In recent weeks, the Trump administration has taken a series of drastic punitive actions against the Palestinian people.
They cut US assistance to UNWRA, Congressionally-authorised humanitarian development projects and programmes for the West Bank and Gaza, and ended the annual grant Congress has authorised for Palestinian hospitals operating in East Jerusalem.
In addition, the administration closed the Palestinian Mission in Washington and announced plans to redefine who is, in their view, a Palestinian refugee.
At the same time, the White House acquiesced to the passage of Israel’s “Jewish Nation-State Bill” and said nothing in opposition to Israel’s recent announcement of thousands of new settlement units, some in highly sensitive areas either in Arab East Jerusalem or deep in the heart of the West Bank.
They also let pass, without protest, Israel’s planned demolition of an entire Arab village and Palestinian homes in Jerusalem.
In a recent interview US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, after gloating over his success in moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, made clear there was a “new day” in the US-Israel relationship.
In a separate and equally revealing interview, Jared Kushner termed the Trump administration’s moves as necessary to “strip away false realities”, which involves “taking Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees’ right of return off the table”.
All of these actions, taken together, tell me the Trump administration has fully embraced the hardline world view of Israel’s Likud.
They reject not only the Palestinian right to self-determination, they also do not accept the very idea of a Palestinian people.
The plans they announced would sever the West Bank from Gaza and leave East Jerusalem and the 28 Palestinian villages trapped within the Israeli-annexed “Greater Jerusalem”.
Meanwhile, the administration’s intention to economically strangle UNWRA and end this programme means Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would not only be forced to give up their property rights and their “right of return”, they would be turned over to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to be resettled in other countries. If this Trumpian approach succeeds, the Palestinian nation would be dismembered and dispersed.
The Israelis have been given carte blanche. They get Jerusalem; an end to the “refugee problem”; the right to declare only they are entitled to self-determination; freedom to demolish and build, as they wish, in the occupied lands; and an increasingly economically deprived Palestinian population that they hope will either submit to Israel’s will or leave. This hardline Israeli rejection of Palestinians as a nation and a people with rights was supposed to end with the Oslo Accords, signed 25 years ago.
In the introduction to the Accords, Israel and the Palestinians recognised each other’s right to self-determination. What remained was finding a way to implement that mutual recognition, but succeeding US administrations failed miserably in pressing the parties to implement the Accords.
The situation went from bad to worse and Israeli politics became more hardline.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority became an economic dependency and a security force without any real control over its territory, land or ability to develop.
Then the peace process died, an unannounced and unacknowledged death. Only the fiction of a process remained.
Now, with the Trump administration, the mask is off and the fiction is revealed.
As it takes shape, Trump’s “ultimate deal” appears to be not a formula for a just peace, but a forced Palestinian acquiescence to the Zionist vision for Palestine.
But not so fast. Despite the dysfunctional state of the Palestinian political order, the will of the Palestinian people lives on.
It wasn’t the PLO, the Palestinian Authority or UNWRA that created and sustained Palestinian national aspirations, but the people themselves. Those who ignore either their will or the fact that the issue of Palestine, for the Arab people, remains “the wound in the heart that never healed” should beware of the consequences of their ignorance.