Move The Embassy, Recognize Jerusalem — Then Watch The Region Explode
07 December 2017By Ray Hanania
So many people in the Middle East viewed the potential role Donald Trump would
play as president would be to bring change to the region. They bought into the
biased coverage of the liberal mainstream American news media, which focused
on his ability to sow seeds of anger and even hatred.
What the media was protecting was a system in which mealy-mouthed politicians
have managed to sustain a status quo that sees Israel and the Palestinians at
loggerheads, without any hope for peace. Yet Israel's government has cleverly
and masterfully used that impasse to build alliances with many Arab countries
without consequences or accountability.
Israel has been able to use the failure of the peace process as a cover to
continue its extremist agenda of expanding illegal settlements and oppressing
non-Jews both inside Israel and in the Occupied Territories. The Arabs have
never recognized this strategy; that the absence of peace has been beneficial
to Israel, and that many American politicians in the Democratic Party have
helped sustain this status quo to Israel's benefit.
Every American politician who has called for peace has done so with a lack of
sincerity. By urging peace without substance or concrete steps forward, they
have reinforced Israel's ability to do whatever it wants in Palestine. And
Israel has done whatever it wants. It has dramatically increased settlements
without any major consequence; it has continued official government policy of
confiscating more and more Palestinian lands in the West Bank; and it has
continued to oppress Palestinians, tightening its headlock hold on the
civilians living in the open air "hell" called the Gaza Strip, while slowly
chipping away at Palestinian resistance in the West Bank.
Without the chance of achieving peace, Israel has been able to achieve all of
its goals and more, expanding Israel without consequence. But Trump is
changing that. Instead of pandering to Israel with fake words of praise for
peace, Trump is creating a unique and new environment that will inevitably
force change on the region.
Trump was never going to achieve peace through happiness — he was going to do
it by throwing up the Middle East "game board" and disrupting a status quo
that has been a disadvantage to the Palestinian people.
Trump has promised to push for peace, but he has steadily taken American
foreign policy from a position of supporting Israel to a new advanced position
of advocating for Israel's agenda. The fuse that Trump will light that will
change the region is his decision to move the US Embassy to the sacred city of
Jerusalem, which has been under occupation in part since 1948 and fully
occupied since 1967. Israel expelled the Palestinians presence from West
Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, and has been doing the same in East Jerusalem
since 1967.
President Trump may be taking 'dangerous steps' in the peace process but
his move will end the status quo and cause devastating change, which is
Israel's worst nightmare. -- Ray Hanania
Trump will do what even the most wildly supportive advocates of Israeli
colonialism have stopped short of doing. Trump will push the region into a new
environment that will change the current status quo in a way Palestinians need
most. Palestinians have been lulled into believing that prior American
administrations were determined to fight for the two-state solution, but that
option was killed by Israel's right-wing governments immediately after its
architect, Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered in 1995. Despite the failure to agree a
peace deal, Palestinians have continued to cling to hope because they are the
victims of oppression. They have been pushed into a corner where their only
hope was to hope for peace, with small bursts of resistance and violence.
Trump will change that. He is taking the old game board of phony Middle East
peace and throwing it into the air. Moving the embassy will trigger a
region-wide enmity and acrimony that will become the basis for Israel's worst
nightmare. Moving the US embassy and recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel will create an explosion that America and Israel have worked hard to
avoid. It is an act that will bring devastating change. The desire to fight
for justice has been smothered by false promises of peace.
Yasser Arafat was betrayed after Rabin was murdered — had Rabin lived, we
might have had peace today, but the Israeli right made sure that would never
happen by assassinating him. It pushed Arafat into a corner, where he
withered, powerlessly, and vanished. And with him vanished the Palestinian
revolution. No one in the Palestinian or Arab world has managed to recreate
the impassioned revolution to force change and seek justice that Arafat
masterfully built.
Trump is the new Rabin, but a different kind of Rabin, who will open the door
to change. And that change will not be in Israel's interests, even though they
will finally cross the demarcation line of sensibility and push the region
into a new turmoil. Instead of opposing Trump's actions, maybe we should
encourage him to do what others have deemed "dangerous steps."
Move the embassy. Recognize Jerusalem. And then sit back and watch the region
explode in anger, protest and a rejection of the state of coma that the fake
promise of peace has put on the entire region.
Get ready everyone. The region is about the change.
• Ray Hanania is an award-winning Palestinian American columnist. Twitter:
@rayhanania
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