Joshua Leifer: Trump is systematically ending the viability of a future Palestinian state
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement
on Monday – that the US will no longer consider Israeli settlements in
the occupied Palestinian territories a violation of international law – is, in
many ways, a near-perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration’s approach
to Israel-Palestine.
Couched in grotesque
doublespeak, it claims to advance “the cause of peace” while signaling US
approval of Israel’s brutal, perpetual military rule over the roughly 3 million
Palestinians living in the West Bank. It is part and parcel of the Trump
administration’s ongoing,
concerted efforts to undermine international legal frameworks for
addressing human rights violations (and not just in Israel-Palestine). And it
is yet more proof, not that more was needed, that the Trump administration is
actively pursuing a post-two-state-solution
agenda.
Indeed, for an
administration marked by erratic decision-making and sudden reversals, Trump’s
has been thoroughly systematic when it comes to ending the viability of a
future Palestinian state. This, of course, is no surprise. In a clear harbinger
of what was to come, rightwing
pro-Israel operatives close to Donald Trump – among them David
Friedman, now US ambassador to Israel, and Jason Greenblatt, former special
envoy to the Middle East – successfully removed support for a two-state
solution from the 2016 Republican party’s platform.
Since its
inauguration, the Trump administration has taken draconian measures against key
Palestinian institutions, from shuttering the PLO office in Washington to slashing
funding to UNRWA, the UN body that distributes vital aid to over 5
million Palestinian refugees across the Arab world. In 2018, the Trump
administration moved the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (East
Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally
annexed in 1967 and which the international community considers
unlawfully occupied, was once intended as the capital of a future Palestinian
state.) Last March, President Trump formally recognized Israeli sovereignty
over the Golan Heights – occupied by Israel in 1967 and, in violation of
international law, unilaterally annexed in 1981....