President Trump summoned the press on Thursday to announce the Mideast peace deal he tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner to broker. Unsurprisingly, he hailed it as the biggest diplomatic accomplishment since Henry Kissinger laid the groundwork for President Nixon’s opening to China.
Trump also tweeted a lengthy joint statement between the US, UAE and Israel, calling the agreement to ‘full normalization of relations’ between Israel and the UAE a ‘historic diplomatic breakthrough.’
The UAE and Israel plan to exchange embassies and ambassadors, according to the statement. It will be the third Arab country to open relations with Israel, after Egypt and Jordan.
(CNN, August 13, 2020)
No doubt full normalization of relations between countries is good. The problem is that Trump hailing this deal is tantamount to a surgeon going into the operating room to repair a patient’s heart, and then hailing the success of his operation on that patient’s abdomen.
Even worse, listening to Emirati and Israeli diplomats talk about this deal, I get the impression that neither side knows exactly what they bargained for. The UAE would have you believe it struck a deal to halt Israel’s (illegal) annexation of the West Bank. But that is belied by the very first sentence in CNN’s report on this deal:
Israel says it will temporarily ‘suspend’ plans to annex the West Bank, as part of a new peace deal with the United Arab Emirates.
If that isn’t a red flag, none exists. Hell, it’s bad enough that Israel is making clear its intent to only “suspend” its illegal annexation. But, that even this suspension is only temporary, telegraphs its intent to ensure that, no matter what deal is written, annexation shall be done.
This is why I was so stupefied to see so many seasoned politicians and pundits hailing Trump’s announcement. None was more surprising, and therefore most disappointing, than “veteran diplomat” Dr. Richard Haass – who has presided as president of the authoritative Council on Foreign Relations since 2003.
He has been all over TV propagating the fatuous notion that Trump deserves credit for getting the UAE to lock arms with Israel. He casts them as the first two links in a chain of opposition to the threat of Iranian hegemony, and posits that other Arab states will link up in due course.
Significantly, Haass predicates this chain link on Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu proselytizing the following bogeyman trope: It’s better to unite in fear with Israel to oppose the Iranians than to remain united in principle against Israel to support the Palestinians.
Except that Trump is the only reason Arab states fear Iran. Specifically, thanks to Netanyahu’s Iago-like urging, Trump not only torpedoed the nuclear deal it struck with the US and other major powers; he then imposed economic sanctions that were designed to make Iran act like a scavenging menace to survive.
(Arguably, the United States and Israel have acted variously like a far greater menace than Iran throughout the region over the past 25 years. That is the cruel irony inherent in the geopolitical projection afoot.)
This is why crediting Trump in this context is tantamount to crediting an arsonist for corralling a bucket brigade to put out a fire he started. But, to his credit, Trump has thrived his whole adult life on getting people like Haass to praise him for dealing with messes of his own making. (For more on these perverse relations and diabolical machinations, I refer you to “Preview of Gulf War III Starring Trump as Othello, Netanyahu as Iago, and Iran as Desdemona…,” May 7, 2019.)
Meanwhile, most politicians and pundits appear to have already forgotten the wool he tried to pull over everyone’s eyes with his tweet about denuclearizing North Korea. For, just as I presaged, far from the “historic diplomatic breakthrough” he hailed, that deal is now perishing on the dustbin of history.
Nonetheless, I trust we all know Trump and his enabling sycophants well enough by now to know that even abject failure does not chasten them. That explains why they’ve resumed their public pleading for the Nobel Peace Prize. Recall that they began this shameless and embarrassing pleading right after Trump’s ill-fated tweet announcing his nuclear deal with North Korea.
White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien on Thursday called for President Trump to be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize citing his role in a diplomatic breakthrough between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). …
The national security adviser stumping for Trump to get Nobel consideration is certain to please the president, who last September said during the United Nations General Assembly that he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize ‘if they gave it out fairly.’
(The Hill, August 13, 2020)
On the other hand, one only had to see the way Palestinians reacted to know that this deal would do nothing to redress the prevailing obstacle to peace in the Middle East:
Palestinians reacted with shock and dismay after US President Donald Trump unveiled an agreement between the United Arab Emirates and Israel to normalise ties. …
‘We already knew that there has been normalisation going under the table, but to formalise and legalise it that way at this critical moment is shocking. It’s a stab in our back and the back of all Arab nations,’ said Majida al-Masri, former PA minister of social affairs.
(Aljazeera, August 14, 2020)
Of course, the Palestinians were shocked and dismayed for the same reason that aforementioned patient would’ve been. After all, Mideast peace has always been about resolving issues between the Israelis and them. But what Jared brokered amounts to little more than the wannabe royal family of the United States getting the royal family of the UAE to recognize the wannabe king of Israel …
More to the point, the way Palestinians reacted makes clear that, far from brokering peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, this deal has upended and worsened conditions for peace. And I hasten to remind you that those conditions for the Palestinians today are even worse than they were for Blacks at the height of Apartheid in South Africa.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Because no less a political authority than former President Jimmy Carter wrote a book lamenting those conditions titled, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.
Above all else, Mideast peace has always been about normalizing relations between Palestinians and Israelis. I cannot overstate this. What’s more, anyone who knows anything about the stalled process knows there’s only one way to guarantee peace: Negotiate a two-state solution, which envisages an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, west of the Jordan River.
Incidentally, there has been some banter about granting Palestinians full Israeli citizenship. But this is clearly a non-starter because it would reduce Jews to minorities in the only Jewish state in the predominantly Arab Middle East.
That said, like the Palestinians, I was shocked and dismayed by the UAE’s betrayal. After all, this is rather like Black Zimbabwe normalizing relations with Apartheid South Africa (i.e., while it was still systematically denying Blacks basic human rights).
But I was not surprised by Israel’s manifest contempt. After all, it has never disguised its intent to keep the Palestinians living under apartheid conditions … in perpetuity. The following titles to previous commentaries in this regard attest to this:
- “Instead of Peace Israel Settling for Apartheid…?” May 1, 2014
- “Israel Votes to Become more like Apartheid South Africa,” March 18, 2015
- “PM Netanyahu Hails Israel as ‘Only for the Jewish People’…,” March 12, 2019
- “Trump Finally Unveils His Mideast Peace ‘Deal’…,” January 29, 2020
At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, I presaged this unfolding calamity … too. As the following quote from the last commentary cited shows, I knew Trump would announce a peace deal that does nothing to advance peace; further, that he would not care if this meant treating Palestinians like apartheid dwellers who should have no say in determining their own fate:
I see no point in elaborating on the fated failure of this peace deal. Suffice it to know that it suffered from the same kinds of delusional representations that doomed Trump’s deal to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. …
Except that Trump couldn’t care less. And he never learns. Only that explains him trumpeting a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians at the White House yesterday, which only the Israelis support … because it is so heavily weighted in their favor.
The only question now is whether other Arab states will follow the UAE down this primrose path of betrayal – as Haass posits. But it’s worth bearing in mind that even a former Israeli prime minister is on record expressing more concern for the plight of the Palestinians than this UAE khalifa has shown:
Ehud Barak … last night delivered an unusually blunt warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish majority or an ‘apartheid’ regime…
‘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,’ Barak said. ‘If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.’
(The London Guardian, February 2, 2012)
Enough said?
Related commentaries:
apartheid… Israel for Jews only… Trump’s unveils deal… North Korea…