President Donald Trump is holding a ceremony Tuesday at the White House for the recent deals between Israel and the small Gulf states of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. See “Trump ‘peace’ deals for Israel, UAE and Bahrain are shams. They boost oppression, not amity” by Noura Erakat at NBCNews.com.
A coalition of over 50 groups are simultaneously holding a protest (from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET) and a news conference (at 1:30 p.m.) outside the White House at BLM Plaza.
HUWAIDA ARRAF, huwaida.arraf@gmail.com, @huwaidaarraf
RANIA QAWASMA, raniaqawasma@gmail.com, @raniaqawasma
Arraf is a Palestinian-American human rights attorney and Qawasma is a Palestinian-American architect. They are among the activists organizing the protests.
Arraf said today: “The U.S.-brokered agreements of the UAE and Bahrain to normalize relations with Israel are predicated on sidelining the most impacted population — the indigenous Palestinian people upon whose land and lives Israel has built its settler-colonial state. These cynical attempts to paint arms deals and cyber-spying contracts as efforts to promote peace, while Palestinians continue to suffer the indignities of violent occupation, racism and apartheid, should be widely condemned.
“Israel’s systemic and systematic violations of Palestinians’ most basic rights must be sanctioned, not rewarded, as the governments of the UAE and Bahrain have done and as the US continues to do by providing Israel with $3.8 billion per year of American taxpayer money.”
The coalition of groups, which include American Muslims for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, the International Solidarity Movement and the Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, referred to the deals as “fake peace plans.” They also noted regarding the UAE agreement that “within a week of the deal’s announcement, a secret clause within the deal to sell tens of billions of dollars in weapons to the UAE was revealed. On September 11, 2020, it was announced that Bahrain — another repressive Gulf country involved in the brutal war in Yemen — will also sign a deal to normalize relations with Israel, also without any concessions for Palestinians. It is understood that Bahrain would not be able to make such an agreement without the tacit approval of Saudi Arabia, the leader of the war in Yemen.”
Background: See The Real News interview from 2018 with scholar As’ad AbuKhalil: “Saudi Arabia’s Unholy Alliance with Israel.”