(CNN) – Protests in the West Bank have been muted since U.S. President Donald Trump announced his proposed peace plan to settle the longstanding dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. The plan would see Palestinians lose huge swaths of land to Israel.
Palestinian leaders rejected the Trump plan. The administration itself acknowledges Palestinians are being told to give up their claim to about 30% of the West Bank.
The plan proposes Jewish settlements with the red roofs on the West Bank, which the U.N. says are illegally built on conquered land, should be handed immediately to Israel, leaving neighboring Palestinians to work out their frustrations over lost lands.
Ahmed is a Palestinian living in the West Bank. He said, “This is our land and all the land up there is ours. They’re expanding more and more. This Trump plan legitimizes the stealing of our land. Nothing makes sense. You see everything is getting worse and we have no more air to breathe.”
For now, protests against the plan on the West Bank, which was captured by Israel in 1967, have been muted, leaving Ramallah and heading east to where the Israelis plan to take ownership of a vast amount of the ancient landscape.
In the next few days or weeks, Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex the Jordan Valley and indeed the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, but the Jordan Valley is a huge area of territory that extends from the Dead Sea down right up to the Sea of Galilea, but in it are significant Palestinian populations, not least, Jericho
This is one of the world’s most ancient continuously habituated city. It’s carrying on while others plan its future. But there are dire warnings of danger to come.
One Palestinian grocer said, “We, as Palestinian people, should go back to Jihad. That should be our way of resistance. We should not be afraid of Trump or Netanyahu or anyone. We should go back to our old way of fighting. No more useless peaceful negotiations which didn’t bring us any dignity or rights.”
For now, though, the Palestinian leadership has fallen back on old slogans to deal with a radical new plan which could strip them of huge swathes of land.
President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas said, “The world should understand that the Palestinian people deserve to live and we are committed to negotiations based on the international legitimacy. We will fight with all our abilities and the peaceful resistance.”
On the West Bank, though, resistance these days looks more like resignation.
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