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Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the apartheid Israeli state not only leaves Palestinians with no other avenue to justice than the use of violence, but also paints a target on the back of every American abroad.

Israel seized East Jerusalem alongside the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in 1967. It’s occupation of these territories constituting a flagrant violation of international law, thus in normalizing the illegal seizure and occupation of Palestinian land, the United States is validating an Israeli war crime, and, in doing so, makes a mockery of international laws and norms that are guided by the Geneva Convention.

Moreover, this is a move that not only sabotages whatever slimmer of the hope the now non-existent peace process held, but also serves no one’s benefit. It neither helps the Palestinians or Israel, and nor does it serve any broader strategy. In other words, it’s a move without a cause, a decision absent any coherent or reasonable logic.

Practically the entire international community has condemned the decision. The United Nations, European and Arab leaders have each issued stern warnings against Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Even a majority of Americans reject the move with arecent survey from showing that 63 percent of Americans oppose it, against a mere 31 percent who support it, and those who argue Trump is merely playing this to his white evangelical Christian base are not supported by polls that show barely half of them support moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

“The peace process — whatever that is and whatever is left of it — was built on agreements that included a certain set of American guarantees about how the U.S. would approach final status issues, including the question of Jerusalem,” stated Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. “This is something that no American president has dared to do before, because of the kind of pushback that they would receive in the region.”

Responding to Trump’s dangerously delusional decision, the US State Department has directed its embassies around the world to boost security, warning of likely violence in the days ahead.

Predictably, Western media will now fix its attention on the Palestinian and Arab response, hoping that their predictions and expectations of violence, underpinned by anti-Muslim and anti-Arab negative stereotypes and tropes, will produce more page clicks, eyeballs, and social media shares.

What will be ignored, like always, is the 70 years of daily violence carried out by the Israeli state against Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. The media will ignore that three-quarters of a million Palestinians have been eternally displaced; more than 500 Palestinian villages have been ethnically cleansed; more than 30,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished; nearly one million Palestinians have been incarcerated by their occupiers; and that 5 million Palestinians live under a brutal Israeli military occupation that is supported by 700,000 heavily armed Israeli settlers.

The media will also ignore the socio-economic violence that living under occupation and apartheid imparts on the Palestinian people, resulting in lower health, education, income and employment outcomes. It will also ignore the Warsaw ghetto like conditions that 2 million Palestinians in Gaza are permanently caged to, with the United Nations declaring the enclave, or rather “open air prison,” to be unlivable within 2 years.

In short, when Palestinians aren’t being segregated, humiliated, and denied freedom of movement, they’re being arrested, detained, tortured, starved and bombed. This has been their plight for 70 years, a plight made worse by a dishonest and untrustworthy broker – the United States of America – which has for the better part of the last half century done nothing to halt the Israeli colonial expansion project.

While the Palestinians have long been completely forsaken by the international community, Trump’s upheaval of the status quo promises to increase the sense of betrayal, humiliation, frustration, and hopelessness Palestinians and the Arab world writ large feels towards the Western world, but more so than ever before, they will fixate their anger towards the United States.

In validating Israel’s illegal seizure of Jerusalem, Trump has given credibility to narratives that posit that not only is the West at war with Islam, but also the “war” is being led by the “Crusader-Zionist” alliance.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh described Trump’s decision as a “flagrant aggression,” adding that it is “an uncalculated gamble that will know no limit to the Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim reaction. We callon stopping this decision fully because this will usher in the beginning of a time of terrible transformations, not just on the Palestinian level but on the region as a whole. This decision means the official announcement of the end of the peace process."

History will mark today as the day Trump and the United States came to be remembered for officially killing the peace process and the Palestinian liberation movement.

*(Image credit: Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv/ flickr)