ON TUESDAY night, US President Donald Trump with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his side finally unveiled to the world his ‘Deal of the Century’ – a ‘deal’ that Trump has concluded only with Israel and which has been condemned by the Palestinian leadership who have pledged to fight it every inch of the way.
While Trump was boasting about his deal, the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas convened an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and in an unprecedented move West Bank officials from Hamas were invited to attend.
This joint meeting between the Palestinian Authority leaders and Hamas pledged to ‘resist the deal in all its forms’, with Abbas insisting it ‘will not pass’ as its sole aim is to end the struggle of Palestinians for their own state, and he indicated that discussions were taking place on ‘changing the role of the Palestinian Authority in accordance with resolutions taken by the PLO’.
Abbas said: ‘Palestine is not for sale. The Deal of the Century belongs to the dustbin of history.’ He added ‘This deal is the final phase of the Balfour Declaration’.
The Balfour Declaration was the pledge by the British government in 1917 to hand Palestine over to the Zionists to establish their own state.
It led in 1948 to 750,000 Palestinians, about half the population, being either expelled or driven from their land and homes by Zionist terror gangs in what has become known as the Nakba (catastrophe).
Under Trump’s deal, this monumental crime against the Palestinian people would be cemented with every Palestinian driven out or condemned to live in little more than isolated enclaves, continually policed and repressed by Israeli state forces and under constant attack from Zionist settlers.
The deal gives the official seal of approval by US imperialism to all the land grabs and occupations made by the Israeli state since 1948, including the annexation of the Jordan Valley along with all the illegal settlements across the West Bank.
A narrative has developed that Trump and Netanyahu have chosen this moment to reveal details of this deal in order to distract attention from the crisis engulfing both men – Trump facing impeachment and Netanyahu up on corruption charges.
This misses the point. Both know that this deal has been rejected with contempt and defiance by every Palestinian and indeed throughout the Arab world.
There is no way on earth that there can be any negotiated agreement on a deal that hands Palestine over completely to the Zionist state – it can only be imposed through the most extreme violence.
A brutal war to drive every Palestinian out of their country or condemn them to live in enclaves that serve as open air prison camps is the essence of the ‘Deal of the Century’.
Trump’s deal of the century is the greatest act of imperialist barbarism since the Israeli state was founded in 1948 on a mass campaign of terror sanctioned by British and world imperialism.
True to form, the modern day Balfours of the Tory party, Foreign Secretary Raab and PM Johnson, have refused to condemn the deal and maintain that it would provide a ‘two state solution’ and urged that it be given ‘genuine and fair consideration’. The British working class must not and will not stand idly by as the Israeli state gets ready to kill thousands of Palestinians.
It must tell the TUC leaders that Congress has long passed overwhelmingly motions supporting the rights of Palestinians to their own state and called for boycotts of Israeli goods.
The time has now come for action. The working class movement must be mobilised at once to give 100% support to the Palestinian people.
The TUC must tell the Tory government that unless it condemns the Trump-Netanyahu ‘Deal of the Century’, recognises the State of Palestine, and halts immediately all arms sales to Israel, the TUC will call a general strike to bring it down and bring in a workers government.
This will immediately recognise the State of Palestine and switch all arms supplies from Israel to the State of Palestine. A socialist secular state of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital, will transform the Middle East for ever.
