Dr. Joseph Massad:
Good morning. Thank you very much for inviting me to give the keynote speech. I’m very honored to be here. I thank you all for coming so early in the morning to hear my talk. I will need my reading glasses. So, Trump’s Deal of the Century, the final stage of the Oslo Accords. Donald Trump’s Deal of the Century is the final phase of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which formalized the final liquidation of the Palestinian anti-colonial national struggle for independence and liberation. The deal is nothing more or less than the last step of the so-called peace process. In order to understand the aims of the “deal” we need to go back to the Oslo Accords which anticipated this step and assiduously prepared the ground for it.
Since the beginning of the so-called peace process, inaugurated in Madrid in 1991, the PLO threw its unofficial negotiators, conceded Palestinian rights one by one in the gradual process culminating the official PLO signing of the Declaration of Principles here in Washington, D.C. on September 13th, 1993. The “land for peace” formula which the peace talks adopted as a part of departure was in fact the first major concession of the PLO. The formula presupposes Israel has “land” which it would be willing to give to the “Arabs,” and that the Arabs, seen as responsible for the state of war with Israel can grant Israel the peace for which it has longed for decades. Placing the responsibility of the Arab-Israeli wars on the “Arabs” is the standard view that is never questioned in the West, especially here in Washington. But the PLO concession ensured the Palestinians and other Arabs also would not question it.
Despite its circus appearance as a political compromise, this formula of “land for peace” was, in fact, a reflection of the racial views characterizing European Jewish Israelis and Palestinian and other Arabs. Whereas the Israelis were asked and ostensibly presented as willing to negotiate about property, they recognized Western liberal right excellence. Palestinian and other Arabs were asked to give up violence or more precisely their “violent means” which is an illegitimate, unrecognized right attributable only to uncivilized barbarians. The fact that the PLO had already given up the Palestinian rightful claim to 77 percent of Palestine and was negotiating about the future status of a mere 23 percent of Palestine did not qualify for formula of land for land on which to base the Peace Process. In reality, and from a Palestinian standpoint, the formula of land for peace was accurate if one reversed the interpretation. And it was the PLO that was giving up Palestinian rights to the Palestinians’ historic homeland in exchange for an end of Israeli oppression and violence against the Palestinian people.
The PLO, Israel, and the Western media hailed the 1993 agreement between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin as “mutual recognition.” This construal, however, contradicts the actual words uttered by both parties and the projected actions based on these words. Whereas the PLO, who wrote the first letter, by the way, recognized and I quote “the right of the state of Israel to exist in peace and security.” The Israeli government in response to the letter “had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East Peace Process.”
This was hardly mutual recognition. For this to be mutual recognition either the Israelis would have had to recognize the Palestinian people’s right to exist in a state of their own in peace and security or the PLO would have only to recognize the Rabin government as the representative of the Israeli people without necessarily granting any right to the Israeli state to exist in peace and security or in any other way. The actual agreement, therefore, did not amount to mutual recognition. It amounted to the final legitimation of the Jewish state as having the right to be a racist apartheid state by the very people against whom its racist and colonial policies have been and continue to be practiced with the Israelis committing to nothing substantively new.
Giving the PLO the recognition as the representative of the Palestinians, something the majority of the world except the United States had done in the mid 1970s, committed Israel to no concessions to the Palestinian people. It committed it only to a scenario whereby since the Israeli government was supposed to speak to representatives of the Palestinians in the context of the Middle East Peace Process, it would speak to the PLO as it finally recognized that party as their representative whereas before it had not. The Israeli recognition of the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people took place at the exact moment that the PLO ceased to represent national will of the majority of Palestinians. As Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, himself had asserted correctly at the time, and I quote him, “we have not changed, the PLO did.”
However, if the PLO stood for Palestinian national aspirations which included the uncompromising demand for national self-determination through the establishment of a Palestinian state, the repatriation and/or monetary compensation of diaspora Palestinians and the end to Israeli apartheid under whom Palestinian citizens of Israel live and as such was recognized by the Israeli government such a recognition would surely have been a veritable concession by the intransient Israelis.
