The Normalization of Israeli apartheid
WHY NOT NORMALIZATION?
On the surface of things, the prospect of Israel normalizing relations with the Arab world after decades of conflict sounds extremely positive. And, indeed, it would be if one crucial element was not missing: the Palestinians. But the Deal of the Century put forward by Trump in 2020 and enthusiastically embraced by Netanyahu, which Trump in his second term is now trying to complete, cuts them out completely. The Abraham Accords normalize relations among states – Israel, the “moderate” Arab regimes, the United States and the international community – but since the Palestinians have no state of their own, they are excluded.
What does that mean for them? It means not having their voice heard when it comes to their own national demands and needs. Normalization is not a process of negotiations. It is a condition imposed by the powerful parties on the weak. In this case, it takes the “facts on the ground” forged by Israel since 1948 as the basis of normalization, leaving the Palestinians with whatever crumbs remain. Specifically, the state of Israel and its settlements in the occupied West Bank, comprising 85% of historic Palestine, are accepted as “Israel.” The Palestinians, fully half the population of the country even without the return of the refugees, find themselves confined to tiny, disconnected, non-viable and non-sovereign enclaves on only 15% of their historic homeland completely encircled and controlled by Israel – a South African-type Bantustan that will then be called a state,” thus fulfilling the requirement of a “two-state solution.” That apartheid regime is then normalized, dooming half the Palestinian people to a life of poverty, dependence and casual labor inside a “Greater” Israel while the other half, the refugees, languish in exile. Normalization in the sense Trump and Netanyahu intend it means the Palestinians will never have freedom, never have a viable country of their own or any future for themselves and the coming generations.
Now it was always assumed that the Arab world would not normalize without addressing the Palestinian issue, at least nominally. In 2002, a Saudi-initiated Arab Initiative in fact offered Israel and end to the conflict and normal relations with the entire Arab world in return for full withdrawal by Israel from the occupied territories (though with the possibility of mutually agreed minor swaps of the land between Israel and Palestine), a mutually agreed settlement of the Palestinian refugee issue based on UN Resolution 194, and the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Israel rejected it out-of-hand.
Today, it appears, much of the Arab world, including Egypt, Jordan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia itself, is willing to make a separate peace with Israel without addressing the Palestinians’ rights or needs, one that normalizes Israeli apartheid.
NORMALIZATION REPRESENTS THE GREATEST THREAT
TO THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE SINCE THE NAKBA
Peddled as a “two-state solution,” Trump’s “Vision of Peace” is in fact a plan for “two-state” apartheid. Just look at Trump’s own map:
Normalization is the way settler colonialism concludes its take-over of another people’s country. It is a closure, not a peace process, not a negotiation. It takes what the Zionists colonizers have managed to impose on Palestine – the taking of Palestine’s land, the violent displacement of its people, their imprisonment in small, impoverished enclaves or abandonment as refugees to perpetual exile, and the brutal suppression of all resistance, all within an encompassing Israeli regime of apartheid – and then makes it permanent.
We cannot let that happen. The Campaign Against Normalizing Israeli Apartheid aims to mobilize the world’s public against the Abraham Accords, the vehicle of normalization, and in support of the Palestinians’ just struggle for their national rights in their homeland.