Middle East Monitor / January 31, 2020
Legal rights centre Adalah has slammed the Trump administration’s “peace plan” for its endorsement of the “forced transfer” of 260,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel.
“Trump’s deal…is no more than an attempt to bypass international legal barriers and to ignore Palestinians’ right to self-determination, as well as United Nations resolutions, and recent statements from the International Criminal Court,” Adalah stated.
The centre noted that “many aspects of the deal…are of grave concern and resemble South Africa’s apartheid government in place between 1948-1994,”
Adalah cites examples such as “the recognition of historic Palestine as the homeland of the Jewish people only; no recognition of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people based on the UN charter; and the creation of ‘self-governing’ Palestinian enclaves and bypass roads.”
In addition, the plan “proposes the forced transfer of over 260,000 Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel living in 10 towns in the Triangle region in the centre of the country to a future enclave of Palestine.”
“According to the plan, the residents of the earmarked communities would remain in their homes but Israel’s borders would simply be redrawn to leave them outside its borders,” Adalah noted.
Adalah stated that this “marks the first time a US administration has ever given a green light to the transfer of Israeli citizens to the authority of another state entity.”
The legal rights centre described the move “as a racially-motivated attempt to forcibly transfer Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, strip them of their Israeli citizenship, and place them under perpetual Israeli military occupation.”
“This kind of population transfer – which has been consistently rejected by Palestinian citizens of Israel when proposed by a variety of Israeli right-wing political leaders in the past – is blatantly illegal under international law and attempts to widen the demographic scope of racially-motivated separation,” the statement added.
