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If Jerusalem is Israel’s capital, then Washington is Bolivia’s capital

December 11, 2017 at 10:02 am

Indonesian Muslims stage a protest outside the US ambassador’s office in Indonesia against US President Donald Trump’s announcement to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Jakarta on 8 December, 2017 [Dasril Roszandi / Anadolu Agency]

Trump recently declared Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The Bolivians have a much stronger moral claim to Washington as their capital than Zionists have to Jerusalem as theirs. After all, the ancestral cousins of the indigenous people of Bolivia only relatively recently lived on the site of Washington DC before they were forcibly removed and indeed murdered by the ancestors of the current occupants in the sixteenth century.

The innocent Palestinians are today paying for Germany’s (read Hitler’s) crimes by having had the State of Israel imposed on them by the United Nations in 1947, despite having been in occupation of the land of Palestine for some 2,000 years and protecting the holy sites in Jerusalem for that period. They are today either living in the bombed prison that Gaza constitutes, or else living in Bantustans under Zionist military occupation in the West Bank, or since 1948 languishing in squalid refugee camps in neighbouring countries, or living as second-class citizens in the apartheid state of Israel. Morally the State of Israel if it were to be established anywhere, should have been in either Italy or Germany – or perhaps even in England given the sordid Balfour Declaration.

LIVEBLOG: Jerusalem Watch

The Jerusalem declaration by Trump is a flagrant breach of international law. From the United Nations Partition Resolution 181 of 1947 to the present, there have been numerous resolutions that assert that Jerusalem is either to be under international control, or in effect divided between Israel and a Palestinian State. Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 war that it initiated, and has since then illegally annexed East Jerusalem, and has denied its resident Arab population house building permits, while granting permission to thousands of Zionists to build there, in manifest breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which prohibits countries from moving populations into territories occupied in a war. Article 49(6) of the convention clearly states: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The timing of Trump’s recent declaration is a convenient distraction from his domestic woes, and indeed a useful distraction also for Netanyahu who is facing corruption allegations, but in the words of the Arab League it is “oxygen and nutrition to terrorists”. These sentiments were echoed by Palestinian Authority officials who condemned Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, saying the decision would bolster extremists’ calls for holy wars.

Read: ‘Jerusalem is Palestine’ – Celtic FC fans

This will have global implications, including for us here in the Caribbean. As it is the imposition of the State of Israel on stolen Palestinian land has ultimately led to the coming into existence of groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh. Revealingly Israeli Dr. Yair Hirschfeld, one of the architects of the Oslo Accords, said he believed that while Trump’s declaration may be a dangerous move, this might be an opportunity to restart talks with the Palestinians, “who may now have more realistic expectations”. Manifestly the intent behind Trump’s declaration is to further Zionist objectives and to destroy any slim Palestinian chances for a viable state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We in the Caribbean must call upon our governments to immediately recognise East Jerusalem as Palestine’s capital, because to paraphrase Trump’s Jerusalem declaration “it is the right thing to do”.

Partition of Jerusalem? Let my people in! - Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

Partition of Jerusalem? Let my people in! – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/MiddleEastMonitor]

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.