Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt, February 7
I don’t think that anyone expected the [Trump Administration’s Mideast peace plan dubbed the] “deal of the century” to offer a balanced framework for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially since the two sides that were parties to its writing are an American president threatened with impeachment and an Israeli prime minister threatened with imprisonment, while the Palestinians were excluded from the conversation. However, this unfortunate deal exceeds even the worst expectations some of us had. Its utter obedience to Israeli interests – land, capital, security, financing and normalization – and total disregard for Palestinian rights managed to shock even the most pessimistic of Arab pundits. The deal itself has received enough criticism from writers and commentators… so there is no need to repeat what has already been said. The same applies to official Arab reactions to the deal, which ranged from support through confusion and ambiguity to outright denunciation. What concerns me here is not the content of the deal nor the weakness of the official Arab position toward it, but the prevailing public discourse in the Arab world, which can best be summarized as apathetic. In my estimation, the traditional anti-Israel trope has become one of the main reasons for the reluctance of younger generations of Arab citizens to monitor the Palestinian issue and remain concerned. The Palestinian narrative has become a narrative that relies on values, ideas and vocabulary belonging to the fifties and sixties of the last century, not something that younger generations can relate to today. The Arab-Israeli conflict is ongoing. What is required is not to belittle it, underestimate its importance or accept the Palestinian situation as a fait accompli; rather, it is time to realize that it is a dynamic conflict that is ever evolving, requiring the tools and rhetoric we use to confront it to evolve together with it. The time has come to move away from traditional anti-Israel tropes and reframe the rhetoric surrounding the conflict as one dealing with a humanitarian system that allows oppressed people to build a free, lawful and pluralistic society, and to provide its people with the level of economic and social development they deserve. The deal of the century is, sadly, not the last of unpleasant American surprises, and I don’t think its effects on the ground will be immediate, but it is necessary to mobilize around it and address it. Not through speeches and slogans, but by building a contemporary Arab public opinion that follows a clear tone and a clear set of values that our younger generations understand, respect and relate to. Do we have the courage to make this change happen? – Ziad Bahauddin (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)