In 2000, after over six years of normalisation, Rabat broke ties with Israel over the second Intifada. Last week, the Moroccan people held a symbolic referendum where they voted “NO” for normalisation. Will Rabat listen, once again, to the street?
After the Oslo Accords, Morocco normalised ties for the first time with Israel “to maintain dialogue and understanding.”But Rabat had to walk away from this controversial partnership in reaction to Israel’s brutality during the second Intifada, which erupted in 2000, and the Moroccan street’s rising opposition to Tel Aviv.
Many are wondering today, will history repeat itself? Will Morocco once again walk away from the “Israeli friendship”?
On Sunday, 15 October, thousands of Moroccans stood before parliament, turning a national march into a people’s referendum.
“Do you support normalisation with Israel?” asked the masked protestor riding the van and leading the crowd’s chant. Thousands answered “No” and then chanted for a “free Palestine” and criminalising normalisation with the apartheid state of Israel.
The official total number of the proclaimed “million march” is unknown. But videos from AP agency show thousands of protesters with women and children in front rows covering the 500,000 meters square; the same square closed three years ago for the singing of the normalisation accord.
“Now they have their answer. Those who support normalisation with the Israeli entity are a discordant minority within Moroccan society that breathes the Palestinian cause,” Abdul Rahim Al-Sheikhi, former head of the Islamist movement of Unification and Reform, told The New Arab.
Late in 2020, Morocco normalised ties with Israel in exchange for the US recognising Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara.
At the time, the Moroccan government, ironically led by Islamists, justified normalisation as a “bold diplomatic step” to gain international support for the Sahara issue, a critical issue for most of the Moroccan population.
Three years after the normalisation, even those who were part of it now admit it was “a mistake”.
Last November, Salah Eddin El-Othmani, head of the Moroccan government from 2016 to 2021, said he was under pressure to sign the deal deeming the moment he sat with Jared Kushner, the former US president’s adviser, and Meir Ben-Shabbat, Israel’s National Security Adviser, “painful and difficult.”
El-Othmani did not attend the national protest, but his social media posts spoke volumes of his current position: supporting the Palestinian resistance to liberate their land.
His party, the Justice and Development (PGD), now opposition, apologised last year for signing the normalisation and vowed to lobby for annulling it.
Meanwhile, Nabila Mounib, head of the opposition socialist party, perceives the normalisation as a failing deal since it was first signed.
“We don’t need anyone to help us figure out our national cases. The Zionist entity only came here for its own benefit,” Mounib told TNA at the protest.
“We were silent. Everyone was afraid. Now it’s time to speak up, everyone,” Mounib said as she scanned the myriad of political fractions members who stood next to her as she called for closing the Israeli liaison office in Rabat and kicking out Tel Aviv’s envoy.
After the normalisation, Morocco witnessed a political silence on normalisation and a complete ban on pro-Palestine protests attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But last week, thousands of Islamists, socialists, LGBTQ+ activists and citizens, whose politics are as simple as “Palestine must be free”, chanted in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, with the sky of Rabat, for the first time, witnessed Hamas’ Qassam flag, the Amazigh flag and queer for Palestine signs.
“It was an out-of-body experience,” said the 25-year-old Chaima, who attended her first pro-Palestine protest since normalisation.
“Besides the back-and-forth politics of parties, the three-year-long normalisation has always seemed a ‘distant, evil’ decision that did not leave out the fancy official building to the hearts of the Moroccan people,” says Al-Hajj Hassan as he sat glued to the television screen broadcasting Al-Jazzera in his shop in Al-Median in Rabat.
“It’s like reducing retirement compensations or not giving jobs to young people; they say they do it to preserve our good, but we know they do it for their own good, exactly like normalisation,” said Al-Hajj Hassan.
“We Moroccan people never supported that (normalisation),” he added.
From Rabat to Fes, the Palestinian flag has always represented an amulet of luck and goodwill in shops and houses, and normalisation has failed to change that.
But on a more pragmatic level, the normalisation also failed in achieving its core promise: a US recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara and locating a US embassy in Dakhla city.
Under the Biden administration, the US embassy project seems to be scrapped from the Democratic administration’s program as US officials continue to give mixed signals about the current administration’s position vis-a-vis Rabat’s sovereignty over the territory.
For Sione Asidone, head of the BDS movement in Morocco, Rabat has yet the power to correct its path and to pressure Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza.
“Morocco now has a powerful arm. It must freeze normalisation ties to pressure Tel Aviv to stop its genocide and war crimes in Gaza,” Asidone told TNA during Sunday’s protest.
Source: The New Arab
