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Last week, President Trump announced that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocate the American embassy there. Jerusalem has long been a site of Israeli oppression against Palestinians. As the Israeli human rights group B’tselem explains, Trump claims Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, but “Israel has never recognized Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents — the people whose land the state annexed unilaterally and unlawfully.” During the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing campaign through which the Israeli state was created, Israel took control of West Jerusalem. Twenty years later, it began its occupation East Jerusalem and, in 1973, mandated a 73 to 26 percent demographic advantage for Jewish residents. Since then, 280,000 settlers have illegally moved in, and Israel has stripped 14,500 Palestinians of their residency rights, made it prohibitively difficult for the Palestinians who remain to get building permits, enacted discriminatory budgets, and provided municipal services unequally. But the city has long been the center of Palestinian life and Israel has no sovereignty over it under international law. In this respect, Trump’s decision amounts to “recognition from those who do not own to those who do not deserve,” in the words of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights. For the Palestinian Youth Movement, the decision is “tantamount to spitting in the face of our people and decades-long anti-colonial struggle and even constitute[s] a form of colonial incitement,” a “symbolic coup-de-grace towards Palestinian assertion of our rightful self-determination and agency over our shared social, cultural and historical heritage.” The UN Security Council denounced Trump’s decision. The Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq notes that the “recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel violates the inalienable Palestinian right to self-determination” while the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights points out that it is a “blatant breach of UN resolutions 476, 478, and 181 and undermines the rights of the Palestinian people.” More than 130 American Jewish Studies scholars signed a petition condemning the US government for “appear[ing] to endorse sole Jewish proprietorship over Jerusalem.” The document notes that “Jerusalem is of immense religious and thus emotional significance to Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike . . . We hope one day to see a world in which all inhabitants of the land enjoy equal access to the city’s cultural and material resources.” Palestinians have launched mass protests in response to Trump’s move. Israeli forces have bombed Gaza, killing two, and wounding approximately one hundred Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Despite strong opposition, the United States seems unlikely to reverse its decision. It believes that recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital will finally quash Palestinian resistance, thereby bolstering the regional position of America and its partners.

US-Managed Colonization The Jerusalem decision isn’t just an example of Trump’s wildly destructive leadership but an outcome of longstanding American strategy. In fact, Democrats have been pushing for this move for more than twenty-five years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both came into office saying they supported the decision, and, in 1995, Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, which mandated that the United States move its embassy to Jerusalem. Thirty-two Democrats, including Joe Biden and John Kerry, cosponsored the bill. In June of this year, the Senate voted 90-0 to reaffirm the 1995 law and to call on the president to follow its provisions. Prominent Democrats like Cory Booker, Ben Cardin, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Chuck Schumer co-sponsored the resolution and Bernie Sanders voted in favor of the legislation. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, criticized the president in October for his indecision over the issue and now claims he advised Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital.” In this regard, the Jerusalem declaration represents another instance of bipartisan support for Israeli settler colonialism. The US government provided significant support to Israel prior to 1967, but that year’s war consecrated the relationship. Since then, Israel has served as an invaluable proxy for the American state, providing mercenary services against Arab nationalism, Middle Eastern leftists, Soviet allies in the region and beyond, and any force considered a barrier to American capital. Israel has also become a lucrative arms market for US firms, and the ruling classes of both nations are so deeply enmeshed in sectors such as technology and security that it’s difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. Put simply, Israel could not have committed its innumerable crimes against the Palestinians and others in the region at any approaching the scale that it has without the United States underwriting it financially, military, and politically. At the end of the Cold War, American and Israeli capitalists and politicians decided to integrate Israel into the regional order. For that to happen, they would have to put the Palestinian question to rest. The United States embarked on this mandate through what has been misleadingly named a “peace process.” The 1993 Oslo Accords were the height of this endeavor. This agreement put off the issues of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees’ right of return to an unspecified date and gave Palestinians only limited sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank. It assigned the administration of these territories to the Palestinian Authority (PA), a creation of Oslo. As Mandy Turner writes, the PA is “a non-sovereign entity whose existence is subject to continuous negotiations with its occupier, Israel,” as well as with international donors unaccountable to Palestinians, making it “party to a complex process of co-optation while Israel continued its colonial practices.” The PA, Turner shows, has frequently fulfilled both Israeli and American wishes, notably by suppressing Palestinian resistance. In the years after Oslo, the number of Israelis illegally settled in the West Bank — including East Jerusalem — has more than doubled. Gaza has been largely reduced to a prison camp where Israel has slaughters thousands, and Palestinian citizens of Israel face systemic discrimination. The violence inherent in all these relationships underlines the fact that “peace” is a misnomer: better to think of the process as one more phase of colonization. As Rashid Khalidi documents in Brokers of Deceit, the United States has not stayed neutral in talks between Palestine and Israel but has acted as “Israel’s lawyer.” US politicians, he writes, have abided by “domestic politics and the politics of big oil and the big arms industry, all of which favored maintenance of a status quo predicated on preventing a just and peaceful resolution” in Palestine-Israel. From this perspective, Trump’s assertion that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel isn’t a threat to the peace process: it represents its logical conclusion.