A few days after President Trump announced that the United States would
recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, I went to a friend’s house
in Ramallah for dinner. We were by no means a cross-section of
Palestinian society: I am a lawyer, and among the group was an
architect, a professor, a researcher, and a former employee of an
investment fund that aided Palestinian small businesses. Nonetheless, we
represented a group that has largely disengaged from the Palestinian
national movement. For years, apathy and avoidance had caused us to
rarely discuss the dire state of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
or Palestinian politics in general—but we found ourselves doing it over
dinner. One of the guests, a journalist who had covered the
demonstrations that took place after Trump’s declaration, had recorded
images of the protests on his phone that he wanted us to see.
“Look at how the police arrested this seventeen-year-old Palestinian, clamped his hands and dragged him,” he told us. “Yes, literally dragged him from the French cultural center all the way to the post office at the other end of the long shopping street. Look how the horse-mounted policemen attacked these women. Can you just see the fear on their faces as they back up against the shut door of one of the stores observing a commercial strike? Look, just look, at this informer disguised as an Arab demonstrator as he moves around taking pictures of the activists. He sends these to the police and they swarm at them and now that they have the evidence, they arrest them. And look how careful they are to hurt but not kill these demonstrators. They don’t want casualties.”
As I looked, I thought that one has to give the Israeli police credit. Clearly, they were applying lessons that they had learned from decades of demonstrations. With their ability to adapt, I had no doubt that the Israeli police would eventually succeed in containing the demonstrations denouncing Trump’s declaration. Clearly, they had the power and means to do it.
Next, our journalist friend insisted that we listen to the protesters’
chants. They included one against Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the
Palestinian Authority, demanding that he leave office. They expressed it
with contempt, openly taunting the moderate Palestinian leader and
demanding, “Abbas, abandon your basta,” using a word that normally means a peddler’s stall. They chanted against the Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as well, denouncing his handling of the peace
process, which they declared dead.
During our long discussion after dinner, we concluded, together, that
Israel and its ally, the U.S., had made a vast mistake. For
Palestinians, Trump’s Jerusalem declaration ended all hopes that the
long-moribund peace process might lead to an independent Palestinian
state. Had Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister,
held off on the announcement, it might have still been possible for the
status quo to continue, with Israelis claiming that they were pursuing
peace while relentlessly pushing ahead with settlement construction that
violated international law and made the creation of a viable Palestinian
state impossible. This fortunate situation for Israel might have
continued for another five or, perhaps, ten years. But after Trump’s
declaration, it was over.
The announcement also may prove politically fatal for Abbas, who had
built his strategy and placed his hopes on the U.S. reviving the peace
process. In recent years, Abbas has satisfied all of Israel’s demands
but has still been rejected by Netanyahu. And now, Trump’s declaration had
exposed the hopelessness of the U.S. serving as a fair arbiter. In an
effort to regain some credibility among Palestinians, Abbas announced
that Palestinians would no longer accept the U.S. serving as a mediator
in peace talks in the wake of Trump’s decision. “Jerusalem is and will
forever be the capital of the Palestinian state,” Abbas declared at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, in Istanbul.
“We do not accept any role of the United States in the political process
from now on, because it is completely biased towards Israel.”
For many years, I have watched Abbas, whom I know personally, do his
best to satisfy the conditions, often ludicrous, placed on him by
Netanyahu in order to restart peace negotiations. I’m not an admirer of
Abbas’s negotiating skills, but I appreciate the fact that, if Abbas is
forced from power, Israel would lose a leading Palestinian moderate who
is a firm believer in a negotiated peace. Yet Netanyahu and other
Israeli leaders have done everything they can to discredit Abbas. And by
lobbying Trump to make his declaration, Netanyahu and his supporters
have likely delivered a final blow that will end Abbas’s rule. The U.S.,
a sponsor of the Oslo Accords, has openly violated one of its paramount
provisions: that the status of Jerusalem be decided in final-status
negotiations. Any pretense of Trump’s impartiality is gone, and, no
Palestinians will be waiting to hear the promised peace plan by Jared
Kushner.
On a recent afternoon, I was walking home in Ramallah and looked at the
rolling hills to the north. On one side, I could see new Israeli
settlements being built ever closer. On the other side, new Palestinian
housing projects were doing their part to destroy the beautiful
landscape that I adored when I grew up here. Three Palestinian policemen
mounted on horseback rode by me and I thought that one needs to live here to keep track of the constant changes. If I would leave Ramallah
for any length of time, I would find the situation too difficult,
confusing, and demoralizing to understand.
