Will the US peace plan cause a new displacement of Palestinians inside?

Mohammed Mohsen Wedd - Umm al-Fahm

At a time when the seventy refugee Suleiman Fahmawi yearns to fulfill his dream of returning to his deserted village of Umm al-Zaynat in the Haifa District, the American peace plan - known as the "Deal of the Century" - opened the door for the unknown in front of him and his family in the city of Umm al-Fahm in the Triangle region that is nominated for its internalization. The Israeli annexation of the Palestinian Authority.

Fahmawi - who is the head of the Committee for the Defense of the Rights of the Displaced within the Palestinian Territory - lives like the other three hundred thousand refugees living inside the homeland and their original villages are a stone's throw away from them, hoping to return to these villages and rebuild them, saying, "We reject the century deal as a new catastrophe and another aspect of displacement." And displacement. "

"The deal of the century is a fatal blow to the Palestinian issue and the principle of a two-state solution, and therefore the annexation and exchange proposals are nothing but evasions from Israel to take unilateral steps to impose its sovereignty and control over all of historic Palestine," he added.

And he added, "If it is necessary to annex, then our demand is to annex the Galilee, the coast, the Negev, and 530 Palestinian villages and cities that are displaced and destroyed in the Palestinian sovereignty."

Redistricting
Fahmawi believes that if borders, demarcation, population exchange and land are to be redrawn, then this should be in accordance with the partition resolution of 1947, as the Triangle region, the Nazareth district, the coast, and the Galilee were within the Palestinian state as per international agreements and resolutions.

However, he believes that Israel - and for decades - preceded the time to impose facts on the ground that prevented the establishment of a Palestinian state by intensifying the settlement project, tore up the geography and surrounded the Palestinian people, whether inside, the West Bank, Jerusalem or Gaza, and provided the conditions for a system of racial discrimination, so that the solution is Binational state.

To evade the two-state solution, Israel began promoting the offer of land exchange and population annexation in the triangle after the Oslo agreement. Political and mass activities inside the Palestinian community agree that this promotion, which was officially framed through the "Deal of the Century", is nothing but political blackmail for 48 Palestinians and an attempt to delegitimize them and question their citizenship in order to push them to make political concessions.

The Triangle region, adjacent to the borders of June 4, is considered a strategic location and security and settlement depth for Israel, which continues to Judaize and intensify settlement projects and national infrastructure plans in the borders of Arab towns and their confiscated lands.

Despite this strategic importance of the Triangle region, which was annexed to Israel in 1949 under the Rhodes Agreement, the terms of the American peace plan propose to annex the villages and cities of the Triangle Area, which are inhabited by about 350 thousand Palestinians, who live about 170 thousand dunums, after the area of ​​land they owned was about one million dunums before The catastrophe.

The Triangle region nominated for annexation includes Umm al-Fahm and its environs, Arara, Ara, Kafrqaa, Baqa al-Gharbiya, Qalansawa, Al-Tayyibah and al-Tirah, Kfarbara, Jaljiliyah and Kafr Qasim, while the plan excluded the villages of Jit and Zimer for their high strategic and geographical location overlooking the coast from the western side and the bank from the eastern side.

Annexation scenario
Ahmed Melhem, head of the People's Committee for the Defense of Land and Housing in Wadi Ara, expresses his willingness to accept the scenario of annexing the Triangle to Palestinian sovereignty, but it is required that the international community guarantee the Palestinian Authority state components according to the principle of a two-state solution, and Israel is also required to include the Triangle Region with the original and adult land area towards One million acres.

However, the head of the People's Committee for the Defense of Land and Housing in Wadi Ara affirms that the essence of the conflict is demographic, not geographical and borders, and he asserts that Israel wants the land free of (Palestinian) citizens and therefore excludes the possibility of implementing a plan to annex residential communities in the Triangle to the sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority.

Melhem asserts that most of the Israeli political leaders realize this unrealistic proposition even from a negotiating point, just as the right-wing parties established their popularity and raised their electoral shares based on hostility to Arabs in the country, and therefore this offering for annexation and exchange comes for electoral purposes only.

He warns that the idea of ​​exchange and annexation - which had unprecedented American support - could be another aspect of the displacement of the nearly two million Palestinians inside, as they are seen as a demographic threat to the "Jewishness of the state" project that was launched with the legislation of "the law of nationalism."