On Tuesday, an American
president being impeached for abuse of power announced a historic
plan for Israel-Palestine alongside an Israeli prime minister who was
just indicted for bribery and corruption. (The Israeli
parliament declined to grant Netanyahu immunity, and he withdrew the
request, allowing the formal indictment to be filed.)
The plan was drafted by a team
allegedly led by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who has no real government
position and is a far right wing Israel nationalist, in consultation with the
far right wing Likud government of Israel, headed by PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The
Palestinians declined to be involved in what was obviously a crooked and fixed
process that gave away their East Jerusalem to Netanyahu before it even got
going.
Just as the Palestinian people
were not consulted in 1917 when the British cabinet adopted the Balfour
Declaration, designating geographical Palestine as a site for a “homeland” for
the Jewish people, so the doomed-to-failure Trump plan also did not consult
them about their own fate. It is no longer the age of Western Empires when
pudgy men in pinstripe suits in the drawing rooms of London and Paris drew the
borders of other people’s countries and dictated the forms of their political
lives.
If you want to know what Iran
is really about, it is mostly a protest against these imperial injustices. For
that reason, the Trump Plan is a huge boon to Iran, since it makes transparent
precisely the “global arrogance” of Washington that Iran is always going on
about.
In turn, imperial practices
were and are underpinned by a latent White Nationalism, such that they attempt
to keep the brown and black people subordinate and to reserve wealth and
privilege and global power to the “white” European and European-descent
nations. Even though Jews in twentieth-century Europe and the United States
were often seen as “not Aryans” and “not White,” nowadays the usefulness of
Israel to imperial designs on the region has led to the Israelis being coded as
“white” and the Palestinians as “brown.” If you want to understand how millions
of people can daily be screwed over as the Palestinians are, it isn’t actually
much more complicated than that.
About 5 million stateless
Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation (the Palestinian West Bank)
or under Israeli military siege (the Gaza Strip). Some 400,000 stateless Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon are from families that were expelled from the British
Mandate of Palestine by militant Zionist militias. Another 400,000 stateless
Palestinians in Syria are from families expelled from the British Mandate of
Palestine by Zionist militias. About 40,000 stateless Palestinians in Jordan
are from families . . . you get the picture. That is, About 6 million stateless
Palestinians are being kept without basic human rights by Israel’s refusal to
allow them to return to their homes and by Israel’s refusal to allow the
Palestinians to establish a genuine state to which the refugees could return.
Although the Trump Plan uses
the diction of allowing a Palestinian “state,” the entity proposed does not
have control over its borders or airspace or coastal waters and cannot make
treaties with other states or go to the United Nations over continued Israeli
violations of international law. In other words it is not a state at all. It
is a
Bantustan of the sort the Apartheid South African government created
as a way of unloading its African population so that they could be stripped of
South African citizenship.
This map is verrrrry
generously shaded to give appearance of contiguity.
100% final map will appear closer to archipelago map on the right.
100% final map will appear closer to archipelago map on the right.
Palestine president Mahmoud
Abbas is said to have reacted to the Plan’s unveiling by calling Trump
a “dog, the son of a dog.”
The Trump Plan is full of
measures that constitute War Crimes in international law, and a systematic
pattern of War Crimes is categorized as a Crime against Humanity. The latter
term is the one appropriate to the Trump Plan. Here are the War Crimes the Plan
proposes
1. Israel has flooded 400,000
of its citizens into the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, where they have stolen
Palestinian land and built squatter-only settlements on it, where Palestinians
are not allowed to live. These Israeli squatters are often armed and some of
them routinely stage attacks on Palestinian villages or commit sabotage against
Palestinian orchards and agriculture.
This squatting on Palestinian
land contravenes the Fourth
Geneva Accord of 1949 on Occupied Territories, which forbids
transferring populations from the Occupying Power into the occupied lands.
“The Occupying Power shall not
deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it
occupies.”
This rule was to prevent the
repetition of the war crimes committed by Nazi Germany, which occupied other
lands and sent Germans in to settle them.
The Trump plan rewards
Israel’s illegal activities, saying “Approximately 97% of Israelis in the West
Bank will be incorporated into contiguous Israeli territory.”
2. The Trump Plan allows
Israel to annex about a third of the Occupied West Bank, on which Israeli
squatters have squatted. Annexation is
an act of aggression, forbidden by international law. By the Fourth
Geneva Convention, Israel cannot actually deprive Occupied Palestinians of
their land rights by simply declaring those lands “annexed.”
3. The Plan envisages
depriving many Israeli citizens of Palestinian heritage of their Israeli
citizenship, which amounts to denaturalization. Since they would be instead
given “citizenship” in a “state” that no one will recognize and which is a
Bantustan rather than a state, in which they will enjoy no actual rights over
their own property because Israel won’t permit the Bantustan to so guarantee
them, that would amount de facto to forcing these Israeli citizens into
statelessness, which contravenes the UN
Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, signed by 75 member
states.
4. The Plan envisages that the
Palestinian Bantustan will be disarmed, which means that Palestinians will be
deprived of the right of self-defense. The Right of Self-defense is recognized
in Chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter:
“Article 51. “Nothing in the
present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective
self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations,
until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain
international peace and security.”
Palestine was in 2012 granted
by the UN General Assembly non-member observer state status, like the Vatican,
which puts it under the authority of the Charter.
5. The enclaves to which the
Palestinians would be consigned give them no control over their lives, as B’Tselem
pointed out. The Israeli human rights organization pointed out,
“With no territorial
contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to
self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel’s
goodwill for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence
their future. They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel’s draconian
permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development. In this
sense, not only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way,
but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and
gives it recognition.”
Article 12 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights puts the right to freedom of
movement into treaty law: “(1) Everyone lawfully within the territory of a
State shall, within that territory, have the right to liberty of movement and
freedom to choose his residence.”
Actually a whole book could be
written about all the ways the Trump Plan for the hapless Palestinians
contravenes international law. Since the over-all rubric is Apartheid, and
Apartheid is a War Crime in the Rome Statute that underpins the International
Criminal Court, the whole plan is a series of War Crimes, which amount in the
aggregate to a crime against humanity.
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