[rad-green] Trump Gives Away the Store and Israel Will Now Officially Become an Apartheid State

*https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/29/trump-gives-away-the-store-and-israel-will-now-officially-become-an-apartheid-state/
<https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/29/trump-gives-away-the-store-and-israel-will-now-officially-become-an-apartheid-state/>*


*Consortium News          January 29, 2020 *

Trump Gives Away the Store and Israel Will Now Officially Become an
Apartheid State
*Ignoring past Israeli prime ministers who warned that annexation of the
West Bank would introduce legal apartheid to Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu
said the first phase of annexations would go to the Cabinet on Sunday.*

*By Joe Lauria <https://consortiumnews.com/tag/joe-lauria/>*
*Special to Consortium News*

*Within hours of the so-called Trump peace plan on the Palestine-Israel
question being revealed on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu said he would propose the first phase of West Bank annexation to
the Israeli cabinet on Sunday.*

Netanyahu sprang into action after the plan, which he essentially created,
was unveiled by Trump with Netanyahu at his side at the White House. It was
the final piece of a strategy that only a U.S. administration as slavishly
pro-Israel as Trump’s could give Netanyahu.

First the Israeli prime minister got the U.S. on Dec. 6, 2017 to recognize
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/world/middleeast/trump-jerusalem-israel-capital.html>
all
of Jerusalem, including Arab East Jerusalem, as Israel’s capital with the
move of the U.S. embassy there, something every previous U.S.
administration had refused to do.
[image: President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israel
Museum in Jerusalem in 2017. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem via Flckr)]
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Donald-and-Bibi.jpg>

Trump and Netanyahu at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2017. (U.S.
Embassy Jerusalem via Flckr)

Then on March 25, 2019 Trump recognized
<https://www.npr.org/2019/03/25/706588932/trump-formally-recognizes-israeli-sovereignty-over-golan-heights>
Israel’s
illegal 1981 annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Just three months ago
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo  declared
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/23/pompeo-says-israeli-west-bank-settlements-arent-illegal-what-does-that-mean-palestinians/>
expanding
Israeli colonies on the West Bank as legal, a violation of the 4th Geneva
Convention, which says: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer
parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The last piece Netanyahu needed was Tuesday’s much-awaited “peace plan”
from the most anti-Palestinian administration in U.S. history.  Even *The
New York Times'* coverage  admitted
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/28/world/middleeast/peace-plan.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>
 the plan was strongly biased towards Israel and that Netanyahu was in on
the secretive plan all along.

The operation was run by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose family
are close personal friends with Netanyahu.  It is a plan being imposed on
the Palestinians rather than arising out of Palestinian-Israeli
negotiations as past U.S. administrations tried to do.

The Netanyahu/Trump plan calls for new Israeli borders that intrude on
Palestinian territory.  The Palestinian “state” envisioned includes no
military force and the Israeli military would control and patrol the
Palestinian border with Jordan.  In the deal Trump is trying to buy off the
Palestinians’ aspiration for independence for $50 billion.  (On Tuesday, as
the plan was being unveiled, Trump was facing an impeachment trial in the
Senate and Netanyahu was formally indicted
<https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/28/middleeast/israel-netanyahu-withdraws-immunity-request-intl/index.html>
 on corruption charges.)

If the Israeli cabinet approves Netanyahu’s first annexation proposal,
which will include the Jordan valley, Palestinians living in annexed
territories would come under direct Israeli rule but, under the plan, would
not be allowed to vote in Israeli elections. That is the very definition of
apartheid.  (Though Israeli law forbids Israelis living outside
Israel–except for diplomats and military–to vote in Israeli elections,
Israeli colonists, known euphemistically called “settlers,”–though living
legally outside Israel–have had the right to vote.)

<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Checkpoint-Ramallah-by-me.jpg>

Kalandia checkpoint into Jerusalem. (Joe Lauria)

*Warnings Ignored *

Netanyahu is simply brushing aside warnings that came from earlier Israeli
leaders.

While many critics of Israel have pointed out that Israel was already
running a de-facto apartheid system in its rule over four million
Palestinians without rights, legal apartheid would come with annexation of
the West Bank.  Negative public reaction to that appeared to be the reason
annexation had been resisted by Israel until now.

No less than two former Israeli prime ministers have said so. “As long as
in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political
entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish, or
non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that
will be an apartheid state,” said Ehud Barak in 2010
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/03/barak-apartheid-palestine-peace>
.

Three years earlier, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said
<https://www.haaretz.com/1.4961269>: “If the day comes when the two-state
solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal
voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon
as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

A former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel, put it
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/joint-israel-west-bank-reality-is-an-apartheid-state/>
even
more bluntly:  “In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian
state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state – in the hope
that the status quo is temporary – is an apartheid state.”

*Reactions*
<https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Mahmoud-Abbas.jpg>

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. (Kremlin.ru)

Apparently Netanyahu felt that the times had changed enough (for the worse)
that Israel could withstand the negative regional and international outrage
that annexation will cause.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas mocked Trump’s Deal of the
Century as the “slap of the century.” And he told Trump where he can put
that $50 billion.

“Jerusalem is not for sale, our rights are not for sale and are not for
bargain and your deal, [this] conspiracy will not pass,” Abbas said Tuesday.

Palestinian activist Fakhry Abu Diab told
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/balfour-palestinians-angered-trump-middle-east-plan-200128194613728.html>
 *Al Jazeera*: “It is obvious that Trump is repeating history by
establishing a new Balfour Declaration. He [Trump] is giving away what he
does not own, to people who have no right to it.”

International law professor Francis Boyle, who was an adviser to the PLO
and Yasser Arafat, told *Consortium News*: “As this plan moves forward, I
don’t think there will be much of Palestine to speak of. It will be Greater
Israel. Then there will be another Nakba forcing a lot of Palestinians into
Jordan: Jordan is Palestine.”

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted:  “This plan was negotiated with
no one but the Israelis, and thus it’s not a peace plan at all. Peace can
only be achieved through agreement between Israel and the Palestinian
people. By setting these new terms, it makes it harder for Israel to
compromise later.”

Murphy said,

“Any claim that this plan envisions a Palestinian state is just false. The
plan allows Israel to control all security matters inside the Palestinian
‘state’, and thus it’s not a state at all. The unilateral annexation of the
Jordan River valley and existing settlements, deemed illegal under U.S. and
international law, will set back the peace process decades. And it risks
real violence and massive destabilization inside places like Jordan.”

Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian Authority spokeswoman, tweeted:
“Netanyahu is clear: Trump is the first world leader to say it is alright
for Israel to steal land.”

Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement: “The shameful peace plan
imposed by America on the Palestinians is the treason of the century and
doomed to fail.” Jordan warned against the “dangerous consequences of
unilateral Israeli measures that aim to impose new realities on the ground.”

To make it work, Netanyahu needs the support of Arab governments that have
long abandoned the Palestinian cause. In a statement, the United Arab
Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S. Yousef al-Otaiba, portrayed Trump’s plan
as  “a serious initiative that addresses many issues raised over the years.”

Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said it “appreciates the efforts of
President Trump’s administration to develop a comprehensive peace plan.”
The Egyptian government, which is dependent on Saudi financing, urged
Israelis and Palestinians to “carefully study” the plan and said it
appreciated the U.S. effort to solve the decades-0ld crisis.

Israeli troops were reinforced on the West Bank anticipating a violent
reaction.

*Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former
correspondent for **T**he Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe**, **Sunday
Times **of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at  *
*[email protected]* <[email protected]>* and followed
on Twitter @unjoe .*

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