By JENERALI ULIMWENGU

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Donald Trump continues to pile up vilification. Kim Jong Un thinks he is a dotard, a word used before William Shakespeare wrote, meaning an adult who acts like a child.

His own foreign minister has said he is a moron. Now someone has called him a pyromaniac, which denotes someone with an uncontrollable urge to set things on fire.

There have been many more nouns and adjectives used against Trump, simply because, honestly, the man has made himself irresistible for anyone with a nasty moniker he wants to hurl at someone.

His manner is so abrasive, his speech so coarse and his tactics so crude that it is not hard to love to hate him.

The fire reference in this recent characterisation was offered by someone commenting on the American president’s decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state of Israel, a move that has been condemned by practically the whole world except Israel and the couple of allies that country can still call friends.

Israel has been described as an apartheid state, not without reason. It openly discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens, mostly Muslim and Christian Arabs, and has stubbornly refused to stop the continuing illegal settlements on Palestinian land.

Military occupation

Anyone who supports Israel’s permanent occupation of Arab lands, including parts of Jerusalem, has to believe that a military occupation, if it is allowed to stay in place for long enough, can be legalised somehow.

Jerusalem was occupied during the 1967 Arab-Israel war, and since then the Jewish state has spurned all the UN’s resolutions calling on it to withdraw to the borders of the status quo ante.

Israel is a rogue state with no permanent borders, because these latter can change at any time at the whim of the Israeli government when it authorises new settlements on Palestinian land.

It is as if Tanzania, having beaten Idi Amin in 1978, had declared parts of Uganda Tanzanian by virtue of military conquest. It is a blatant violation of international law.

That Trump the dotard, moron and pyromaniac has decided to show a total disregard for international law, should not surprise us, because that is his wont, and in his desire to play to the gallery of those who voted for him, I suspect, he will do much worse than this before he is impeached and removed from office, or just runs his course and thoroughly discredits the US in the eyes of the world before he is done.

But one thing is clear, and that is that he has effectively written America out of any script for a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question in the foreseeable future.

And, I suspect, he won’t give a hoot about that as long as it is Israel that is still calling the shots and the Palestinians still catching hell. That is the way he is, and apparently even the strong institutions of his country find themselves largely impotent once an ogre has been elected and sits in the Oval Office.

Supporting Trump's move

What is surprising is the Speaker of Tanzania’s parliament supporting that move. Tanzania has a longstanding and principled stand on the Palestinian question, a stand that has guided this country’s policies in the Middle East since the times of Julius Nyerere, who recognised Israel as an occupying military force. He never wavered on this.

I have read and heard humiliating words, such as that we should support Israel because we stand to gain more from that than continuing to back the Arabs who give us so little.

How small we have become! I do not know what those who say these words get from Israel, but did we ever learn anything from the biblical story of the firstborn who sold his right of primogeniture for a bowl of peas?

If we predicate our support for a pariah state on some base calculation of what we get materially from a relationship with it, what then will be the difference between us and prostitutes, except, as an academic friend of mine suggests, that real prostitutes are honest women who provide crucial services in the capitalist production cycle?

To my mind, Trump’s support for fellow racists is explicable, almost inevitable, because birds of a feather flock together, don’t they? Where does ours come from?

Jenerali Ulimwengu is chairman of the board of the Raia Mwema newspaper and an advocate of the High Court in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]