On Tuesday, January 28th, the United States announced its latest “peace plan” for the Palestinian people in a characteristic display of arrogant imperialist hubris. Like all such “peace plans” put forth by the US, the plan offered no meaningful concessions from the Israeli side. Yet the Trump administration, in typical shady salesman style, has pushed it as “the Deal of the Century”, even having the chutzpah to mock and insult the entire Palestinian people prior to their even having a chance to reject this latest non-solution.
All of this in spite of the fact that the entire conflict is the result of the Zionist state being built via settler-colonial violence against the Indigenous Palestinian population, and in spite of the fact that an apartheid state of affairs persists on their land to this day. The Palestinian people are expected to jump with joy every time the head imperialist power “offers” them “peace” in the form of total surrender to Zionist colonization, and of course are vilified for any resistance, including non-violent resistance which they are not obligated to restrain themselves to.
In response to being offered nothing again, this time without a single Palestinian representative even to serve as a fig leaf for US imperialism’s persistent support for Zionist colonization, the Palestinian Authority has reportedly overturned the 1995 Oslo Accords which serve as the legal basis for the fraudulent “peace process” which has continued ever since.
The Palestinian people have long seen that the Zionist state has no interest in accepting even the most modest peaceful and legalistic compromise which would allow the Palestinian people to live in peace and dignity alongside those that colonized them. All attempts at achieving any sort of decolonization of any part of Palestine through peaceful negotiations have proven fruitless time and again.
The Palestinian left has long affirmed these facts, and if the authorities who supposedly represent the Palestinian people have at last been forced to agree, this vindicates the left’s criticisms of the Palestinian Authority. The cancellation of the Oslo Accords would represent a bare minimum of popular representation, and the first step for the Palestinians to articulate on the world stage a vision for their place in the 21st century beyond being residents of a Bantustan.
Any remaining “peace camp” which exists in Israeli society with any real and sincere commitment to peace will certainly acknowledge this. Even if the entire Israeli Jewish population should long for peace with all of their hearts, scream for it at the top of their lungs, even face down the police demanding it at personal risk, it is a long-established fact that the Zionist authorities refuse any peace save for the peaceful surrender of any Arabs who dare resist their ongoing illegal and oppressive occupation of Palestine.
When the Israeli politician Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated for his role in the Oslo Accords, the killer himself identified a conspiracy behind him the Zionist state was “afraid” to pursue those responsible. It later came that the Israeli intelligence services had a direct hand in encouraging the assassination (see Dan and Eisenberg’s “Crimes d’État: l’assassinat de Rabin, les attentats”).
In a country such as the US, where a significant portion of the population is still led to believe that Israel offers peace to the Palestinian people who reject it for no reason, it is the bare minimum duty for those interested in peace in the Middle East region to ceaselessly undermine this propaganda line with the truth of the matter: the Israeli state has never wanted or accepted the idea of real peace negotiations with the Palestinians under any circumstances. All Palestinian resistance has been resistance to a campaign which seeks to deny them their most basic rights. The fact that US imperialism arrogantly thinks it can force such an unworkable apartheid “solution” as Trump’s laughably named “Peace to Prosperity” plan is a testament to the widespread ignorance about the Palestinian struggle which persists.
All revolutionary, democratic, and pro-peace forces in the US must unconditionally condemn the Zionist project for what it is: a settler-colonial project born, like the US itself, from genocidal violence by a foreign population against the Indigenous. We must call out Israeli apartheid by name, and defend the Palestinian right to resist this apartheid just as the peoples of Azania did in the 20th century. We must work with Palestinians here and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their occupied homeland in order to expose the lies of Zionist propaganda and make possible the self-liberation of the Palestinian people, from the river to the sea.
Struggle for a New World 