Palestinians take part in a Fatah rally in support of president Mahmoud Abbas, in the Palestinian Authority controlled side of Hebron, February 24, 2019. (photo credit: REUTERS/MUSSA QAWASMA)
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Palestinian officials on Sunday stepped up their attacks on the economic portion of the US administration’s plan for peace in the Middle East, calling it Balfour Declaration No 2 – reference to the 1917 public statement by the British government announcing support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
Meanwhile, Palestinian factions called for launching three days of protests in the West Bank and Gaza Strip against the US-led Bahrain economic conference, which is expected to be launched in Manama on Tuesday. The factions and Palestinian officials in Ramallah expressed disappointment over Jordan’s and Egypt’s decision to participate in the conference despite Palestinian calls for boycotting it.
“Day after day, the reality of the American intentions and attitudes against the Palestinian people and their rights are exposed,” the Palestinian Authority Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Referring to the unveiling of the economic plan by the White House on Saturday, the ministry said it was [US President Donald] “Trump’s ominous declaration or Balfour Declaration No 2.”
The PA ministry accused the US administration of denying the existence of the Palestinian people and dealing with them as a “group of people.”
It said that the US economic plan, called “Peace to Prosperity,” was an extension of the US administration’s political bias in favor of Israel. “This plan does not mention the economy of the Palestinian state and its components, but is trying to whitewash the occupation and settlements,” the ministry added.
PLO official Tayseer Khaled on Sunday denounced Trump’s senior advisers as a “group of swindlers and fraudsters.”
The American “peace team, which consists of [Jared] Kushner, [Jason] Greenblatt and [US Ambassador to Israel David] Friedman is nothing but a group of swindlers and fraudsters,” Khaled said in a post on Facebook.
He said that the $50 billion economic plan unveiled by the US administration is a “10-year fake investment.” He claimed that the funds allocated to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon are “the price for liquidating the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) and the rights of Palestinian refugees.
Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior Fatah official and head of the PA’s General Authority of Civil Affairs, also lashed out at the US economic plan. “The mask has fallen, and attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause in return for a handful of dollars has been made public,” he said, implicitly criticizing Arab states that agreed to attend the US-led economic conference in Bahrain.
Mahmoud al-Aloul, deputy chairman of the ruling Fatah faction, said that the Bahrain conference will be “flimsy,” adding that the Arabs were participating under pressure from the US. “We have rejected the idea of economic peace dozens of times in the past,” he said. “The main issue for us is independence and sovereignty. The current US administration has nothing positive to offer the Palestinians.”
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