Palestinians search for allies on Jerusalem issue

Pro-Palestinian protesters chant slogans against the US and Israel on Dec. 10, 2017 during a demonstration in Rabat, Morocco against U.S. President Donald Trump's declaration of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. FADEL SENNA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Jerusalem is only 20 kilometres from Ramallah yet, as of last Wednesday, when U.S. President Donald Trump upended decades of international diplomacy by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's official capital, it has never seemed more distant or unattainable to the Palestinians. Most of them consider Mr. Trump's move a sellout to the Israelis and have little-to-no hope that the peace plan under development by the President's son-in-law, Jared Kushner (tasked with striking a Middle East peace deal), and special envoy Jason Greenblatt will end the Israeli occupation and deliver them a sovereign state.

Jerusalem was Israel's last hope of peace – until Trump threw it away

 
"We are finished," says Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative party and former contender to the Palestinian presidency, now held by Mahmoud Abbas. Mr. Barghouti believes Mr. Kushner and Mr. Greenblatt's sympathies lie with Israel.

While Palestinians are heartened by the anti-U.S. and anti-Israel protests that have erupted around the world since Mr. Trump announced the diplomatic U-turn, they suspect they are running out of allies powerful enough to convince Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to commit to a two-state solution that would put the Palestinian capital in Muslim East Jerusalem.

 
To be sure, most of the Arab countries throughout the Middle East, while condemning Mr. Trump's move, seem far more concerned with their own crises, ranging from the civil war in Syria to the war in Yemen, which is pitting Iranian-backed Shia Houthi rebels against a coalition of largely Sunni countries led by Saudi Arabia. "Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries do not make us a priority for them," said Mahmoud al-Aloul, vice-chairman of Fatah, Palestine's ruling political party, and a touted replacement for Mr. Abbas, who is 82 and no longer popular with Palestinians. "That's a problem for us, absolutely."

As Palestinian leaders were trying to shore up international support for their condemnation of Mr. Trump's Jerusalem decision, there were signs that a potentially violent mass uprising – an intifada – was not out of the question even though Palestinians and Israelis both considered the scenario unlikely. (The Times of Israel described the protests so far as "intifada lite" because of the relatively few fatalities to date.)

On Sunday at Jerusalem's central bus station, a Palestinian man used a knife to stab a security guard in the chest. Earlier on the weekend, four Palestinians were killed in Gaza, two of them in Israeli air strikes in retaliation for the firing of several rockets from Gaza into Israel. Police clashed with protesters outside the U.S. embassy in Beirut and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ramped up anti-Israeli rhetoric by calling Israel "a terror state."

For his part, Mr. Netanyahu said of Mr. Erdogan that he wouldn't take lectures "about morality from a leader" whom he accused of bombing Kurdish villages in Turkey, jailing journalists and helping Iran get around international sanctions.

In spite of the widespread protests in their support, most Palestinians seem aware that there is little-to-no chance that Mr. Trump will reverse his decision or that Israel will stop building settlements in the West Bank or cede East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital – now or ever. What does seem certain to them is that the United States is no longer useful to them as a peace broker. That much was made clear when Mr. Abbas decided he will not meet U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence when he visits Israel and the Palestinian Territories later this month.

"To us, the political process has failed," said Hassan Yousef, the senior Hamas official in the West Bank who was one of the leaders of the second intifada, which lasted from 2000 to 2005 and resulted in thousands of casualties on both sides. "What we have warned for 25 years, that the Oslo [peace] negotiations have failed 100 per cent, has happened. But if Trump signs a decree, does it mean the Palestinian people will forget Jerusalem? It will be our nemesis together."

Most Palestinians gave up on Mr. Trump even before his Jerusalem announcement. In a September poll published by the Jerusalem Media & Communications Centre, in conjunction with Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 79 per cent of respondents said Mr. Trump "was not serious in his call for a resumption in the peace process," which went into hiatus four years ago. More than 75 per cent considered the peace process "dead" or facing "difficult conditions."

Ghassan Khatib, a Birzeit University professor and former Palestinian planning minister who is director of the Jerusalem Media & Communications Centre, said the Palestinians face dwindling options though he notes that the peace window had been closing for years.

In his view, the trigger point came in 1995 with an ultranationalist's assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the 1993 Oslo peace accords. "After that, Israel became more fundamentalist religiously and moved away from the two-state solution," he said. "There is no majority support in Israel for territorial compromise. Half of the Israeli cabinet lives in settlements."

According to widely published reports, about 400,000 Jewish Israelis live in West Bank settlements, which are considered illegal under international law, with another 200,000 or so in East Jerusalem settlements.

Mr. Khatib and other Palestinian academics and politicians say they now have little choice but to hope that widespread protests will put pressure on Americans and Israelis to take the two-state scenario seriously. In the meantime, Mr. Khatib said he hopes the protests will accelerate the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. The movement has some traction in Europe but seems stalled in North America. "We know there will be no short-term solution," Mr. Khatib said. "This will take time."

 
While many Palestinians won't say so on the record, they think the Palestinian territories more than ever need a fresh political start under a united West Bank and Gaza and believe that cannot happen under Mr. Abbas.

Sam Bahour, an Ohio-born Palestinian who is one of Ramallah's best-known businessmen, thinks Mr. Abbas was gravely wounded by Mr. Trump's Jerusalem decision and should step down to allow democratic elections.

"What can Abbas sell today?" Mr. Bahour said. "He was selling the Oslo peace process, the two-state solution and hope that Trump would keep it alive. But Trump undermined him. What Trump did was recognize that there is only one side – the Israeli side."

Mr. Abbas's response to Mr. Trump's Jerusalem announcement was widely considered weak by Palestinians. Shortly after Mr. Trump's move, he travelled to Jordan to meet with King Abdullah II to co-ordinate response while calling for a meeting with the Palestinian Liberation Organization's central committee to draft a "unified national position." Mr. Bahour called Mr. Abbas's response "pathetic – I would have liked to have heard an admission that the Oslo process had just taken the bullet. Instead, he called a meeting."