The New Palestine in Kerry's Thinking

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

Since 1967, Americans have made thousands of fact-finding and negotiating tours across the Arab-Islamic region searching for a settlement to the Palestinian cause, and they have not grown weary — their tours continue still. Recently the name of John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, has come to the fore, appearing highly energetic, active, and determined to establish a new framework agreed upon by the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, as a sign of a new horizon toward a final settlement. Kerry has not yet fully succeeded, but he appears to have smoothed over certain matters and obstacles, and opened a door toward a new agreement resembling the Oslo Accords.

The Americans’ History with the Palestinians

American intervention in the Palestinian question began at the end of the nineteenth century, when the American ambassador pressured the Sublime Porte in Constantinople to leak thousands of dunams of agricultural land in Palestine to Jews, and this continued afterward, reaching a peak of arrogance and impudence under American President Harry Truman, who took over from Britain’s role in Judaizing Palestine, insisting on the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews from around the world to Palestine. France entered the picture in supporting Israel after its establishment, but the Americans took their place after the June 1967 war, and began offering every kind of economic, security, military, diplomatic, and political support to Israel at the expense of Palestinians and Arabs. America enabled Israel’s grip on the Arabs’ necks, and helped forcefully rout them militarily on the battlefield. What matters is that Palestinians have never seen any good from the Americans, and the standing of the Palestinian cause has continued to deteriorate with every American intervention, and it has become clear over time that the Americans are neither an arbiter nor a mediator, but a party to the equation. They are enemies of the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, entirely and forcefully biased toward the Israelis. This is why Palestine has continued shrinking over time, both in area and in the numbers of Palestinians the various proposed solutions might actually cover.

The Americans offered financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority, but this assistance has always been, and remains, conditional on political concessions, and was never once intended to instill strength in Palestinians’ limbs to face challenges.

The New Palestine in Kerry’s Thinking

Palestine was carved out of Greater Syria in the colonial Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, and this was codified internationally in 1922 in the Mandate instrument issued by the League of Nations, and so Greater Syria and its people shrank, as the Palestinian people was cast out to face its fate alone, separate from the people of Greater Syria in Jordan, Lebanon, and lesser Syria. The United Nations then gave the Palestinians 44% of the area of Mandatory Palestine (that is, the Palestine whose borders British colonialism drew) and gave the Jews 53%, even though Jews constituted only about a quarter of the country’s population in 1947. The Palestinians’ share shrank to about 23% after the 1948 war and the defeat of the Arab armies, without the United Nations lifting a finger in the Palestinians’ defense. The area then shrank a further 1.5% after the King of Jordan, in the armistice agreement, ceded part of the Triangle area to Israel, in order to widen Israel’s narrow waist. Then another contraction occurred after the 1956 war, when Israel seized the neutral zone between Palestine and Sinai and expelled its Bedouin inhabitants.

The greatest concession was made by the Palestinians themselves in the Oslo Accords signed in 1993. Palestinians did not merely shrink the area of Palestine — they confined it entirely to the territory occupied in 1967, and began using the expression “the Palestinian territories” or “the two halves of the homeland” to refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, thereby acknowledging that the territory occupied in ‘48 was no longer Palestinian.

Kerry now comes with something even worse than this Palestinian confinement. He demands Palestinians, and certainly the Arabs with them, recognize the “Jewishness” of the state. This means Palestine is Jewish, or at least those areas now referred to as Israel. And since it is so, there are no Islamic or Christian holy sites in Israel, and this recognition opens the way for Israel to demolish Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre under international legal cover, opens the way for Israel to expel the Palestinians steadfastly remaining on their land in the territory occupied in ‘48, and annuls the refugees’ right of return, forever. In addition, Kerry strips the Jordan Valley from the area of the West Bank, which amounts to about 2,000 square kilometers, or a third of the West Bank, and also carves out about 80% of the area of land constituting the settlements’ surrounding zone.

With legal cover. In this project of his, Kerry does not merely assault the land — he assaults the very existence of the people as well. He is not content with changing the land’s political identity to make it exclusively Jewish-Israeli, but also works to annul the identity of the Palestinian people and hunt it down, so that it acquires other identities that annul its rights, authenticity, history, and national belonging. He tries to accomplish what Israel, the Western states, and the Arab regimes have failed to accomplish since the establishment of the state of Israel.

