Wednesday December 6 2017 marks a moment of an unparalleled furor that has made its way deep into the hearts of the Palestinians and Arabs. It was with tears of bitterness and sighs of wrath that the Palestinians Arabs Muslims Christians and decolonization activists around the world received Trump’s notorious declaration that Jerusalem is the capital of the self-proclaimed Israeli State reversing decades of American foreign policy.
Showing up on air Trump made the formal announcement during a speech in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House with Vice President Mike Pence standing behind him.
Though in 1995 the American Congress adopted the Jerusalem Embassy Act urging the federal government to relocate the American Embassy to Occupied Jerusalem and to recognize the city as Israel’s capital for over two decades every pre-Trump American president has exercised the law’s waiver refusing to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem or to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city under the belief that delaying the recognition of Jerusalem would advance the cause of peace.
“I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel” said Trump in a language echoing much of the callousness and apathy with which the world’s colonial figures have often delivered their sermons. “Israel is a sovereign nation with the right like every other sovereign nation to determine its own capital. Acknowledging this as a fact is a necessary condition for achieving peace.”
As one sifts through Trump’s speech in the hunt for a rationale to his unfair one-sided declaration one gets even more absorbed into oaths of undecipherable ambiguity. “But today we finally acknowledge the obvious. That Jerusalem is Israel’s capital. This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality. It is also the right thing to do. It’s something that has to be done” Trump’s tarnished declaration goes on.
Not only is Trump pulling the wool over the world’s eyes by declaring that Jerusalem is intrinsically Jewish and thus wiping out centuries of resourceful Islamic and Christian tradition and heritage; he is also at one fell swoop pushing the entire legacy of the Muslim and Arab nation into the margins of history and geography.
Trump’s calls for the Judaization of Jerusalem are not very much dissimilar to those pronounced by the terrorist American-Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane who throughout his lifetime left no stone unturned to have non-Jewish communities exterminated once and for all. In his disreputable book They Must Go written from behind prison bars Kahane says: “The Jews and Arabs of the Land of Israel ultimately cannot coexist in a Jewish-Zionist state. A time bomb in the Holy Land ticks away relentlessly.”
“A Jewish state means Jewish orientation and ties. It means Jewish culture and a Jewish spirit in the Jewish body politic” read Kahane’s book. “Jewish state means Jewish sovereignty and control of its destiny. That can be accomplished only by a permanent Jewish majority and a small insignificant and placid Arab minority.”
According to Kahane the only path for Israel to take in order to exist is the immediate deportation of Arabs from the Land of Israel. “Separation. Only separation” yells Kahane in his incredibly fascist voice. “Let us remove the Arabs from Israel and bring the redemption.”
“Tragedy will be ours if we do not move the Arabs out. The great redemption can come immediately and magnificently if we do that which G-d demands” declares Kahane in another section of the book. “Their transfer from the Land of Israel thus becomes more than a political issue. It is a religious issue a religious obligation a commandment to erase (them).”
Signaling a politics of sheer terrorism bigotry and Manichaeism both Trump’s and Kahane’s words amount to a call for unreserved land theft sweeping ethnic cleansing and dislocation of Palestinians from the land where they have set up roots and raised their children for centuries.
Can Arabs and Jews ultimately coexist in a Jewish-Zionist state? Rabbi Kahane’s only answer: “They Must Go.” Trump’s answer is no different. His declaration is a barefaced abandonment of the peace process of the very gleams of hope to which a number of Palestinians and Middle Easterners knocked over by the images of war and destruction have clung (whether they are right or wrong). Trump’s declaration stands as the century’s greatest act of betrayal announcing to the world that America’s claim to the pursuit of peace and to a lasting agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis is the most mythical of all promises.
If there is anyone who must go from the Land of Palestine it is certainly Israel. Let it be said as clear as a glass of moonshine: We—Palestinians Arabs Muslims and Christians—do not recognize the right which the Israelis and their allies call “historic” of the Jewish people to this land. Palestine Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Mosque were are and will forever remain exclusively Arab Islamic and Christian. The day will come when no single Israeli shall dare step into the land where Prophet Muhammad Peace Be Upon Him led prayers in congregation that were attended by all the previous Prophets. This is just a deep-seated conviction one that has been passed on to us in the very milk our mothers have breastfed us. Trump must be mad literally mad to recognize a colonial power’s sovereignty over a land that does not belong to it. The dead the living and the unborn know it very well: Jerusalem is ours.
– Safa Othmani is a PIC staff writer.
