“Economic plans were tried before as a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and they have failed” a senior Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) official said.
At a press conference in Ramallah, Hanan Ashrawi, member of the PLO’s Executive Committee, said the fate of the new American-sponsored economic plan presented by Jarod Kushner, senior advisor to US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, at the Peace to Prosperity workshop that opened in the Bahraini capital, Manama, is going to have a similar fate.
“Economic peace was being presented before repeatedly and failed and it is being presented once again; recycled,” she said. “It is an insult to our intelligence.”
Ashrawi said all economic plans are going to face the same fate, which is failure, until the parties deal with the real causes first, that is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land.
The US is misleading us by suggesting that an economic plan is going to lead to a political solution. However, she said, these ideas are often destructive because they prevent any political initiative from being presented or having any kind of success while redesigning the occupation and legalizing it.
“They want to normalize and integrate the occupation on Palestinian land and integrate the settlers with Palestinians. It is rewarding Israel and punishing the Palestinians. Normalization first and then we deal with the political issues,” said the PLO official.
“Whatever you do while maintaining the Israeli occupation will lead to a constant, endless cycle of destruction. You can invest your money, but Israel is capable of destroying it as long as there is occupation that controls and dominates life of Palestinians.” she said,
Ashrawi asked “Why are they taking all these measure against Palestinians? Why are they defunding UNRWA (the United Nations Palestine refugee agency)? Why are they targeting Palestinian schools, scholarships, hospitals, infrastructure, and now they claim they want to provide economic prosperity to the Palestinians?”
She said the 130-page economic plan booklet presented at the workshop used the same photographs taken by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) while undertaking projects in the Palestinian areas. USAID operation in Palestine has now been shut down after the US has ended all aid to the Palestinian people.
Ashrawi said the US and Israel want the Palestinian to admit defeat first and then take what was presented to them, stressing that this will never happen.
