Bashing And Trashing: Trump’s So-Called Legacy In Palestine
By: Rima Najjar
Tags: Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, Palestine, Susan Rice, Israel

Right: Palestinian protesters prepare to tear apart a portrait of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed at al-Aqsa compound on 14 August, 2020 (AFP)

Left: Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Western Wall in occupied Jerusalem’s Old City on March 21, 2019. (Kobi Gideon/GPO)

Trump’s most egregious ‘political norms trashing’ is his trashing of the U.S. political norm of bashing, but not actually fatally wounding, what remains of Palestine and Palestinian rights.

Since it became apparent that Trump had lost the 2020 election, the news media has relentlessly focused on two things: Trump’s ongoing legal shenanigans meant to undermine the election itself, and Trump’s final moves meant to “cement” his foreign policies.

Regarding the latter, the New York Times’ Gail Collins and Bret Stephens, for example, intoned:

We also can’t ignore the foreign policy hit parade. Exchanging “beautiful” letters with Kim Jong-un. Taking Vladimir Putin at his word on the question of Russia’s election interference. Strong-arming the president of Ukraine to provide political dirt on the Biden family. Asking Xi Jinping’s help to get re-elected. Calling NATO into question. Maybe one of our clever readers can set all this to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

But the above list of Trump’s “serial trashing of political norms” in foreign policy always fell short of mentioning the most egregious trashing of them all and the one hardest to reverse — until, that is, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s trip to Israel, where he toured the illegal Jewish settlement Psagot near Ramallah and its winery and received a bottle of wine named after him.

Suddenly, as Trump is heading out of office, the Palestinian point of view (albeit that of the defunct “peace process” rather than that of liberation — long before Trump, the Zionist lobby put a stranglehold on facts about Palestine) appeared loudly on the current news cycle and not just in the alternative media. The 79 plus million who voted for Joe Biden and who are following cable news stations perhaps with receptive ears regarding Trump’s policy foibles could hear reporters, for once, using the phrase “anti-Palestinian” and commenting negatively on Pompeo sound bites denouncing BDS and honoring Israel’s “right” to “defend” the “Jewish people” from the people Israel brutalizes and claiming internationally recognized Palestinian land as a “central” part of Israel.

During his visit to the Israeli winery, Pompeo referred to the West Bank in the settlement’s visitor’s book as “Judea and Samaria,” using the Hebrew names Israel has given the Palestinian area it’s been occupying since 1967.

Many, probably including Pompeo himself, are unaware that, along with physically erasing hundreds of Palestinian villages after the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government undertook the Judaization of Palestinian place names, replacing Arabic-language place names with invented Hebrew-language place names across the land. In 2015, for example, the Israeli government began omitting the Arabic name for Jerusalem (Al Quds) from its street signs, “erasing not only the language from the Israeli consciousness, but Palestinian identity itself.”

Pompeo’s visit (along with his upcoming visit to the occupied Syrian Golan Heights) challenges not only the UN and the majority of the international community, who recognize the West Bank including Jerusalem (and the Golan Heights) as occupied territory, but also the incoming Biden administration: “If anyone in the next four years” has any doubts about your “sovereignty,” Pompeo told his Israeli hosts, I am here to tell the world, “we the US have it right.”

“Nothing good for Palestinians will come from Rice…her rhetoric has been a staple of US foreign policy in Palestine for decades.”

And what of “the next four years?” and Palestine? Consider this: Andrea Mitchell, American television journalist, anchor, and commentator for NBC News, posed a question to Susan Rice that began with the following:

“We are at a critical stage, the worst stage yet of the pandemic and the same goes for national security. We have the secretary of state in Israel today trying to cement policy, anti-Palestinian policy…”

In her response on MSNBC, Rice, who is former President Obama’s White House national security adviser and is said to be “very open” to joining the Biden administration, studiously ignored the “anti-Palestinian policy” reference.



Nothing good for Palestinians will come from Rice. To refresh your memory, take a look at the following excerpt from a 2014 Guardian article titled ‘Susan Rice launches staunch defence of Israel despite ‘alarming’ Gaza death toll’:

The senior White House adviser Susan Rice used a crucial speech on Monday to underscore the administration’s commitment to Israel and dismiss critics of its military offensive in Gaza, which has claimed hundreds of civilian lives, as biased and unjustified. In a staunch defence of Israel’s response to rockets fired from the Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas, Rice was particularly critical of the United Nations human rights council, which recently voted for an inquiry into the possible war crimes violations committed by Israel. “When countries single out Israel for unfair treatment at the UN, it isn’t just a problem for Israel, it is a problem for all of us,” Rice said on Monday. She added: “No country is immune from criticism, nor should it be. But when that criticism takes the form of singling out just one country, unfairly, bitterly and relentlessly, over and over and over, that is just wrong — and we all know it.”

The above rhetoric has been a staple of US foreign policy in Palestine for decades. It is a toss-up as to whether the Biden administration would denounce or adopt Pompeo’s outlook on the BDS movement expressed by him as follows: “We will immediately take steps to identify organizations that engage in hateful BDS conduct and withdraw US government support for such groups. We want to stand with all other nations that recognize the BDS movement for the cancer that it is.”

“And yet, there is a silver lining. Solidarity is growing despite Pompeo’s shameless spectacle in Palestine or maybe even because of it — solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine!”

As for the current Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, they appear to be as trapped in their own misguided fantasies of “a peace process” as they have always been. Hani Al Masri, director general of Masarat, the Palestinian Centre for Policy Research and Strategic Studies, recently lamented:

the absence of a new strategy [by Mahmoud Abbas] based on learning from the mistakes of the past, a strategy of unity and popular participation, and the conviction that the negotiating track, which had been embraced by the administration of President Barack Obama and Vice President Biden until the year 2014, is a failing bet … [My translation]

For Palestinians that leaves “The Palestinian Alternative Path,” which, in the words of Palestinian left-wing writer Khaled Barakat, is an alternative path for the struggle of liberation that rests today on two basic facts:

The first fact is that today we are facing a new Palestinian generation, born and grown up after 1991. The second fact is that our people have multiplied during the last thirty years. They have the right to ask today: Where has this path [the Oslo path] led us as Arabs and Palestinians? How do we pass from that stage, which was prolonged, to a new stage of struggle? Is this even possible? How? [My translation]

Many Palestinians outside the confines of the paralyzed Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization are hard at work evaluating their political history with painful clarity in search of alternative winning paths.

My prediction regarding Pompeo’s visit to “cement” the unconscionable is similar to that expressed by a Haaretz reader in the comments section of a report on the visit. Issa wrote, “In the long run, this administration will prove to be the biggest anti Semite for both Semitic people: The Palestinians and the Israelis. More bloodshed will come for decades because of its policies, long after the Trump, Natanyahu and Pompeo ugly trio are gone.”

And yet, there is a silver lining. Solidarity is growing despite Pompeo’s shameless spectacle in Palestine or maybe even because of it — solidarity from Ferguson to Palestine!

__________________

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.