pre-stressed concrete walls and lots of
inner bunkers for its diplomatic staff. But
by then, I suppose, Trump will be gone. Or
will he?
As usual, we had the Trump waffle. He wants
“a great deal” for the Israelis and
Palestinians, a peace agreement that is
“acceptable to both sides” – even though
this is not possible when he’s recognised
all of Jerusalem as Israeli before the
so-called “final status” talks, which the
world still fondly expects to take place
between “both sides”. But if Jerusalem is
“one of the most sensitive issues” in these
talks, if there was going to be
“disagreement and dissent” about his
announcement – all of which he said – then
why on earth did he make the decision at
all?
Only when he descended into Blair-like
verbosity – that the future of the region
was held back by “bloodshed, ignorance and
terror” – did it really become too much to
stomach any more of these lies. If people
are supposed to respond to “disagreement”
with “reasoned debate, not violence”, what
is the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital supposed to produce? A “debate”, for
heaven’s sake? Is that what to “rethink old
assumptions” means?
Enough of this twaddle. What more folly can
this wretched man dream up and lie about? So
what was going on in his befuddled mind when
he made this decision? Sure, he wants to
follow up on his campaign promises. But how
come he decided to honour this promise but
could not bring himself to say last April
that the mass murder of a million and a half
Armenians in 1915 constituted an act of
genocide? He was obviously frightened of
upsetting the Turks, who deny the first
industrial holocaust of the 20th century.
Well, he’s sure upset the Turks now. I’d
like to think he’d taken that into account.
But forget it. The guy is crackers. And it
will take many years for his country to
recover from this latest act of folly.
This article was originally published by The Independent -
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