A YEAR after taking over from Barack Obama as US President, Donald Trump did not waste time in sinking his fangs into the age-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not to bring a solution.
Trump shocked the world by announcing the US would set up its embassy in disputed Jerusalem effectively vetoing proposals for a two-state solution envisaged under the comatose 1992 Oslo Accord.
But that is the US, which seizes every opportunity to bully other countries to submit to its will.
Now the opposition MDC-T led by Nelson Chamisa has thrust Zimbabwe into the international diplomatic spotlight by declaring his ‘government’, if he wins the forthcoming harmonised elections, will establish an embassy in Israel.
Chamisa’s declarations fly in the face of standing policies by both SADC and the AU, two regional and continental institutions that have stood with the people of Palestine in their fight for an independent homeland against Israeli apartheid.
In launching his political grouping’s manifesto ahead of elections set for next month, Chamisa declared his ‘government’ would establish diplomatic relations with Zionist Israel.
Zionism has been described as a crime against humanity and for a party claiming to champion the interests of the oppressed, Chamisa and his band of latter-day pseudo-democrats are willing to do anything to get their hands on the levers of power, including sacrificing their souls and lives of innocents.
Chamisa’s rant aims at currying favour with the US administration in the hope that Trump will aid the regime change agenda which has been severely weakened by many failed attempts.
While Trump has threatened to withhold ‘billions’ of dollars of US aid from countries which vote in favour of a United Nations resolution rejecting the US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, African countries under the banner of the AU have consistently rejected the international bullying with Egypt leading the way in scripting the last resolution condemning Israel but vetoed by the American.
Early this year, Senior Human Rights Expert at the African Union’s Department of Political Affairs, Salah Hammad, reiterated the continental body’s standing resolution that, “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.”
Hammad argued, “The United States cannot give it to Israel or any other party.”
It then puts the MDC-T into a pickle regarding its policy on Israel which directly contradicts the AU.
Last month, SADC reacted angrily to Israeli bombardment of Palestinian protestors in which 50 civilians were killed in the wake of Trump’s decision to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to East Jerusalem.
The establishment of a US embassy in Jerusalem sets back previous efforts by the international community to secure the inalienable right to self-determination by the Palestinians and has potential to bring about a religious based conflict in the Middle East region as has been observed by the United Nations General Assembly.
The SADC therefore reiterates the United Nations Resolution GA/11995 (2017) asking Nations not to locate Diplomatic Missions in Jerusalem.
The Palestinian flag must fly proudly at the UN General Assembly but the US has prevented the UN Security Council from recognising the state of Palestine hence its flag is banned at this very important global forum.
Questions still arise on how and why the conflicts seem to be unending.
History captures the facts and unsurprisingly the West has had a hand in the unending conflict.
As part of the wider Arab Israeli conflict, Israelis and Arabs have been fighting over the Gaza strip on and off, for decades, something that has worried the world.
The three regions on the map Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank were once known as Palestine.
Ownership of the land is disputed primarily between two different groups: Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs (who are chiefly Muslim, but also include Christians and Druze).
In 1917, the Balfour declaration was issued in a letter dated November 2, 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.
The declaration contained four clauses, of which the first two promised to support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.
The other two were termed ‘safeguard clauses’ and focused on the respecting of civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine and the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine.
By late 1917, in the lead up to the Balfour Declaration, the wider war had reached a stalemate, with two of Britain’s allies not fully engaged: the United States had yet to suffer a casualty, and the Russians were in the midst of a revolution.
A stalemate in southern Palestine was broken by the Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917.
The first high level negotiation between the British and the Zionists was held on February 7, 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership.
Subsequent discussions led to Balfour’s request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann submit a draft of a public declaration.
Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.
Although the United States supported the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which favoured the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had assured the Arabs in 1945 that the United States would not intervene without consulting both the Jews and the Arabs in that region.
The British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May 1948, opposed both the creation of a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine as well as unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region.
Great Britain claimed it wanted to ‘preserve’ good relations with the Arabs to protect its vital political and economic interests in Palestine.
Millions have died since hostilities broke out particularly after 1967 war that gave Israel control of the West Bank but even before at the creation of Israel in 1948.
The Gaza Strip is a rectangle along the Mediterranean coast between Israel and Egypt.
The majority of its approximately 1,4 million residents are Palestinian refugees, many of whom have been living in refugee camps for decades; 80 percent were estimated to be living in poverty in mid-2007.
Under the Oslo peace accords signed in 1993, Gaza was turned over to the newly created Palestinian Authority to form one wing of an emerging Palestinian state, along with the West Bank and a potential land corridor between them.
But two different parties rule these two regions—the militant Hamas controlled Gaza and Fatah ruled the West Bank.
Many Israeli settlers remained in Gaza.
In September 2005 the Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israeli settlers from Gaza, making it the first territory completely in Palestinian hands.
Israel, however, kept tight control over all border crossings and continued to conduct raids.
In January 2006, Hamas won a surprise victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election ousting the Fatah government.
Then in a burst of fighting in June 2007 in which more than 100 people were killed, Hamas gunmen routed the Fatah forces, and seized control of Gaza.
Israel, which had refused to recognise the Hamas government, responded by clamping down even tighter on the flow of goods and people in and out of the territories.
By June 2008, Hamas and Israel were both ready to reach some sort of accommodation, and the six-month truce was declared, although never formally defined.
Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea.
Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land.