This, however, was far from what happened. The Oslo Agreement had no place for Palestinian refugees except according to [inaudible] for a few thousand people or a place for Palestinian citizens of Israel and had no provisions for Palestinian national self-determination or the establishment of a Palestinian state. All of which, by the way, we wrote about at the time back in 1994. I wrote several articles about this. This is not some new realization that people had, this was clear from the moment it had been signed. Since the Arafat leadership had abandoned all the major national aspirations of the PLO, or that the PLO embodied before Oslo, the Israeli recognition of the organization turned out not to be a concession at all. Rather, it was triumph for the Israeli colonial settler project, which had always sought to negotiate with people and governments who did not actually represent indigenous Palestinians or their rights.
The Israeli recognition of the PLO, therefore, did not depart from Israeli strategy which successive Israeli governments had followed diligently of liquidating the Palestinian national struggle. The establishment of the Israeli settler colony resulted in the [inaudible] in all of historic Palestine and in the process the physical separation of the Palestinian people into three major segments in relation to Palestine: Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories—in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—and the expelled Palestinians in exile. The agreement was engineered, by definition, not to redress the injustices inflicted on the Palestinian people as such, rather of transforming the Israeli occupation over parts of the Occupied Territories ino something with which both the PLO leadership and the Israelis, more generally, could live. This would be followed later by the complete separation of Gaza from the West Bank.
The territorial contraction of the area called “The West Bank” and the severance of East Jerusalem completely. Whereas since the Israeli occupation and subsequent annexation of the Palestinian city of East Jerusalem, Palestinians living in that city were accorded a different legal and political status by the Israelis. The Oslo Agreement separated those Palestinians who live in Gaza from the West Bank and then subdivided the West Bank into areas A, B, and C, dotted by hundreds of Israeli checkpoints as I’m sure many of you know. Much of the PLO and later Palestinian Authority flexibility in surrendering the rights of the Palestinian people was connected to the question of funding.
The story of the Palestinian national movement can only be told through ways and means that different Arab and non-Arab governments have tried to control it. While the PLO was established in 1964 and controlled principally by Arab League of States, within which the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser was hegemonic, the defeat of 1967 of the 1967 War weakened that arrangement leading to the non-PLO revolutionary guerillas’ takeover of the organization in 1968-1969. With Fatah and the leftist Palestinian guerrillas at the helm, the revolutionary potential of the PLO constituted such a threat that it precipitated an all-out war in Jordan in 1970. A situation that powerful and repressive Arab regimes did not want to see repeated. It is in this context that Arab oil money from Saudi Arabia, from Kuwait, later Libya, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq began to pour into the coffers of the PLO, primarily to ensure that it would not encourage revolutionary change in Arab countries and that in so far as it did not compromise Arab regime interests its weapons should only be directed towards Israel. The Lebanese civil war and the PLO role in it, in the second half of the 1970s, remained a problem. But as far as these countries were concerned, or these regimes were concerned, it was a problem that they were able to contain. This is very important because, remember, imagine, the African National Congress being actually funded by Mobutu, by the most reactionary African regimes.
The PLO, a third-world liberation movement, was actually funded by the most reactionary Arab regimes, an exception to the third world. Nothing like that happened anywhere else. With the onset of the 1980s and the military defeat of the PLO in 1982 in Beirut at the hand of the Israeli invaders, Arab funding for the PLO was no longer conditioned on its not turning its weapons against them only, but that the organization would also no longer target Israel. The various attempts at agreements between the PLO and King Hussein in the mid 1980s were part of that plan with continued Israeli and US refusal to deal with the PLO no matter how much its policy and ideology had changed, the situation remained frozen until the first Palestinian uprising in 1987 gave the PLO the opportunity to lay down its weapons against Israel.
The formalization of this transformation took place in Algiers in 1988 and later at the Madrid so-called Peace Conference in 1991. As oil funding dried up after the Gulf War of 1991, as the diplomatic support with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the PLO needed funders or new funders. Enter the United States and its allies whose terms included the Oslo Agreement and the newly created and Fatah controlled Palestinian Authority should indeed be armed but that its weapons should have a new target. So, whereas the conditions before, were that its weapons should not target Arab regimes and, later, not target Israel itself, the new target would be the Palestinian people themselves, and that its weapons should be directed at them and at their anti-colonial resistance.
