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href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/what-will-president-trump-mean-palestine">https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/what-will-president-trump-mean-palestine</a></font>
<h1 id="reader-title">What will President Trump mean for
Palestine?</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">
<p class="node__submitted">
<span class="field field-author"><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label
skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ali Abunimah</a></span> <span
class="field field-blog">- </span><span class="field
field-publication-date"><span class="date-display-single"
property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2016-11-09T13:43:00+00:00">9 November 2016</span></span>
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<p>On a day that most people expected not to see, we can
say few things with certainty.</p>
<p>One of them is that Hillary Clinton would have been a
disastrous president for those supporting the
Palestinian struggle for their rights.</p>
<p>Her failed campaign pitched her as the natural
successor to President Barack Obama, the Democrat who
just unconditionally handed Israel the <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/obama-hands-israel-largest-military-aid-deal-history">biggest
military aid package</a> in history.</p>
<p>During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton
marketed herself as a belligerent and violently hawkish
<a
href="http://forward.com/opinion/national/324013/how-i-would-rebuild-ties-to-israel-and-benjamin-neta/">ally</a>
of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/defying-establishment-bernie-sanders-defends-humanity-palestinians">against
the Palestinian people</a>.</p>
<p>She <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/jeb-bush-says-hed-order-crackdown-bds-president">vowed</a>
to make blocking the nonviolent Palestinian-led boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement a priority of
her would-be administration.</p>
<p>She went out of her way to campaign against the mildest
efforts to hold Israel accountable, including <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/hillary-clinton-attacks-her-church-over-israel-divestment-vote">appealing
directly</a> to members of her United Methodist Church
last spring to vote against divestment from companies
that assist and profit from Israel’s occupation.</p>
<p>Clinton positioned herself as an anti-Palestinian
extremist at a time when the Democratic Party base
showed itself <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/democratic-clash-over-palestine-signals-changing-party">more</a>
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/battle-over-palestine-may-spill-democratic-convention">open</a>
<a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/obama-hands-israel-largest-military-aid-deal-history">than
ever</a> to embracing Palestinian rights.</p>
<p>Her extreme support for Israel is just one of the many
ways she and her party operatives <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/leaked-emails-show-donors-drive-hillary-clintons-pro-israel-positions">pandered
to donors</a> and revealed themselves to be out of
touch with large segments of the country they had <a
href="https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/796243185739632640">taken
for granted</a>.</p>
<p>But Hillary Clinton will not be president.</p>
<h2>President Trump</h2>
<p>The only thing that can be said about President-elect
Donald Trump with any confidence is that no one knows
exactly what he will do.</p>
<p>Earlier in the campaign he <a
href="http://www.jta.org/2016/02/18/news-opinion/politics/trump-suggests-palestinian-incitement-is-more-pronounced-but-will-not-take-sides">insisted</a>
that he would be even-handed in dealings with Israelis
and Palestinians, driving many of Israel’s most
fanatical and neoconservative supporters <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/content/hillary-clinton-more-dangerous-donald-trump/16316">into
Clinton’s arms</a>.</p>
<p>But facing a backlash, he quickly pivoted, <a
href="http://time.com/4507432/donald-trump-israel-jerusalem-capital-netanyahu/">promising
Netanyahu</a> he would recognize Jerusalem as the
“undivided capital of the State of Israel,” and <a
href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-israel-should-keep-building-west-bank-settlements/">actively
encouraging</a> Israel to continue building colonial
settlements in the occupied West Bank.</p>
<p>Trump still showed flashes of unwillingness to appease.
After winning his party’s nomination in July, he brushed
off a reporter’s question about whether he would follow
the “tradition” of other Republican candidates and visit
Israel.</p>
<p>“It’s a tradition, but I’m not traditional,” Trump <a
href="http://forward.com/news/346168/donald-trump-brushes-off-questions-about-trip-to-israel-im-not-traditional/">shot
back</a>.</p>
<p>Even if these changes reveal an erratic man with no
fixed views, Trump’s most pro-Israel positions don’t
differ much in substance from the policies of Obama, on
whose watch settlement construction <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israeli-settlements-have-grown-during-the-obama-years/2016/09/16/a8eda95c-7c27-11e6-8064-c1ddc8a724bb_story.html">more
than matched</a> the pace during the term of President
George W. Bush.</p>
<h2>Visceral fears</h2>
<p>In his <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/us/politics/trump-speech-transcript.html">victory
speech</a> last night, Trump returned to a regular
theme: “We will get along with all other nations willing
to get along with us … We’ll have great relationships.
We expect to have great, great relationships.”</p>
<p>That will be little comfort to people in the US and
around the world whose visceral fears are stoked by the
forces that helped propel Trump’s rise: his racist
baiting and incitement against Muslims and Mexicans, his
boasts about sexually assaulting women, his denial of
global warming and his <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-david-duke_us_56d31097e4b0871f60ebbd35">indulgence</a>
of <a
href="https://mic.com/articles/145808/david-duke-uses-anti-semitism-to-defend-donald-trump-s-racism-against-mexican-judge">anti-Semitic
white supremacists</a>, including the Ku Klux Klan,
which gave him its <a
href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/01/the-kkks-official-newspaper-has-endorsed-donald-trump-for-president/">endorsement</a>.</p>
<p>The Israeli counterparts of these vile American racists
are celebrating Trump’s victory today.</p>
<p>Netanyahu congratulated Trump, <a
href="https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/796307533287727105">calling</a>
him a “true friend of Israel.”</p>
<p>“I am confident President-elect Trump and I will
continue to strengthen the alliance between our two
countries and bring it to greater heights,” the Israeli
prime minister <a
href="https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/796307981684117504">added</a>.</p>
<p><a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/naftali-bennett">Naftali
Bennett</a>, the Israeli education minister who has <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/naftali-bennett-and-qana-massacre">boasted</a>
about his killings of Arabs, hailed the coming Trump
era.</p>
<p>“Trump’s victory is an opportunity for Israel to
immediately retract the notion of a Palestinian state in
the center of the country, which would hurt our security
and just cause,” Bennett <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/US-Elections/Donald-Trump/Likud-MKs-react-to-Trumps-victory-in-US-Presidential-Election-472088">said</a>.</p>
<p>But the so-called two-state solution was already dead
and Clinton would not have changed that.</p>
<h2>Fighting back</h2>
<p>The Palestinian cause has already shifted to a struggle
for equality against an entrenched system of Israeli
occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid anchored
and rooted in support from the US bipartisan
establishment.</p>
<p>Palestinians were not waiting for the result of the US
election to decide which way their struggle would go.</p>
<p>Trump has won, but some things have not changed. Over
the last decade, support for Palestinian rights has been
rising in the United States, <a
href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/support-palestinians-triples-among-us-youth-survey-finds">particularly
among the young</a> – and in the increasingly diverse
Democratic Party base that has been utterly failed by
its establishment leadership.</p>
<p>More than ever, people understand that US support for
Israel comes not only from the same places where support
for white supremacy, mass incarceration, unchecked
police violence and US militarism and imperialism are
strongest.</p>
<p>It also stems from the liberal, pro-human rights
circles that championed Clinton, who more often than not
equate colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed,
occupation and resistance.</p>
<p>This base has no choice now but to rally from its
despair, which at any rate the election of either
candidate would have precipitated, to keep organizing
and fighting for its rights and the rights of people
around the world.</p>
<p>The truth is, we had no choice but to wage that fight
anyway.</p>
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