Daily Times

This is the moment that Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been waiting for. Trump Town’s Jerusalem shuffle couldn’t have come at a better time, quite frankly, for the Turkish president. His emergency meeting of the OIC will, he hopes, help crown him the Muslim world’s man of the moment.

Though it is unlikely that that either Erdogan or, indeed, the 57-member bloc, will be able to deliver anything of substance. Talk of imposing economic sanctions on the US has already been dismissed as all but unrealistic. And we have to agree. Then there is the irony of a nation chairing this crisis session that last year sought to repair ties with the Jewish state. This has not been lost on us. Just as we sincerely hope is the case regarding the top Pakistani leadership who will have by now arrived in Istanbul; with the sitting Prime Minister accompanying the Chief Minister Punjab.

So maybe the time has now come to get serious about language. And while nitpicking over semantics when an entire people have been living in military shackles for half a century may smack of so-called First World problems — we say, if not now, then when will the Muslim world sit down and make a concerted effort to change the narrative on Palestine?

This is what expatriate Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has long called for: the doing away with such dangerously juxtaposing vocabulary as “occupation” and “peace process”. For this suggests that all Israel has to do is withdraw its forces for peace to be magically ‘restored’. Whereas, according to Professor Pappé, the Jewish state is guilty of waging a war of ethnic cleansing and colonisation against the Palestinian people in their own land. Indeed he goes as far as talking of the Israelis imposing two military models on those whom it subjugates: an open prison system on the West Bank and a maximum security prison in the Gaza Strip. How else to describe the former — a land where the Palestinian President must wait for his Israeli jailers to open the gates for him? And the latter is where the Jewish state locks away from the outside world those whom it enslaves.

This is where the Pakistani leadership really has to step up to the mark. It is well placed to draw parallels with the prevailing narrative on Indian-held Kashmir that talks of cross-border terrorism instead of disputed territory. It also can never recognise the Israeli state until Palestine is free — regardless of how close Gen Musharraf might or might not have come to this point — if, that is, it wants to settle and not surrender Kashmir.

We therefore would urge PM Abbasi to stress going back to the UN on a priority basis to have Palestine formally recognised. Of course, this would be nothing more than a symbolic gesture given that the US would veto any moves towards this end. But this shouldn’t stop the OIC from tabling resolution after resolution. At the very least this might well end up strengthening the Muslim lobbies in the US. And as hard as this is for us to admit: this is the audience that the OIC must woo. For if, as has been said in certain circles that Trump made this Jerusalem announcement with both eyes firmly on the US mid-terms scheduled for next year, then why should we not play the same game? And ‘manipulate’ the American elections — not through bribery and corruption — but by putting human rights back on the agenda.  *

Published in Daily Times, December 13^th 2017.