Palestinians reject economic solutions from 'punitive' U.S.
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The destroyed and deserted terminal of the Gaza Strip's former "Yasser Arafat International Airport", in the Palestinian enclave's southern city of Rafah, June 24, 2019. /VCG Photo

The destroyed and deserted terminal of the Gaza Strip's former "Yasser Arafat International Airport", in the Palestinian enclave's southern city of Rafah, June 24, 2019. /VCG Photo

Palestinian leaders accused the Trump administration of punishing them with one hand and offering to reward them with the other, as protesters turned out in the West Bank and Gaza on Wednesday to demonstrate against a U.S. economic peace plan.

At a U.S.-led conference in Bahrain U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner urged Palestinian leaders boycotting the event to think outside the "traditional box" and consider the 50-billion-U.S.-dollar plan to boost the Palestinian and neighboring economies.

The event drew fiery criticism both within the Palestinian territories, where demonstrations broke out for a second day, and across the wider region, where many Arabs took aim at officials for taking part.

Palestinian officials said it was Trump who had inflicted further hardship on Palestinians, cutting hundreds of millions in aid to humanitarian organizations across the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner addresses the opening of the Peace to Prosperity workshop in the Bahraini capital Manama, June 25, 2016. /VCG Photo

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner addresses the opening of the Peace to Prosperity workshop in the Bahraini capital Manama, June 25, 2016. /VCG Photo

Meanwhile, Kushner said Wednesday that Palestinians were still welcome to engage in his peace initiative, and accused their leaders of not caring about their own people for rejecting his 50-billion-U.S.-dollar economic plan. 

Closing the conference at a luxury hotel in the capital Manama, the 38-year-old real estate investor promised to unveil a political plan at "the right time" and said the Palestinian Authority could help its people by embracing U.S. recommendations. 

"If they actually want to make their people's lives better, we have now laid out a great framework in which they can engage and try to achieve it," Kushner told reporters. 

"We're going to stay optimistic," he said. "We have left the door open." 

He said the U.S. was trying a fresh approach to the long intractable Middle East conflict and that the authors of the economic framework had not seen the political plan. 

"The common theme coming up is that this is all achievable if the (Palestinian) government wants to make these reforms," Kushner insisted. 

Read more:

Kushner insists economic plan key to Israeli-Palestinian peace

'Insult to our intelligence'

In the occupied West Bank, senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi told media the U.S. proposal was an "insult to our intelligence" and "totally divorced from reality". 

"The economic peace, which has been presented before repeatedly and which has failed to materialize because it does not deal with the real components of peace, is being presented once again, recycled once again," she said. 

"The elephant in the room in Manama is of course the occupation itself," she added. "The Israeli occupation, which was never mentioned, not once." 

Trump has taken a series of landmark steps to benefit Israel including recognizing bitterly divided Jerusalem as the Jewish state's capital in 2017, leading the Palestinian Authority to cut off formal contact. 

The Trump administration has hinted its political plan will not mention a Palestinian state, a goal of U.S. policy for decades, and that it could accept an annexation of parts of the West Bank mulled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

A boy suffers from tear gas fired by Israeli forces during protests along the border with Israel east of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza strip, June 21, 2019. /VCG Photo

A boy suffers from tear gas fired by Israeli forces during protests along the border with Israel east of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza strip, June 21, 2019. /VCG Photo

'Urgency' for Palestinian economy

The "Peace to Prosperity" plan sets an ambitious goal of creating one million new Palestinian jobs through 50 billion U.S. dollars of investment in infrastructure, tourism and education in the territories and Arab neighbours. 

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, praised the plan for focusing on jobs and said "all the goodwill in the world" was needed to prevent a severe deterioration of the Palestinian economy. 

Tax revenue is being held up in a dispute with Israel, which has blockaded the Gaza Strip for more than a decade because of the Islamist movement Hamas' leadership of the crowded and impoverished territory. 

