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PERHAPS it was no coincidence, as some commentators claim, that Donald Trump’s announcement about formally recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital preceded yesterday’s Senatorial contest in Alabama by less than a week.
After all, the chances of accused child molester Roy Moore winning the seat substantially depended on bringing out the evangelical vote. And American Christian fundamentalists generally tend to back the Zionist project on the grounds that Israel’s strength (and breadth) is directly proportionate to the probability of Armageddon and the End Times.
It may seem contradictory that Israel, even under its Likudite dispensation, welcomes such support, given that the subtext implies its imminent destruction. But it could simply be a case of acknowledging biblical prophecies only to the extent that there can be political purpose behind claiming divine right over someone else’s land.
Amid an orgy of predictable protests across the Middle East in the wake of the White House declaration, Benjamin Netanyahu invited himself to Brussels this week, brandishing his Trump card and seemingly expecting the European Union to follow the example set by the US, which purportedly intends to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem within a couple of years.
It’s unfair to damn Trump for killing the two-state solution.
The EU was never likely to take the bait, as Netanyahu must have known — or at least realised after his encounter with Emmanuel Macron in Paris. After all, none of the 14 other members of the UN Security Council backed the US stance last Friday, prompting US ambassador Nikki Haley to bash the UN yet again for its ‘bias’ against Israel — just because it routinely violates UN resolutions and universal standards of decency. It’s worth noting that when Trump was still only president-elect a year ago, his aides Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn sought to importune other nations, notably Russia, to forestall a UN wrist-slap for Israel that the Obama administration refused to veto. Fortunately, the ploy failed.
In a somewhat different context, it was a hopeful sign that Haley did not resort to complaints of bias against her president when confronted with questions relating to accusations of sexual transgressions by Trump, instead upholding the right of his accusers to be heard — even though the White House has labelled the women concerned as liars.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, has been busy perpetrating the obvious lie that Jerusalem — a city holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike — has been “the capital of the Jewish people” for 3,000 years. Without a break.
Identifying the Israeli state and Zionist aims with “the Jewish people” inevitably appeals to anti-Semites, and has always done so in Europe, where the most ardent Israel supporters are to be found among governments to the east of the continent, all too often coinciding with anti-Semitic notions, although they tend to be overshadowed by Islamophobia.
It is unfair, all the same, to damn Trump for killing the two-state solution, or compromising Washington’s role as an honest broker in the moribund peace process. Anyone who considered the US an honest broker was delusional. And the possibility of a fair divide has been dead for years. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it, the two-state solution is a corpse that is produced every now and then, before being returned to its coffin. It died of neglect after the Oslo accords more than 20 years ago failed to prevent Israeli settler-colonialists from continuing to encroach on Palestinian territory. (Pappe’s most recent book, Ten Myths About Israel, is highly recommended as an antidote to the most common Zionist fallacies.)
Perhaps Trump has presided over its funeral. As the perennial Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat recently claimed, the only feasible alternative that remains is a one-state solution. Historical Palestine can be one country again, provided the hitherto marginalised Palestinians are accepted as citizens with equal rights, and the victims of ethnic cleansing during the past 70 years are offered the right of return.
No, that’s not a likely scenario in the short term. But are there any feasible alternatives? Two states formed along the lines of the 1967 borders are no longer a possibility. Nor, one would like to think, is the likelihood of Netanyahu and his perverse allies succeeding in driving out all Arabs from their ancestral lands and annexing the West Bank as part of an exclusively Jewish state.
Tongue in cheek, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy suggests that when this outcome is achieved, Trump should be offered honorary citizenship. But it could be a long time coming, and US president is already in his 70s.
One can be reasonably sure, though, that he’ll live long enough to see whether his favoured candidate in Alabama, Roy Moore, makes it to the Senate. Domestically at least, his fate could delineate the shape of things to come.
Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2017
