Trump’s Jerusalem Stroke: Part Of US Exceptionalism!
With a sense of arrogance, Trump officially announced that US will recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, referring to the move as an acknowledgement of “historical and current reality”, even as world leaders condemned the relocation and change in Jerusalem’s diplomatic status – an announcement he knows will stir hornet’s nest not just across the ME, but beyond as well. He also instructed his State Department to begin the years-long process of moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, – a sacred city of importance to all Abrahamic faiths and the most contested city in the world. Adding humour to his announcement, he also quipped that it will be “a step to advance the peace process” with Palestinians and “a long-overdue step to advance the peace process and to work towards a lasting agreement”. This announcement no doubt bears many serious consequences, although many observers may shrug it off as just another insane move by a demagogue and narcissist Trump, whose credibility was shattered to smithereens even before he was elected to office last November.
His recent tweets sharing anti-Muslim videos of an ultra far right groups showed his temperament and unstable mental state of mind, let alone his suitability to act as a future honest broker to the perennial Palestinian conflict. In fact, diagnosing Trump’s alleged mental disorder has become a popular pastime, not just among mental health professionals but also among politicians, journalists, pundits, comedians, and ordinary people gathered at coffee breaks. He is an undisputed poster boy for narcissism. According to Allen Frances, M.D, Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences Specialist, Trump demonstrates in pure form every single symptom described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, Humorously, the title of John Gartner and Rachel Montgomery’s book “All I Ever Wanted to Know about Donald Trump I Learned From His Tweets” is self- explanatory. Be it as it may, whatever he utters, however narcissistic they may be, is taken as the US viewpoint. Incidentally, if ‘American Exceptionalism’ in Post- 09/11 period in particular and |Cold-war era in general, has made the world a much worse place to live in, Trump has virtually made ‘America’ much dirtier in the minds of the outside world and a laughing stock in the community of nations.
To be quite honest, US has never ever been a honest broker or taken genuine measures to ensure the Palestinian people are given their historic right to their own homeland usurped by US’ Zionist agent in the ME region. Simply put, the US cannot act as an honest broker while at the same aligning itself with and serving as Israel’s strongest ally. American double standards and hypocrisy on matters related to the Israel-Palestine conflict account for much of the recent decline in international admiration and deference to U.S. leadership in the Middle East and elsewhere. Therefore, expecting Trump with his narcissist frame of mind to do so will be insane. Perceived American double standards and hypocrisy on matters related to the Israel-Palestine conflict thus account for much of the recent decline in international admiration and deference to U.S. leadership in the ME and elsewhere.
Lord Folke Bernadotte, the first UN mediator to the Arab-Israeli conflict, stated: “It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent [Palestinian] victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine.” In delivering justice , it is easy to see the hypocrisy of the US as the so-called leader of the free-world. Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, in his The Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture rightly exposed the continued hypocrisy of the US vis-à-vis the resolution of the Palestinian conflict thus:
‘US determination to protect Israel from the political and legal consequences of any and all of its actions has also taken its toll, earning the wrath of the international community and the UN / international organizations as well as earning a dubious reputation in polluting the integrity of international law. The UN Security Council was conceived as the ultimate arbiter and enforcer of an international order in which law could protect the weak and vulnerable from the depredations of the strong. It was however despicable that the U.S. has routinely exercised its veto to prevent the application of well-established principles of international law to Israel, when the international community has been attempting to allow justice to accrue to the Palestinians, the underdogs. Repeated American vetoes on behalf of Israel have reduced the UN and other international fora to impotence on fundamental questions of justice and human dignity. Confidence in these institutions has largely disappeared. Thus, the Israel-Palestine dispute has shaped a world in which both the rule of law and the means by which it might be realized have been deliberately degraded.. The inability of the US to build on the obvious shared interests of Palestinians and Israelis is, at best, damning testimony to the incompetence of those Americans who have made a career of processing peace without ever delivering it’.
