A Look At Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan
USCPR Executive Director Yousef Munayyer was interviewed on AirTalk, in an episode that examines Trump’s apartheid plan.
In Trump’s vision, which was outlined yesterday and which might as well have been drawn up by the Israeli prime minister himself, Palestinians are offered a truncated, dismembered archipelago of bantustans connected by bridges and tunnels that would remain subservient to the Israeli state, which would retain security control over the entirety of the land. Israelis will keep Jerusalem, no Palestinian refugees will be able to return to their homes, and the Israelis would even be able to offload Palestinian citizens of Israel into this ghettoized cluster. Not only would Palestinians receive this sorry excuse for an offer that fails to meet even the basic human rights all people should be guaranteed, it’s only something they can receive if they prove that they’re worthy of it. First, they have to satisfy several conditions, proving that they are deserving of this version of statehood. To call this proposal a nonstarter would be to glorify it with negotiation language it does not even deserve. It is, rather, little more than a calculated insult oozing with the most colonial-minded racism designed only to elicit a rejection. It is a plan to legitimize apartheid and nothing more.
In response to the racist stereotype of Palestinian “rejectionism”:
It’s not rejectionism to oppose being…erased from your history and your land, which is effectively what the Israelis have tried to do to the Palestinians. The only way that we are going to move forward and ever see peace is if peacemakers—and if Donald Trump ever wants to be one, he would have to accept that the rights of Palestinians are no less than the rights of Israelis. But that is far, far from the principles that undergird this plan. This is a plan that is designed to ensure that one group dominates another, that Israelis dominate Palestinians in an unjust, apartheid, Jim-Crow way for years and years and years. No one would accept that.
