By Jonathan Cook
Israel needed a fresh pretext to
justify seizing the last fragments of
historic Palestine after the expiry of
its Oslo alibi.
February 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The Trump "Vision
for Peace" will never be implemented - and not
because the Palestinians reject it. Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s enthusiastic public embrace
of the plan belies the fact that the Israeli right
detest it too.
The headlines are that, with US blessing,
Israel's dream is about to be realised: it will be
able to annex its dozens of illegal settlements in
the West Bank and the vast agricultural basin of the
Jordan Valley. In return, the Palestinians can have
a state on 15 per cent of their homeland.
The real aim
But that is not the real aim of this obviously
one-sided "peace" plan. Rather, it is intended as
the prelude to something far worse for the
Palestinians: the final eradication of the last
traces of their political project for national
liberation.
US President Donald Trump’s plan is neither a
blueprint for peace nor a decree from the heart of
the US empire. Rather it is a decoy, an enormous red
herring created in Tel Aviv and then marketed by
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, the glorified used-car salesman who
currently occupies the White House.
Trump may think his vision could lead to a
"realistic" two-state solution. Even many critics
assume it envisions the establishment of a highly
circumscribed, enfeebled Palestinian state. But for
Israeli leaders it serves another purpose entirely:
it provides diplomatic cover while they put the
finishing touches to their version of a one-state
solution inside Greater Israel.
Netanyhau has crafted a "deal of the
century" designed to fail from the outset - and
managed it through deeply partisan White House
intermediaries like
David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel,
and Kushner. For all of them, its purpose is to
provide a fresh alibi for Israel and Washington to
continue disappearing the Palestinians more than two
decades after the illusions of the earlier Oslo
Accords "peace" process can no longer be sustained.
Israeli bad faith
That this is intended as a grand deception should
not surprise us. The current plan follows a tried
and tested tradition of US-dominated
"peacemaking" that has utterly failed to bring peace
but has succeeded triumphantly in smothering and
erasing historic Palestine, gradually transforming
it into Greater Israel.
Trump’s deal is, in fact, the third major
framework - after the 1947 United Nations Partition
Plan and the Oslo accords initiated in 1993 -
supposedly offering territorial partition between
Israelis and Palestinians. The lesson of each has
been that Israel and the US have returned after each
inevitable and intended failure to offer the
Palestinians even less of their homeland.
On each occasion, Israel (and before its
creation, the Zionist leadership) has signed up to
these peacemaking initiatives in bad faith, forcing
Palestinians, as the weaker party, to reject them.
And each time, that rejection has been weaponised by
Israel - used as a pretext to steal more territory.