The Palestinian Authority obliged and continued to receive its funding until the Second Intifada when, contra their raison d’etre, some of its security forces engaged the Israelis in gunfire when the Israelis attacked Palestinian civilians. Funding was intermittently stopped, Arafat was placed under house arrest or, if you will, office arrest, and the Israelis reinvaded the West Bank. A resumption of steady funding continued after Arafat’s death conditional upon Mahmoud Abbas’s “seriousness” in pointing Palestinian guns at the Palestinian themselves, which he and the Palestinian Authority’s thuggish security apparatuses trained as they were by the Americans have done diligently.
Since PA security coordination with the Israeli Occupation Army became the view of the PA’s unelected president Mahmoud Abbas’ “sacred and untouchable” and continued unhindered or continues unhindered to this day. In the meantime, while the PA had forsaken the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel to equal citizenship when it recognized Israel, despite Israel’s dozens of discriminatory racist laws. The question of the Palestinian refugees continued to plague its diplomacy. Yasser Arafat obliged in a now-infamous op-ed piece in the New York Times in 2002 in which he surrendered the Palestinians’ Right of Return. Arafat frankly expressed his “understanding and respect” of the Israeli need to maintain Jewish demographic supremacy and thus Israel’s colonial and racist character. He asserted and I quote him “We understand Israel’s demographic concerns and I understand that the right of return of Palestinian refugees guaranteed under international law and United Nation Resolution 194 must be implemented in a way that takes into account such Israeli concerns.”
Arafat proceeded to state that he was looking to negotiate with Israel on “creative solutions to the plight of refugees while respecting Israel’s demographic concerns” that is respecting its Jewish supremacist demographic concerns. Arafat’s position was reiterated by his US spect successor Mahmoud Abbas who conceded his own right to return to the city of Saffad now a city in Israel from which he and his family were expelled in 1948. Ten years after Arafat’s concession, Abbas declared on Israeli television in Nov 2012 “Palestine now for me is 67 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is now and forever, this is Palestine for me, I am a refugee and I live in Ramallah, I believe that the West Bank and Gaza is Palestine and the other parts are Israel.” Now that Israel’s right to be a racist state was guaranteed by the Palestinian leadership were in its racist demographic concerns will no longer be threatened either by the demand for equality for Palestinian citizens or by the return of the Palestinian refugees that were expelled, attention was focused on East Jerusalem and West Bank colonization as precursors to the final liquidation of the Palestinian national struggle.
The failure of the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000 which resulted in Yasir Arafat’s rejection of Ehud Barak’s final offer which very likely forms the territorial basis of Trump’s deal, although latter promises to be less generous I suspect, made it clear that the Oslo Accords, what did the Oslo Accords had in store for the Palestinians. In the language of Israeli and Western propaganda, Ehud Barak offered Arafat 73 percent of the West Bank which could expand in 10-25 years to 91 percent. Indeed some American Israeli accounts insisted what Barak offered was 95 percent of the West Bank. The West Bank, however, means something different for the Israelis from what it means to the Palestinians and to international law. The West Bank was the name that Jordanian authorities gave to the central and eastern parts of Palestine that they annexed in 1950. This included the small city of East Jerusalem which was 60 square kilometers in size when the Israelis occupied it in 1967. Israel, however, redefined the West Bank as not only to exclude the small city of East Jerusalem but in fact also to exclude the much-expanded city which the Israelis annexed in 1967 and ratified the annexation in 1980 by expanding its size at the time to 70 square kilometers at the expense of West Bank lands. That is the expanded East Jerusalem to almost 12 times its original size.
United Jerusalem was renamed in the 1980s by the Israelis as “Greater Jerusalem” and it was expanded again to almost three hundred square kilometers by stealing more land from the West Bank. Indeed Greater Jerusalem has come to encompass at the time almost 10 percent of the West Bank not to speak of the recent plan of “metropolitan Jerusalem” whose geographic size has been expanded by the Israelis to encompass as much as 25 percent or more of West Bank lands. It is this United Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel that is not part of the negotiations. Earlier talk of renaming the adjacent village of Abu Dis as the new East Jerusalem to satisfy the PA was inconclusive over the last two decades. Though in 2017 Trump formalized the question of Abu Dis as the only possible PA capital in the future. Trump’s move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was meant to remove any hope for the reopening of negotiations on this question before he unleashed his deal of the century.
