Prince
Turki Al Faisal: Mr Trump, it’s time for America to
recognise Palestine
Prince Turki Al Faisal is a former Saudi
ambassador to Washington and London, and was
director-general of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence
agency.
February 03, 2025
On the occasion of Donald Trump’s recent
call to relocate Palestinians from Gaza, Prince Turki
Al Faisal writes him a letter in The National
Dear President Trump,
The Palestinian
people are not illegal immigrants to be deported
to other lands. The lands are their lands and the houses
that Israel
destroyed are their homes, and they will rebuild them as
they have done after previous Israeli onslaughts on
them.
Most of the people of Gaza are
refugees, driven out
of their homes in what is now Israel and the West Bank
by the previous Israeli genocidal assaults on them in
the 1948 and 1967 wars. If they are to be moved from
Gaza, they should be allowed to return to their homes
and to their orange and olive groves in Haifa, Jaffa and
other towns and villages from which they fled or were
forcibly driven out by the Israelis.
Mr President, many of the tens of thousands of
immigrants who came to Palestine from Europe and other
places after the Second World War stole Palestinian
homes and land, terrorised the inhabitants and engaged
in a campaign of ethnic
cleansing. Alas, America and the UK, the victors
of the war, stood by and even facilitated the murderous
evictions of the Palestinians from their homes and
lands.
America
and the UK did not want to receive the victims of
Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust,
so they were content with sending them to Palestine.
In the book Eight Days at Yalta, the author
Diana Preston refers to a conversation between then
US president Franklin Roosevelt and his Russian
counterpart Joseph Stalin. Preston writes:
“Conversation turned to the subject of Jewish
homelands. Roosevelt said he was a Zionist… When
Stalin asked Roosevelt what present he planned to
make [Saudi king] Ibn Saud, he replied his only
concession might be to give him six million Jews..."
Fortunately, when Mr Roosevelt did meet Ibn Saud,
the king disabused him of that offer and suggested
that the Jews should be offered the best lands in
Germany as compensation for the Holocaust. Alas,
Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, wholeheartedly
supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and
eventually became instrumental in the creation of
Israel.
The violence and bloodshed we witness today are the
result of that action and the previous British
complicity with Zionist ambitions from 1917 until
then.
Mr President, your declared intent to bring peace to
Palestine is much lauded in our part of the world. I
respectfully suggest that the way to do that is to
give the Palestinians their inalienable right to
self-determination and a state with its capital in
East Jerusalem, as envisaged in UN General Assembly
Resolutions 181 and 194 and Security Council
Resolutions 242 and 338, and the Arab Peace
Initiative.
All the Arab and Islamic countries, as well as the
Palestinian Authority, accept the terms of the Arab
Peace Initiative to end hostilities and establish
relations with Israel. One hundred and forty-nine
countries recognise the Palestinian state. Please
make your country the 150th. No peace in the Middle
East will be realised without addressing this noble
issue justly and fairly.
Be remembered as the peacemaker.