Forty years ago, I left Ramallah to study law in London. Since returning
home, in 1978, I have closely tracked the stream of legal changes that
allowed Israeli settlements to develop near Ramallah and in numerous
other parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. I wrote extensively
about Israel’s plans to annex the areas it occupied in 1967 by gradually
extending Israeli laws to its ever-growing settlements. I firmly
believed that if these violations of international law became known,
Israel would no longer be able to carry them out. I was wrong.
The Israeli effort to erode any official Palestinian presence in
Jerusalem has been underway for many years. In 1996, Israel allowed the
first Palestinian parliamentary elections to take place in Jerusalem,
and local residents ran as candidates. Officials of the Palestine
Liberation Organization met in Orient House with international diplomats
visiting Jerusalem. Gradually, during the early two thousands, the
Israelis limited Palestinian access to Jerusalem by building the
separation wall. They justified it as necessary to stop suicide
bombings, but none of the restrictions were reversed when security
conditions improved. Palestinians concluded that the Israelis had other
objectives, namely keeping Palestinians away from East Jerusalem, a city
that had been an integral part of the West Bank until the Israeli
occupation, in 1967.
The decades that have passed since I began practicing law here have
included hopeful periods when it seemed that change could come through
nonviolent activism and negotiations. And there have been years when
violent resistance, in the form of two intifadas, was viewed as the only
way to end to the occupation. After Trump’s speech, calls for a new
intifada have greater resonance. Over time, I’ve become used to this ebb
and flow and have learned that the most important lesson is to hold on,
or persevere, which, in Arabic, we call sumoud. If I leave, I may find
the situation here too strange and incomprehensible to endure.
At our dinner, there was one last thing that our journalist friend
wanted us to see. He showed us images of the Israeli police preventing
Palestinian demonstrators from flying the Palestinian flag in Jerusalem.
As soon as the protesters noticed this, they challenged the police and
argued that the mutual recognition established between Israel and the
P.L.O. under the Oslo Accords has allowed the Palestinian to flag to fly
for the past twenty-two years. They asked what had happened to change
this.
Three weeks after Trump’s declaration, only one other nation, Guatemala,
has followed the U.S. in recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Last
Thursday, the U.N. General Assembly
voted a hundred and twenty-eight to nine, with thirty-five abstentions, in
favor of a resolution condemning Trump’s action. Egypt, normally a close
Trump ally, sponsored the original resolution. Across the West Bank and
in Gaza, the Israeli military is showing less restraint—a
dozen Palestinians have been killed and more than three hundred injured.
In view of the fortunate position Israel was in regarding Jerusalem,
what prompted its decision to rock a smoothly sailing boat? Did it feel
it no longer needed the cover of the peace process because it is now
strong enough to say it wants more Palestinian territory? Did the
Israelis, perhaps, feel they had created enough settlements to make the
situation irreversible and force the world to come to terms with it? Was
this behind Netanyahu’s extensive lobbying of Trump to declare Jerusalem
the capital of Israel?
I believe not. It is unlikely that the Israeli Cabinet carefully
discussed the pros and cons of this declaration. More likely, it was
another example of events being driven by power politics. Netanyahu,
threatened with looming corruption cases, needed to boost his
popularity. The declaration may, at best, extend his hold on power for
another few years. On the other side of the world, an obdurate U.S.
President was eager to please his wealthy donors and his political base,
particularly evangelicals. Surely, neither politician is a statesman and
neither is thinking of the good of his country.
It is important to remember that the Palestinians have consistently
called for Jerusalem to remain undivided, and urged that when it became
the capital of both states, Israel and Palestine, it would remain an
open city. After a peace settlement, the city would serve as a model of
coëxistence. Instead of furthering this objective, Trump and Netanyahu
have condemned us, both peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, to perpetual
conflict.
How else can the Israelis continue to control millions of Palestinians
under their rule without representation except through force? Watching
the images of the police in action in East Jerusalem on my friend’s
phone, I had no doubt that they will continue to successfully quell
demonstrations. But what I, as well as many other Palestinians and
Israelis, wish for is to end violence as the modus operandi between our
two peoples. I refuse to be cured of my naïvety. I refuse to believe
that power politics alone will determine the future of our suffering
region and nations. I have always believed, and will continue to
believe, that peace will allow us to do much together. Trump’s
intervention only takes us further from that dream.