Day of rage

The decision by US President Donald Trump to accept Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was never likely to be taken quietly. Palestinian groups called for Friday to be marked as the ‘Day of Rage’. The global response did not disappoint. Large protests were held all over the world, including Pakistan. In Palestine, the Israeli army showed its brutality by killing two protesters and injuring dozens of others. This was after Hamas urged Palestinians to abandon peace efforts and launch a new uprising against Israel. Whether a new Intifada is possible is a much more difficult question. We know that Palestine’s traditional allies in the Middle East have now reconciled with Israel – and in some ways, seem to be doing its bidding. Focusing on the protests on the US is not enough. In earlier times, such an announcement would have triggered widespread condemnation from the heads of Middle Eastern states and the non-aligned countries. There would be a chance of some countries announcing diplomatic boycotts of the US. Not today. Much of this is a product of the re-alignments in the Middle East that took place before and after Trump’s visit and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s frequent visits to the region.

Trump’s decision is certainly a terrible one, but it is one rooted in this calculated logic. The protests on the street are inconsequential. A new Palestinian Intifada would not mean anything. There will be little support for Palestine diplomatically in the current environment. This makes the task of the hundreds of thousands around the globe who got together to express their outrage over the decision to accept Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital much harder, although the numbers of protesters that showed up is encouraging. The colonial occupation of the country remains a sore point for most of those who still harbour hope for a just world. But we are entering a new era of US militarism despite whatever Trump may have promised on the election trail. Two dead is nothing in the larger schemata of Israeli brutality against Palestine. The fear is that no pressure from the global public is going to be enough to force a serious policy shift in Washington. This leaves Palestine in a precarious state, where fig leaves offered such as Hamas’s tentative acceptance of the right of Israel to exist have been rendered meaningless. Decades of US policy to maintain a tricky peace between Israel and Palestine have been reversed, and the future remains difficult to predict. It seems that a chaos plan is in place for the Middle East – and Palestine will be one of the staging grounds.