In order to endear himself to organized Jewry and especially to Israel Firsters among evangelical Christian Zionists on the American arena President Trump issued earlier in December a formal executive decree recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The decision has been widely considered a drastic departure from long-standing American policy regarding the town which Israel seized from Jordan in 1967.
Moreover the audacious feat is considered a gigantic insult and brazen defiance and provocation to the sensibilities of hundreds of millions of Muslims and although to a lesser extent Christians around the world. More to the point the fateful decision seems to underscore many facts including the President’s over-reliance on a group of mostly ignorant advisors who had apparently convinced him that the Palestinians would eventually come to terms with the decision; a view which I am sure is grossly inaccurate.
The truth of the matter is that Jerusalem is and will always remain paramount for Palestinians as the vast majority of them would rather keep the cause of the holy city alive even without a state than having a state even on the entirety of the remainder of the West Bank but without Jerusalem.
Another bad advice that Trump received from his ignorant advisors had ostensibly swayed him into thinking that if the US administration exerted some bullying and arm-twisting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas he should be able at least in the long run to pacify his people and get them to accept the fait accompli. This is also a misleading notion. In fact a people who defied history by surviving as a people despite the immense savagery of the Nazi-like onslaught of the Zionist movement are unlikely to be cajoled or coaxed into agreeing to liquidate their national cause (heart and soul) just to please the proverbial monkey of the Israeli organ grinder aka the United States of America. We Palestinians are not and won’t ever be a herd of two legged human-sheep that our current or future leaders can conduct us as they wish. I can even dare say that any Palestinian leader who might venture to play the collaborationist game with our enduring cause wouldn’t live to regret the utter foolishness of his folly. In short Trump ought to eject from his mind if he still has one the illusion that the Palestinian people will one day backtrack on Jerusalem. I also say to Trump if he is willing to listen don’t listen to the bigot named Netanyahu. He has the tongue of a liar and the mindset of a dishonest person. Lying is his policy and dishonesty is his shield.
I know as many others do that Trump‘s folly won’t be innocuous or harmless. It is already radicalizing the wider Palestinian street and putting the advocates of peace on the defensive. It is also expected to give a new life and vigor to violent groups as it will enable them to claim that they are fighting for the honor of Islam and standing in the face of neo-Crusades hell¬ bent on harming Islam and usurping its holy places such as the Aqsa Mosque. But the most enduring impact of the millenarian stupidity coming from the White House will undoubtedly manifest itself in prolonging or even perpetuating the conflict and causing more suffering bloodshed and violence.
Two weeks ago the elderly Israeli journalist Uri Avnery wrote an article in which he pointed out that within mandatory Palestine (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean) now live 7.8 million Israeli Jews and 8.2 million Palestinians whose numbers (the Palestinians) are expected to reach 25 million in less than three decades. These people will not just accept the status of children of a lesser God. They won’t settle for a life of water carriers and wood hewers. The writing is on the wall and denial won’t help either the fool of Washington or fool of Jerusalem!
I also know the fool of Jerusalem is having morbid dreams these days about possible ways and means to expel us or the bulk of our people from our ancestral homeland probably using an updated version of what Zionist thugs did to us in 1948. But we have learned the lesson rather well and we won’t make the same mistakes again!
– Khalid Amayreh is a veteran journalist and political analyst living in the Hebron region of Palestine.
