Islamabad:Mohammad Makram Omar Moh’d Balawi, Secretary-General, League of Parliamentarians for Al Quds (LP4Q), Makram Balawi, has said that Trump views international politics like a kind of a deal without any focus on finding a political solution for the Palestinian people while Europeans talk about a two-state solution but not doing anything substantive about it.
Mr Balawi was speaking as chief guest at a public talk on ‘Palestine at a crossroads: the future of the Palestinian cause under the Board of Peace’ organised here by Institute of Strategic Studies (ISSI) under its Distinguished Lecture series.
Mr Balawi said that as Palestinians, we are happy that Muslim counties are involved in the Board of Peace as a balancing factor but it is not a good solution. He said the Board of Peace is a project of Trump and this is likely to collapse sooner. Israelis are also undermining Trumps plan and are pushing Palestinians to retaliate. He concluded that Israel wants to create an environment where Palestinians find it difficult to survive.
Mushahid Hussain Sayed, President, Pakistan Africa Institute for Development and Research (PAIDAR), as keynote speaker stated that the discourse on Palestine changed with the growing awareness in Western countries of Israeli brutality, increasing perception within the Arab and Muslim world of Israel as a major threat and the rise of a coordinated Indo-Israel nexus driven by extremist ideologies of Hindutva and Zionism respectively linking the issues of Kashmir and Palestine. He emphasised Pakistan’s historic and unwavering support for the Palestinian cause recalling that Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s first formal diplomatic communication with US President Harry Truman was on Palestine.
Dr Amina Khan, Director, ISSI, in her welcome remarks said that despite global outrage and mounting evidence, Israel remains actively engaged in the systematic genocide of the Palestinian people marked by mass civilian killings, destruction of entire communities, deliberate dismantling of Palestinian life in Gaza and the other occupied territories.
