An Israeli prime minister named Muhammad

Yes, you read the headline right; that was the gist of a sarcastic remark by US President Donald Trump a few weeks ago in a discussion with King Abdullah of Jordan, according to Israeli media sources.

“Many young Palestinians don’t want the two-state solution any more,” said Abdullah, “but would rather live together with the Israelis in one state with equal rights for all… The result will be that Israel will lose its Jewish character.” And the prime minister could be called Muhammad.

Despite the White House refusal to confirm or deny the statement, the Jordanian monarch told French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian about it when he met him in Amman on 2 August.

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The political context that preceded it, along with several other factors, not only makes the claim about Trump’s remark likely to be true, but also requires further discussion. Far from being a simple throwaway joke, it was effectively an explicit blessing by a major power in the world for Israel to be distinguished from other countries as an apartheid state that rejects equal political rights for one-fifth of its population.

It is true that Israel’s Knesset (parliament) passed what it called the Nation-State Law about a month ago, which establishes in law the Jewish nature of the state at the expense of its democracy, and restricts the right of self-determination to its Jewish population alone. It is also true that the indigenous people of the land, the Palestinian Arabs, have suffered from Israel’s marginalisation and discrimination over the past 70 years. However, to hear Israel’s racism and the consequences of such a law being given the blessing of the US President is something else.

Look at the irony of Trump’s position. The father of his immediate predecessor in the White House, two-term President Barack Obama, was an immigrant from Kenya, and yet Trump did not shy away from mocking the possibility of a Palestinian called Muhammad serving as prime minister of the country in which he and his ancestors have lived for thousands of years.

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Nevertheless, perhaps the US leader — who displays racist tendencies — may not know that such an idea was raised by Dr Azmi Bishara 20 years ago. The Palestinian intellectual dropped a political bombshell when he declared his candidacy for the position of prime minister of Israel.

At the time, Bishara told me during an interview that he wanted to challenge Israel’s Zionism and its anti-Arab stance. Judging from the reactions to his statement, he succeeded in exposing the racist essence of Israel like no one has, either before or since.

He succeeded in defying what he called the “Israelisation” of politics that forced the Palestinian minority to have no electoral choice other than Likud or Labour, led at the time by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak respectively. It has taken Netanyahu two decades to confirm his country’s racist nature with the Nation-State Law and be given the nod by a sitting US President. Events throughout that time explain but do not justify, this.

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The West is also heading towards right-wing nationalism, with its blatant racism. Meanwhile, the Palestinian and Arab leaders who pressured Bishara to withdraw his candidacy, fearing that he would harm the chances of Barak’s victory (he was the peace candidate at the time), have either become secret and public allies of right-wing Netanyahu or their heirs and successors have. They are indifferent to his destruction of the two-state solution by means of illegal settlements, Judaisation and blocking the path to a potential one-state solution. Could they be anything else, given that they are only in office thanks to Donald Trump and his Middle East advisor, and son-in-law, the very pro-Israel Jared Kushner?

This article was first published in Arabic on The New Khalij, 22 August 2018

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