Mohammed al-Jadaan, Saudi Arabia's finance minister, said the Palestinian issue was "very important" for the oil-rich kingdom, which would support "whatever brings prosperity to this region". 

Obaid bin Humaid al-Tayer, minister of state for financial affairs of the United Arab Emirates, said that international institutions should back the plan to decrease risks. 

"We should give this initiative a chance, we should be discussing it, and we should try to promote it," he said. 

Meanwhile, Oman said it would open an embassy in the Palestinian territories, a first for a Gulf Arab state.  But Netanyahu paid a rare visit to Oman in October, raising speculation the embassy could be a way to soften the blow before recognition of Israel. 

Gulf apart

Neither the Israeli nor Palestinian governments are attending the event.

Some Gulf Arab states, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, voiced qualified support for Kushner’s plan, while Qatar sent top officials but made no public comment. Egypt and Jordan, the only two Arab states with a peace deal with Israel, sent deputy ministers.

Many Arabs slammed their governments for taking part, describing the event as a sell-off of Palestinians’ rights without them present.

"The participation of Arab and Islamic countries in this conference of shame in Manama is unfortunate. ..Political courtesy does not justify this participation," Qatar University professor of political sociology Majed al-Ansari said on Twitter.

Bahrain's main opposition group, the outlawed Shi'ite Muslim al-Wefaq party, said hosting the event had brought shame on their country's rulers, while Kuwait's parliament said it would reject anything that comes out of the event.

Washington is hoping that wealthy Gulf Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar will bankroll much of the 50 billion U.S. dollars plan, another potential sticking point unpopular with some opposed to the deal.

"The last thing we can imagine as Qatari citizens is for the wealth of our country and nation to contribute to the displacement of another Arab people," Qatari Youth Against Normalization, a Qatari youth group, said in a statement.

Former Egyptian football star Mohamed Aboutrika took aim at FIFA head Gianni Infantino, who spoke in Manama about developing a sports sector in the Palestinian territories to drive economic growth.

"Thank you to everyone who boycotted this auction... the presence of the head of FIFA is a major question mark... our holy sites are not for sale," Aboutrika wrote on Twitter.

Demonstrations

More than 1,500 km away in Gaza, where over half of the enclave’s two million people live in poverty, Palestinians criticized the Arab businessmen who attended for siding with the United States and Israel.

"Capitalists do not think of the poor," said Abdel-Rahim Nateel, 62, who spent most of his life in the Beach refugee camp in northern Gaza.

"Let them come and give aid to the hungry people, make projects, ask Israel not to attack us... let them give us our state on the 1967 borders and we do not want anything else from them."

Several thousand Palestinians demonstrated in Gaza on Wednesday, burning posters of Trump and Netanyahu. "No to the conference of treason, no to the conference of shame," read one banner.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, demonstrations against Bahrain were light for a second day. Some Palestinians voiced a sense of exhaustion about peace efforts and promises of cash and prosperity.

"This conference is just like all others from the past, Arab conferences, American conferences. All of them have been at the Palestinians’ expense," said Hamdallah Qasem, 72, who lives in Ramallah.

Their own leadership was not exempt from criticism, however. At an Israeli military checkpoint separating Palestinian villages from the neighboring Israeli settlement of Givat Zeev, several Palestinian day laborers said President Mahmoud Abbas was hurting the local economy by boycotting the conference.

"If he was struggling like the rest of our people, maybe he would participate. As long as boycotting doesn't hit his wallet, he will never change his position," said Nasser, who declined to give his last name for fear of retribution.

Yara Hawari, a policy analyst based in Ramallah, said the low turnout at protests was due to a sense of fatigue at international initiatives from which they saw little chance of changing their situation.

"There are certain topics that mobilize Palestinians more than others – like Jerusalem. This ‘economic peace’ is just more of the same. They see it as empty talk," Hawari said.

Source(s): AFP ,Reuters