Israeli Security and Palestinian Security

In all their tours of the region, the Americans have consistently made Israeli security a priority over various other issues, always insisting that Arabs must abide by and be mindful of Israeli security requirements, or else lose American aid and bring American anger upon themselves. This is why we have found, over time, Arab armies whose function has shifted from defending Arab homelands and repelling aggression to preserving the enemy’s security and keeping Arab land outside Arab sovereignty. The Jordanian army, for example, stands guard over Israel’s eastern border, even though it was the Jordanian regime that was defeated in 1967 and lost the West Bank. The Egyptian army, for its part, has accepted remaining outside Sinai, ceding Egyptian sovereignty over it, and waiting for Israeli permission to operate militarily inside Sinai if the need arises, as is happening now.

In all their talks with the Palestinians, there is American insistence that Palestinians devote further efforts to defending Israeli security, and Palestinians spare no effort in fulfilling their obligations toward Israeli security. Or, as the president of the Palestinian Authority put it, the abiding concern of the Palestinian security apparatuses is defending Israeli security.

Who is the aggressor? Israel is the constant aggressor, together with the United States, which offers it every kind of support. It is the Palestinians who need security, who need protection from continuous Israeli aggression, not the other way around. Despite this, no one speaks of Palestinian security, neither Palestinian leaders nor Arab leaders, and it has become taken for granted that there is no security for Palestinians, and that their security, if it exists at all, can only be achieved through their defense of Israeli security — that is, only after they have fully accepted that all right belongs to Israel and no rights belong to Palestinians, and that security belongs only to the rights-holders, not to those without rights. Accordingly, Kerry’s project does not merely involve the Palestinian security apparatuses continuing to carry out their duties toward Israel, but also encompasses freedom of expression, movement, assembly, and even whispering and insinuation. That is, it will become one of the Palestinian Authority’s tasks to put an end to freedom of expression, treating anyone who speaks or writes against Israel as an inciter and bringing them to trial. It also means banning sit-ins and protests, such as the Friday marches against the wall, and sit-ins demanding the release of prisoners. In other words, Palestinians must be placed in foul cages of total erasure and annulment — consistent with the earlier clause on annulling the people alongside the Judaization of the land.

The Right of Return

Although the Western states never stop talking about human rights under despotic regimes, they do not want to recognize the Palestinians’ right of return. These are states that always defend refugees’ right of return — except the right of Palestinian refugees. Perhaps they see Palestinians as not being refugees, or not being human. Yet these same states spoke, in Security Council Resolution 242, of a “just settlement” of the refugee problem, without specifying who these refugees actually are. Israel, at the time, interpreted this clause as including the Jewish refugees who left Arab states, preferring to emigrate to Israel. This interpretation is being revived with Kerry’s tours, as Israel demands compensation for the Jews who emigrated, or the displacement of Palestinians to where the Jews once lived, considering this reasonable compensation for them.

Neither Kerry nor anyone else proposes a mutual right of return. If Jews of Arab origin in Israel are refugees, then it should be possible for them to return to the Arab countries and hand over what they now claim to own to Palestinian refugees. In other words, why shouldn’t the solution be return in exchange for return, rather than compensation in exchange for compensation?

It does not seem Kerry is trying merely to liquidate the Palestinian cause — he is working to liquidate the Palestinian people as well, to erase the Palestinian people. Perhaps the Americans learned the Arab proverb saying “no right is lost as long as someone demands it,” and so became convinced that fully settling matters in Israel’s favor requires erasing the Palestinian people by scattering it across the earth and affirming the Jewishness of the state of Israel.

Where Are Palestinians and Arabs in the Face of Kerry’s Proposal?

They are not searching for solutions — they are searching for the land, and for the erasure of the people. The problem is that no Arab or Palestinian has appeared to say no to Kerry, and to put matters back in their proper, just place. No one has even accurately informed the people of the ideas Kerry brings, leaving Arabs and Palestinians to learn of Kerry’s plans from Israelis and Americans instead. This is part of the Arab and Palestinian betrayal that always works to keep the people in a state of informational blindness, leaving it exposed to the media’s own interpretations and maneuvers. We have not heard a single Palestinian among the negotiating teams call for the right of return, or insist on Palestinian security — all we have seen and heard is confined to feeble media statements carrying no information at all.

It is clear the Palestinian leadership, along with the leaderships of the Arab regimes, is complicit with the Americans, and that its political conduct will not differ from what came before — all these Arab parties will accept further insults and offer further concessions, and the people of Palestine will always be the one to pay the price.

The solution is for the Palestinian people to stand up defending itself, and if it does not forge for itself the arm of steadfastness and defiance, no one will forge it for them. The Palestinian leaderships have crossed every red line, becoming part of the equation hostile to the Palestinian people, and unfortunately, that steadfast, patient Palestinian people, which endured hardships and pains, no longer exists now — it has no choice but to return to itself, drawing its sword anew, if it wants its rights to be respected.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “فلسطين الجديدة في أفكار كيري” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.