By Marwan Bisharaby
February 03, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
On February 1, Mahmoud Abbas,
the president of the Palestinian Authority,
succeeded in extracting from the Arab League a
rejection of US President Donald Trump's Middle East
plan by warning its leaders that neither he, nor
they, could afford to go down in history as the ones
who "sold Jerusalem" and the Al-Aqsa Mosque to
Israel.
This is the same argument the late Palestinian
leader
Yasser Arafat made to justify rejecting the US
and Israeli dictates at the Camp David summit in
2000, knowing all too well that Arab autocrats may
not care about Palestinian rights but could not be
seen to have surrendered Jerusalem.
The ploy worked.
US arrogance in declaring all of Jerusalem the
capital of Israel has backfired on Trump's entire
"vision", leaving Washington humiliated and its
foolishly dubbed "deal of the century" barely alive.
Furthermore, Abbas severed all relations with the
US and Israel. "If Jerusalem is off the table,
America is off the table," warned one Palestinian
official.
This may have come as a shock to the Americans,
who thought he
would come back to the table sooner or later, but it
was no surprise to their Israeli partner.
American ignorance or Israeli arrogance
It is hard to say whether the Trump plan has been
driven mainly by the ignorance of young Jared
Kushner, Trump's adviser and son-in-law, or the
arrogance of his mentor, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu. But it is probably both, since
gullibility is required for successful manipulation.