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In January, Donald Trump released his vision for Middle East peace, hailing his plan as the “deal of the century.” In reality, the plan is a “deal” for one side only, granting every demand extremist right-wing Israelis have ever made — bar expulsion. It was drafted by administration officials with long-standing support for Israeli settlements, without Palestinian input, and offered Palestinians Bantustan-like enclaves in the West Bank The deal is a list of Israeli exemptions from war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel thus gained from the formula in which violations that are not immediately held to account slowly turn to norms by which to live. The Deal of the Century is the expected outcome of ignoring Israel’s long-standing violations of international law. It denies Palestinian refugees their right of return, enshrined in UN Resolution 194 and affirmed by the UN General Assembly every year since 1949, including multiple subsequent resolutions to that effect. The deal prevents Palestinian statehood. The Palestinian state that it does talk about is fraudulent and fake. It keeps in place the exact same settlements that are an outcome of colonial conquest, and actively obstructs any form of meaningful state sovereignty.

Entity Without Sovereignty According to the UN, settlements are part of the architecture of Israel’s war crimes that destroy the conditions of Palestinian life (whether of natural resources or land) and, in their own language, “deny Palestinians the basis for a real statehood and a viable economy.” There is in fact no change from the ongoing apartheid and colonialist policies Israel has implemented since its establishment: maximum land and minimum Palestinians. This explains the relative apathy with which Israeli society has reacted to the deal, which is . As Rabin made clear to the Israeli public in a speech in the Knesset on October 5, 1995: “We view a permanent solution [as involving] a Palestinian entity which is less than a state”. That’s exactly how Israel developed the notion of a Palestinian “entity” devoid of sovereignty. To the Israeli public, the deal is not presented as withdrawal from territory, but rather the ridding of its demographic and administrative burdens over Palestinians. The Israeli media has thus accurately presented Trump’s plan as continuous with the occupation, an extension of old Israeli plans to promote settlements in the midst of large Palestinian population centers.

Two Fundamentalisms If the Israeli political establishment under Labour Zionists had seemed — albeit in contradiction to the facts on the ground — to be somewhat restrained in public by questions of international legitimacy, the right wing always sought to fortify territorial conquest by recourse to claims of Jewish historical and moral rights. Now, the right wing has won the national argument. The current national consensus expresses a new convergence both in word and deed between secular Zionist fundamentalists and religious Zionist fundamentalist over the question of annexation and expropriation of vast amounts of occupied Palestinian land. Trump’s Deal of the Century, therefore, represents the success of a settler-colonial project that seeks to substitute the settler for the native. A gift from the United States to its Middle Eastern ally, it formalizes Israeli impunity for its international crimes. It is not a peace deal but rather a certificate of appreciation granted by the United States to Israel’s colonial project — a project that has been morally and legally condemned in various international and human rights forums around the world for many years. Palestinians are nowhere to be seen in a plan that determines their fate and their future. For the deal constitutes a political end for the Palestinian people and their national narrative. It orders them to totally surrender to a project that is responsible for the many tragedies that have befallen them. The settlement of the refugees in their host countries embodies political liquidation in its most striking form, and presents the Palestine question as one of mere individual material existence under minimal conditions. Such a plan requires no Palestinian consent: it’s just imposed on Palestinians unilaterally because they now seem too divided and too weak to resist it — and Arab regimes privately applaud.