PALESTINIAN Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has declared that the authority will withdraw from all agreements with Israel, the illegal occupying power across most Palestinian territory.
This is a moment for the left to wake up to the urgency of confronting the dangerous shift in US policy on Israel and Palestine that we have seen since Donald Trump assumed the presidency.
Abbas’s threat might be empty. He has said similar things before.
But whether this is a cry for help or the real deal, our response must be solidarity. As founding members of the Democratic Caucus for the Palestinian Territories, launched in February, warned, Israel’s hard-right government seems increasingly willing to wipe Palestine off the map permanently — and in this it has found a willing collaborator in Trump’s White House.
Of course, US — and British — complicity in Israel’s occupation and systematic colonisation of Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, long predates Trump.
Black Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar may have been induced to backtrack from her stinging criticism of former Democratic presidents after a tremendous Democratic Party backlash, but the essence of her argument held water: “[Trump’s] policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was,” before referencing policies of the Obama administration such as the massive expansion of murder-by-drone on other countries’ territory and the separation of families and caging of immigrant children at the US border.
The endless lip-service paid to a “two-state solution” and formulaic criticisms of Israel’s illegal settlement expansion programme on stolen land did little to constrain Israel’s colonisation project, its routine, savage violence against Palestinians or its racism towards its own Arab citizens.
But on all counts Trump’s rejection of even token acknowledgement of the only internationally recognised framework for a just solution has empowered and enabled the most reactionary forces in Israel.
Shifting the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, cutting all aid to the UN agency for assisting Palestinian refugees UNRWA and to the UN’s cultural and educational arm Unesco and its closure of its Jerusalem consulate that served as a de facto embassy to Palestine were all signals to Palestine that the US is not prepared to treat it as an independent polity.
They were also signals to Israel that there would be no backlash to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open rejection of any future Palestinian state or to the Israel Defence Force’s repeated massacres of unarmed protesters along the Gaza border last year.
US Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt can now blandly tell the UN security council that “global consensus,” “international law” and previous UN resolutions are all irrelevant when it comes to finding a way forward for the laughably named “peace process.”
While Britain, Germany and other states formally demurred — with Germany’s Christoph Heusgen telling the US that international law is not an “a la carte menu” — we have seen in a few short months Britain’s government shift from deploring the US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal to our troops seizing Iranian shipping on Washington’s orders.
Boris Johnson has shown his craven allegiance to Trump before, and his new Cabinet contains a number of members whose hostility to Palestinian rights is a matter of record — Home Secretary Priti Patel in her previous incarnation as international development secretary both cut funding to the Palestinian Authority and attempted to divert British aid to the Israeli military.
This is a government that will be complicit in the further erosion of Palestinian rights unless our movement pushes back hard.
That means an emphatic rejection of any attempt to blame Palestine for worsening relations. Abbas’s statement is a response to escalating US and Israeli aggression. That is the context in which we must respond.
