The main criticism of Donald Trump’s declaration recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has been that it threatens to provoke Muslim rage in response.

Commentators have fixated on the prospect of Muslim violence, while continuing to overlook the decades of actualized violence endured by Palestinians (Christian and Muslim). They focus on the inflammation, while neglecting the injury that produces it.

Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 violated a cardinal rule in international law: the prohibition on acquiring territory through military force, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations. The UN Security Council has stated that Israel’s efforts to alter the status of Jerusalem “have no legal validity and constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

In 1980, the Security Council called on all states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from Jerusalem — an expression of the general principle that no state should accord legitimacy to situations created through serious breaches of international law.

This is the fundamental problem with Trump’s Jerusalem declaration: not that it risks igniting Muslim passions, but that it brazenly torches basic norms of international justice.

And yet, Canadian media has routinely failed to mention the essential fact that Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem is illegal (and not simply “unrecognized” by most of the international community).

“There is no better way to gauge whether grievances, demands, or one side’s ‘facts’ are valid than by testing their validity against the rules and standards of international law,” note foreign policy scholar Howard Friel and international law professor Richard Falk. The overwhelming tendency in media to ignore international law “pre-empts any assessment of the legality of Israel’s policies in the Palestinian territories … prejudicing coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict to the detriment of Palestinian rights and a comprehensive peace.”

Under international law, Israel’s main obligation as an occupying power is to protect the Palestinian communities under its power. But instead of protecting Palestinians, Israel has steadily dispossessed them.

According to Bimkom, an organization of Israeli planners and architects, Israel’s “planning and development policy in [Jerusalem] aims at ensuring a Jewish majority in the city by designating the vast majority of available areas in East Jerusalem for the Jewish population.”

Israel has revoked the residency permits of more than 14,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites since 1967, expelling Palestinians from a city their families have inhabited for centuries. Only 13 per cent of land in East Jerusalem is allocated for Palestinian neighbourhoods; 35 per cent has been confiscated for Israeli settlements, which now house more than 200,000 settlers.

Since 2004, Israel has demolished more than 700 Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, leaving more than 2,500 people homeless. At least 120 Palestinian institutions have been shut down by Israel in Jerusalem since 1967, including kindergartens, charities, and the Arab Studies Society.

Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations have meticulously documented the progressive erasure of Palestinians from Jerusalem. But this reality has received little coverage or analysis in Canadian media. While Canadians have been shown copious photos of Palestinians engaged in angry protest over the last few days, we see few images of the regular abuses that Palestinians experience under occupation.

“Because the reality of what Israel is doing is only occasionally glimpsed, when violence breaks out many people around the world assume this is just the reaction of Palestinians who will never accept Israel’s existence,” observes veteran journalist John Lyons, former Middle East correspondent for The Australian.

This year marked the 50th anniversary of the occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza: a milestone that attracted minimal attention in Canadian media. And even in this scarce coverage, Palestinian perspectives have been marginalized. A CBC Radio retrospective on the Six-Day War that initiated the occupation, for example, featured four Israeli interviewees — but not even one Palestinian.

Palestinians are rendered almost invisible, except when they reinforce stereotypes of Muslim irrationality and irascibility — while the reasons for Palestinians’ anger, frustration, and despair remain hidden from sight.

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from ‘Secondly,’” writes Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti, in his memoir I Saw Ramallah. “Start your story with ‘Secondly,’ and the arrows of the [Indigenous peoples] are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victim … It is enough to start the story with ‘Secondly,’ for my grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon her victim.”

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As long as we start with “Secondly,” we cannot arrive at justice or peace.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst, and writes in the Star every other Thursday.

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