Israeli peace camp should use language Trump understands: Private property
With President Donald Trump in the White House, the Israeli peace camp should focus its strategy on highlighting the theft of Palestinian lands for settlement construction.
The White House's recent contention that the existing Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are not an impediment to peace should, it would seem, allay the concerns of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he licks his wounds after the forcible evacuation of Israeli settlers Feb. 1-2 from the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona. After all, that is exactly what Netanyahu has been insisting for years about the settlements. Now, finally, there is a White House occupant after his own heart — a real estate mogul who doesn’t understand how a construction project can be a bad thing.
Like Netanyahu, President Donald Trump is apparently not bothered by the reality that some 2.5 million Muslims have been living for 50 years under a discriminatory occupation. Netanyahu’s problem, however, is that right-wingers, especially those involved in real estate, including Trump, have a red line that must not be crossed under any circumstances: appropriation of someone else’s property. This is the argument that the Israeli left can and should make in the Trump era for pursuing a diplomatic arrangement with the Palestinians.
Anyone who dared encroach upon land owned by the Trump family would quickly find themselves under lock and key. That the Amona settlers lived in their homes for 20 years without paying rent to the Palestinian landowners makes their conduct even more egregious. Any American judge who would agree, as Israel’s justices did, to postpone the evacuation of squatters from Trump’s private land would come in for a tongue lashing by the president. No sane American politician would even consider proposing an amendment to the law legalizing the use of someone else’s private property, as Israeli lawmakers have done by passing the Regularization Law Feb. 6.
Netanyahu would have to look high and low on Capitol Hill to find a single member of Congress who understands the reason for all the fuss over the eviction of 40 families who took over a remote hilltop that the state and the Supreme Court ruled does not belong to them. Even a master wordsmith like Netanyahu would find it hard to make excuses for legislation retroactively legalizing wildcat outposts, having himself publicly warned that the international community would not accept such an Israeli law.