Even the question of the colonial settlements was settled through preliminary arrangements with the PA and the Americans but basically, all the big blocks of settlements would be annexed to Israel in exchange for allegedly some demand that Israel might seed to the Palestinian Authority, with all these issues being parts of talks and discussions, there were never any commitments to a Palestinian State by the Israelis or really the Americans even when the Americans would speak of a two-state solution as all indications were that if a PA ministate was established, it would have no army and sovereignty over water or borders and no sovereignty over Jewish Settlements etc. Essentially, what was being offered was exactly what the PA was able to obtain during and after Oslo, namely a Palestinian diplomatic and administrative staff to manage the population and a Palestinian coercive security force to assist the Israeli Army in repressing the Palestinian people’s resistance to Israeli colonialism. In addition, the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis created an economic environment from which Palestinian businessmen both local and from the diaspora could profit from the ongoing Israeli Occupation and they have profited handsomely.
The succession of the peace process under Benjamin Netanyahu since 2014 is fully in keeping with the Oslo Accords. As I mentioned earlier, the accords only stipulated that Israel recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and that if Israel were to negotiate with the representatives of the Palestinian people in the context of the Middle East peace process, it would negotiate with the PLO. However, Israel did not commit to open-ended negotiations or to concluding a peace agreement with the PLO, especially in the absence of a peace process and I think Netanyahu is correct on this. Indeed even Trump’s closure of the offices of the PLO mission in Washington DC which PA propagandists mislabeled as a “Palestinian Embassy” over a year ago was in keeping with the Oslo Agreements and with US policy before and after Oslo. After all, Arafat became persona non grata following his refusal to sign an agreement at Camp David in 2000 just like the PA mission had become more recently to occupy a similar position.
It is in this context that the US moved in the last year to dismantle UNRWA and a very legal category of refugee as applied to Palestinian refugees moved its embassy to Jerusalem, withdrew its commitment to a two-state solution, hatched a plan with the aid of the Egyptian government and the Qataris for a permanent resolution to Gaza’s so-called “humanitarian crisis”, raised no objections to continued colonial settlements in the West Bank and issued no objections to Israel’s racist nation-state law enacted in July 2018. The background of the nation-state law is most relevant to the aims of Trump’s deal of the century. Since its inception, the Zionist project to colonize Palestine has been determined and uncompromising in its colonial-settler goals but at the same time it demonstrated ideological innovation and acrobatics in its take over of the land of Palestinians. While the initial goal was to create a colonial Jewish majority in Palestine, successfully achieved for a few decades through the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and again in 1967, Zionists have more recently had to face the old new reality of Jews as a minority in their own settler-colonial state.
The Israeli government has been obsessing about the dwindling number of Jews and the rising number of Palestinians under its rule for decades. This has lead it to convene several conferences on the demographic danger Palestinians constitute to its racist colonial settler project. The first conference, sponsored by the Institute of Policy & Strategic at the Hertzilia Interdisciplinary center was inaugurated in December 2000. One of the main points identified in the 52 page conference report was the concern over the numbers needed to maintain the Jewish supremacy of Israel “the high birth-rate of Palestinian citizens of Israel brings into question the future of Israel as a Jewish State, the present demographic trends should they continue challenge the future of Israel as a Jewish State. Israel has two alternative strategies, adaptation or containment. The latter requires a long term energetic Zionist demographic policy whose political, economic, and educational effects would guarantee the Jewish character of Israel.”The conference was not some marginal affair convened by racist academics and experts. On the contrary, Israel’s current at the time and former prime ministers attended, an Israeli President, Moshe Katsav addressed the attendees. The conference was co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, The Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, The Israeli Defense Ministry, The Jewish Agency, The World Zionist Organization, The National Security Center at Haifa University, The Israeli National Security Council of The Prime Minister’s Office and on and on.
