Trump could usher in an era of honesty in Israel

Jesse Rosenfeld surveys the situation in the occupied territories and the world's response to Israel's intransigence

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Abir Sultan / EPA

The era in which an American president will publicly embrace the most violent, unjust and repressive actions in the Middle East in 140 characters or fewer is fast approaching. With his ambassador choices and pre-inauguration diplomatic bluster, it is on Israel-Palestine that Donald Trump’s stance is the most fleshed out.

The irony in actions such as tapping David Friedman – a lobbyist for the settler movement – as United States ambassador to Israel is that Mr Trump is simply embracing a system that the US has always enabled through funding, arming and ignoring.

Since the Oslo Accords started in 1993, the US has facilitated Israel's practice of paying lip-service to an increasingly muddied concept of a two-state solution while using the cover of the unending negotiations process to expand and entrench ethnically exclusive rule. During the era of the peace process, Israel grew its settler population to half a million and transformed an unending temporary military occupation into a permanent system of militarised segregation. Palestinian refugees’ hope of exercising their right of return has never seemed further from realisation, while Israel’s own Palestinian citizens have increasingly seen their rights shrink and second-class status reinforced.

In the name of reaching peace, Palestinians have been forcefully divided from each other. They have been besieged and bombed under a suffocating military blockade in Gaza or had their West Bank homes raided by soldiers, children tried in military courts for protesting and their land seized by settlers.

As Israel created one reality on the ground, it spoke to the world about a different possibility, one that fits into America’s official regional diplomatic efforts and appeased western sensibilities and allies. Israel’s most egregious transgressions would receive mild diplomatic criticism along with increased material support. More recently, US officials have taken to parroting the talking points of liberal Israeli officials such as former prime minister Ehud Barak, who laid the ground work for the current reality and warned of a future apartheid scenario to deflect from what has long been in place.

That script has been thrown out the window as we enter the Trump era. Israel’s current government, the most hardline and expansionist in its history, has taken his election as a sign that the diplomatic rumblings of future peace and some form of a Palestinian state are no longer needed. Ministers have gleefully proclaimed the process over and bragged to the world about the reality that Palestinians have long known and felt. The Israeli government’s openly oppressive actions are in line with a public that no longer wants to see or deal with Palestinians while enjoying the privileges of continuing to take their land and impunity over how they treat the indigenous inhabitants. Israel’s Jewish population embraces the status quo, one in which they have experienced both an unprecedented level of quiet and separation from Palestinians.

The trial of Elor Azaria for his execution of Abed Al Fattah Al Sharif, a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian man who had attacked a solder at a checkpoint in Hebron, has again shown a light on this grim status quo.

Although he was found guilty – a fact that Israel will use to claim they have an impartial military justice system – Israeli society has united behind Azaria. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for a pardon and described Azaria as one of Israel’s sons.

As Israel stands naked before the world, Mr Trump embraces it because of its shame, not in spite of it. It is a disturbing parallel with one of America’s darkest alliances, the Reagan administration's embrace of apartheid South Africa. After years of restrained criticism of their apartheid allies in Pretoria, America’s approach in the 1980s shifted decisively away from discussing the white government's subjugation of the majority black population to focus on its regional role in the fight against the Soviet Union's influence in southern Africa. Instead of the traditional saying one thing and doing another, the Reagan administration lauded Pretoria’s role in its reignited Cold War rhetoric, and US weapons and companies continued to flow into the country.

The possibility of a similar future between the US and Israel poses a challenge for Palestinian leadership. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was transformed through the Oslo process from a representative body of Palestinian national liberation to a handful of people in a new Ramallah establishment acting as outsourced middle managers of the occupation.

Palestinians can no longer look forward to the token American promise of an independent state under Mr Trump, making their choice a stark one. They can see this cruel honesty for what it is and turn their attention towards a struggle for full political, economic and social equality in a single state or continue fighting for a compromise Israel has no interest in making and the US no longer promises.

Unlike apartheid South Africa, Israel wants the Palestinians’ land without the people and it has made clear it will take as much of it on those terms as it can get. Now they will have an administration in Washington that openly calls that goal a “beautiful thing”.

Jesse Rosenfeld is a freelance journalist in Beirut and has reported from around the region since 2007