U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan to alter the position of the West Bank contravenes international law and only serves to help both he and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to be re-elected.
They knew the Palestinians would reject it, so why did they announce it? The deal is an elephant in the room and simply to blame the Palestinians. It was announced to fuel the fire of Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Trump’s so-called “Deal of the Century” has already left no room for Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian Territories to manoeuvre. Trump’s deal pushed and united the Palestinians to reject it and they have already expanded their non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation as thousands of Palestinians held protests in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, also called Trump’s Middle East plan the “slap of the century”.
The Palestinian President invited representatives from all political factions including Hamas and Islamic Jihad to his office in Ramallah in the occupied territories. It has been unusual to invite these representatives to his office since the Palestinian division. The Palestinians, however, had already stopped communications with Trump’s administration since the recognition of Jerusalem as a capital for Israel on 6 December 2017.
Read the article by Ibrahim Natil on Independent Australia.