Needless to say, the two strategies the conference elaborated to alter Jewish minority rule over a majority Palestinian population failed. From the 1950s to the 1990s Israel insisted that Arab States recognize its so called “right to exist” a formula as many of you know that no other state has ever required because international law does not recognize or does not think a state can be recognized except de-facto de-jure but non has a legal “right to exist” I mean the US for example never recognized the soviet union’s right to exist and the soviet union never recognized the US’ right to exist, they just had formal recognition but no right to exist. By the 1970s when the PLO insistently called for the Palestinian people to realize their right to self-determination, Israel countered with a so-called “Israeli self-determination” as they used to call it in the seventies, this would be expressed in September 1972 by then Israeli Foreign Minister, the South African born Obri Eban or Aba Eban as he came to be known. He declared at the time that “Israeli self-determination should take moral and historical precedence over Palestinian self-termination, though it does not rule it out entirely.” Eban’s recognition was not unlike earlier statements that were made by David Ben Gurion or Haim Weitzman since the 1920s which plays the Jewish right of conquest of Palestine as superior to the Palestinians’ right of self-determination. By 2007 the Israeli government of Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu thereafter insisted that since Egypt and Jordan and the PLO, the latter as you know was transformed through the Oslo Accords from a liberation movement to a subsidiary of Israeli colonialism since all of them were forced to recognize Israel’s so-called “right to exist” as a settler colony whose legitimacy could no longer be questioned, the new task before the Palestinians and all other Arabs was to recognize Israel’s right to exist “as a Jewish State” meaning that they should recognize it as a legitimate Jewish settler colony with the right to privilege Jews racially and religiously in law and institutional practice, and this last phase, Jewish propagandists began speaking of “Jewish self-determination” rather “Israeli self-determination” as they had done in the 1970s. While we were previously told that Israeli self-determination takes precedence over Palestinian self-determination, we are now told that the Palestinians have no such rights at all. This was formalized in the nation-state law which declared “the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish People in which it fulfills its historical right to self-determination and that the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish People.” The point of the exclusivity of self-determination for the Jewish colonists and their descendants is that it must be exercised regardless of demographics, Israel had no choice but to drop its liberal democratic pretense.Herein lies, the importance of the enactment of Israel’s nation-state law, its enactment demonstrates Israel’s abandonment of the prior propaganda commitment to being a “Jewish and Democratic State” in anticipation of maintaining its illegal and racist rule over the indigenous Palestinian population in all of historic Palestine, and not only in Israel’s 48 49 borders. A population who despite Israel’s ongoing expulsion since 1948 had again come to outnumber the Jewish colonists and their descendants in Israel and in the Occupied Territories. Here the laws refer to the “Land of Israel” rather than the “State of Israel” as the Homeland of the Jewish People anticipates the Jewish colonial minority’s control over the whole of historic Palestine. Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State is the formula that several US presidents insisted Palestinians and other Arabs accept. George W. Bush and the more stridently anti-Palestinian Barack Obama both threatened Palestinians with dire consequences if they refused. The new code for that right is “Jewish self-determination”. Donald Trump’s deal of the century aims to legitimize once and for all the Zionist settler-colonial project and its right to state-sponsored racism. Israel’s leaders now accept that Jewish colonists and their descendants will forever be a minority in historic Palestine especially as prior measures to make them a majority through ethnic cleansing and expulsions are no longer available options. Not able to reduce the number of Palestinians further, Trump’s plan aims to negate categorically, the Palestinian Refugees’ right of return to their homeland guaranteed by international law by undercutting UNRWA thus ensuring that the existing majority of Palestinians over Jews in historic Palestine not increase any further. It is in light of the recognition or of the recognition that Israel will no longer be able to change the country’s demographics easily that the law was enacted. Namely, as to declare Israel’s open commitment to being a Jewish state with a Jewish minority rule, a state that is formally nondemocratic, and dispensing with the trappings of its erstwhile propaganda.
Into the deal of the century, the deal only has one rule for the Palestinian Authority which is the same rule the Oslo Accords had for the PLO, namely that the Palestinian Authority should accept the deal, then dissolve its political class and hand over its authority to its security apparatus and to Palestinian and hopefully some Arab and international businessmen. The goal of the deal like the Oslo Accords of which it is the final phase is that all the Palestinian People everywhere need is businessmen and policemen and not the end of Israeli-settler colonialism and occupation. The PA security apparatus that has killed and imprisoned Palestinians since 1994 is highly trained and appraised by the Americans. In November 1994 soon after entering Gaza, Yasir Arafat’s police killed at least thirteen unarmed Palestinians and wounded 200 for daring to demonstrate against the Oslo Accords. During his visit to Gaza, in early 1995 then US vice president Al Gore praised Arafat for setting up military tribunals to try those Palestinians opposed to Oslo. While the CIA helped the Palestinian CIA security forces in covert operations initially, the US would later come out openly as in charge of training them.
