Pallestine's plight

Surprise: Jared isn't paving a peace path in the Middle East.

[A]fter two and a half decades of being mugged at the negotiating table, the Palestinians have nothing to show for the moribund "peace process". No state. No sovereignty. No Jerusalem. No human rights. No borders (let alone control of borders). No end to the mushrooming illegal Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land or the more than a half century of Israeli military rule over Palestinians.

Meanwhile, water and other resources are siphoned to the Israeli state and settlers as Israel today pushes the idea of officially annexing swaths of the occupied West Bank. And of course, despite promises to connect Gaza and the West Bank, the two territories have remained divided - with Gaza subject to a brutal siege and periodic pulverisation by Israeli and American munitions.

In essence, Palestinians live under a form of apartheid with the timid stamp of Palestinian approval from the unelected Palestinian "Authority", itself a pseudo-entity created by the Americans and Israelis to outsource the burden of keeping the restive Palestinian natives in their place.

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Enter two infamous slumlords (and sons of slumlords): Donald Trump and Jared Kushner. These scions of sketchy New York real estate empires are currently doing business out of the White House, and Kushner the younger has been put in charge of Middle East peace, where he has been pimping something called the "deal of the century".

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If only the Palestinians problems were limited to being duped into an overpriced lease for a shoebox apartment in the East village with shoddy renovations, no gas or heat, broken appliances and vermin infestations. But the scale of the real estate swindle the Palestinians are being dragged into is much greater, as is the human tragedy that will follow in its wake.

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[Jared's "deal of the century" makes] no mention of the return of Palestinian refugees (homeless since 1948) to a quasi-statelet of "New Palestine". Of course, Palestinians will be ignored when they insist they would be perfectly happy with "old" Palestine (ie, "historic Palestine").

Second, Palestinians get no control of their own borders and no army but must pay the Israeli army a fee to protect their reservation, err, territory.

Third, Palestinians will not get back any Palestinian land currently occupied by hundreds of thousands of illegal Israeli settlers but will instead receive a slice of land donated by the dictator of Egypt, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. No matter that this land swap will see the Palestinians give up their rich ancestral agricultural lands in the West Bank for a slice of the Sinai Desert. Oh yeah, and the Palestinians will apparently have to pay rent to the Egyptians for this piece of prime real estate.

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Considering the way that the Trumps and Kushners have always done business, however, it's not at all surprising to see how ungenerous the deal is for the Palestinians. For only slumlords could come up with a deal whose terms are so mean-spirited, so insulting, so falsely advertised. And only slumlords like the Trumps and Kushners know how to prey on the susceptible customer, in this case, a stateless nation of refugees and their descendants.

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Then, there are the foreign cosponsors of the deal in the form of two long-standing "democracies" and the closest regional allies of the United States - the absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia under the Yemeni-butchering, journalist-dismembering Crown Prince MBS; and the apartheid state of Israel under the extreme right-wing demagogue Benjamin Netanyahu.

With this dream team drafting up the Palestinians' fate, is it any surprise that the future looks nightmarish? Perhaps the only hope for us to wake up before it is too late is the shifting opinion of millions of Americans who increasingly see the US one-sided support of a deeply flawed Israeli regime to be a hindrance to peace.

  alJazeera