Ropes of Sand

While Donald Trump lords it in London posing as a great statesman in front of the Queen and Mrs May his dream of winning a Nobel Peace Prize is fading fast in the face of mounting Arab resistance to what the chief American warlord still calls the “deal of the century”.

            Trump really shouldn’t have bothered in the first place if the details of the American “peace plan” that have appeared in the Israeli press are true. His “deal” gives the Zionists everything they want and more. The Palestinians get nothing apart from some monetary compensation funded by the feudal Arab oil sheikhs as part of their effort to build an anti-Iranian front in the Middle East. While some of the princes of oil, including the disgraced Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, were prepared to support Trump’s surrender plan others are clearly having second thoughts.

The Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the refugee camps are boycotting the talks. Few others have shown any enthusiasm for the “Peace to Prosperity” conference in Bahrain which the Americans hoped would kick off the first stage of the Trump “deal” in June. Now even the future direction of the major beneficiary, Israel, has been thrown into doubt as Israel gears up for a second general election after the first one undermined Benyamin Netanyahu’s efforts to form a new coalition in April.

Trump’s unilateral recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of Arab East Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights was designed to boost Netanyahu’s chances in the spring election. In actual fact the American card counted for little in elections that revolved around the turf war between Netanyahu’s Likud bloc and the new Blue and White front led by General Benny Gantz.  

 “The citizens of Israel know we are going to elections only because Bibi [Netanyahu] wants to save himself,” Gantz says alluding to Netanyahu’s apparent efforts to scupper pending graft indictments against him. “Netanyahu could have returned the mandate to the president, and we would have formed a government. Why is he not doing that?”

            The Blue and Whites, who are named after the colours of the Israeli flag, style themselves as “centrists” and “liberals”. In fact their platform differs little from Likud’s long-standing right-wing Zionist agenda. Whether a Gantz-led coalition would continue where Netanyahu left off is anyone’s guess.

The social-democratic parties which once dominated Israeli politics are now amongst the also-rans. For the first time Labour and Meretz were pipped at the polls by the communists who have always campaigned for the restoration of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.

Now the communist-led Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and three Israeli Arab parties are planning to reunite and run once again, like in 2015, as a single slate in the forthcoming elections scheduled in September.

            Israeli politicians across spectrum are now back on the campaign trail for an election whose outcome no-one can predict. One thing’s for sure though – Trump’s “deal of the century” is going nowhere.