Lieutenant Keith Dayton who served as the US Security Coordinator (USSC) for the PA from December 2005 to October 2010 oversaw their training and the coup they staged against democratically elected Hamas in 2007 – a coup that failed in Gaza and was successful in the West Bank. Before coming to the West Bank, Dayton was busy fighting America’s war against the Iraqi people in 2003. He was succeeded by Lieutenant General Michael Muller who served in that capacity until 2012 and was followed by the current overseer vice-admiral Paul Bushong. The European Union in turn has been financing and training PA police for the same tasks through their EU police coordinating office for Palestinian police support, or what they call EUPOL Cops since 2006. The PA security police has been a major Israeli success and is dully credited by the Israelis for continuously preventing the majority of Palestinian resistance actions against the occupation army. Indeed even after the Palestinian Authority’s political class suspended relations with the US in December 2017, PA security chiefs continued their meetings with the CIA and their trips to Washington DC. Also after the US stopped financial aid last February to the PA political class and bureaucracy due to PA fears being sued in the US or in US courts by Americans who accuse them of responsibility for terrorist attacks, the US tried frantically to find ways to continue its financing, estimated close to 850 million US dollars since 2007 alone of the Palestinian security apparatus.
As for the business class which was instrumental in convincing Arafat in 1993 to sign Oslo: They continued to coordinate business activities with the Israelis while businessmen and pro-business intellectuals promised that the peace process would transform the Occupied Territories into Singapore, now it is Jared Kushner who is making similar promises with his deal. Amidst preparations for the deal of the century’s Bahrain conference, it was revealed by the Israeli’s online news outlet, Wala, that Israeli Army Chief of General Staff, Lieutenant Aviv Kohavi met with one Palestinian millionaire namely Bashar Al Masri two months ago in Ramallah, this is back in April to discuss the current economic situation on the West Bank. Imagine, a businessman meeting with the head of the army to negotiate business deals, another Palestinian Billionaire with multiple businesses in the occupied territories is celebrated by the Israelis as the “Rothschild of the Palestinians” we shall not identify him.
The PA’s refusal to attend the Bahrain Conference last June was not a heroic act but one of self-preservation. Knowing that the goal of the deal of the century is to force the PA political class to dissolve itself, the PA men chose not to attend. While a few Palestinian businessmen attended the Bahrain Conference, only one of them Salah Abu Mayalla was arrested by PA security after returning to the West Bank and was later released after a few hours. The rest of them stayed away from Bahrain in an apparent show of solidarity with the political class. In this light, the culmination of the Oslo Accords in the deal of the century as the final stage of the Accords has ensured two types of collaboration that will continue to secure Israel’s settler-colonial project: namely the collaboration of the Palestinian-business class with its colonial project, a collaboration which Palestinian businessmen have excelled since 1993 and from which they have reaped and continue to reap the requisite profits; and the collaboration of the erstwhile Palestinian guerrillas turned mercenaries in the guise of the PA security apparatuses with the Israeli army and enforcing the occupation and suppressing Palestinian resistance to it.
The PA political class knows very well if the Americans and the Israelis succeed in imposing the deal, Palestinian businessmen and the Palestinian security apparatus would sacrifice the PA political class and perform roles assigned to them. It is these two key elements from the Oslo Accords that will survive the deal of the century, alongside a permanent Israeli colonial settlement protected by racially separatist laws that ensure Jewish supremacist laws and privileges. The Oslo Accords inaugurated this process of liquidating the Palestinian national struggle while the deal of the century plans and hopes to conclude it, the only thing standing in its way is the ongoing Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonialism and racism that continues inside Israel in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The ongoing marches of return in Gaza and the armed resistance of the Izz Eddin Al-Qasam to Israeli invasions in Gaza, the major effort of the boycott national committee in the West Bank alongside the daily resistance demonstrations against the settler and army violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem. And the ongoing anti-racist activism inside Israel have all come together alongside the Palestinian-led global BDS movement to block the Palestinian mis-leadership embodied in the Palestinian Authority and its Israeli and American sponsors. It is the realization that the permanence of Israeli settler colonialism is no longer guaranteed that has propelled Trump’s deal of the century. The deal’s failure however, signals the permanent failure of the US and its ability to guarantee Israel’s future as the last settler colony in Asia and Africa.
Thank you.
