Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Netanyahu's Circus | Trump's One State | Oscar Stars: No to Israel Trip | Barghouthi Sentenced to Life | More ..

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EDITORIAL

The Trump-Netanyahu Circus: Now, No One Can Save Israel from Itself

By Ramzy Baroud

The President of the United States can hardly be taken seriously, saying much but doing little. His words, often offensive, carry no substance, and it is impossible to summarize his complex political outlook about important issues.

This is precisely the type of American presidency that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers.

However, Donald Trump is not just a raving man, but a dangerous one as well. His unpredictability must worry Israel, which expects from its American benefactors complete clarity and consistency in terms of its political support.

At the age of 70, Trump is incapable of being the stalwart, pro-Zionist ideologue in a way that suits Israeli interests well.

Take, for example, the White House press conference following the much anticipated visit by Netanyahu to Washington on 15 February.

The visit was scheduled immediately after Trump's inauguration on 20 January and is considered the Trump Presidency's answer to what Israel wrongly perceives as a hostile US administration under former President Barack Obama.

However, Obama granted Israel $38 billion over the course of ten years, estimated to be the most generous aid package in US history. He supported all the Israeli wars against Palestinians during his presidency, and unfailingly defended Israel before the international community, at the United Nations and every global forum in which Israel was justifiably criticised.

But Israel expects blind support. It needs a US administration that is as loyal as the US Congress, always praising Israel, degrading Palestinians, dismissing international law, calling to stop funding the UN for daring to demand accountability from Israel, feeding Israeli "security" phobias with monetary and absolute political backing, demonising Iran, undermining the Arabs and repeating all Israeli talking points fed to them by Tel Aviv and by the fifth column lobbyists in Washington.

Trump is striving to be that person, the messiah that Israel's army of right-wing, ultranationalists and religious zealots have been calling for. But this appears beyond the man's control, no matter how hard he tries.

"Looking at two-state or one-state, I like the one that both parties like. I'm very happy with the one both parties like. I can live with either one," Trump said in answer to a journalist's question, implying to Israel that the US will no longer impose solutions; instead, Trump pushed the "one-state solution" idea to the very top of the discussion. It is not what Israel wanted - or expected.

In Washington, Netanyahu, with unmistakable pomposity, stood before the media and simply lied. He painted Israel as vulnerable, a prey for dark "radical Islam" forces, ready to strike from every corner.

He presented Iran's nuclear capabilities as if it is lined up to incinerate Israel, itself built atop the graves and villages of dispossessed Palestinians. No journalist had the courage to quiz the Israeli leader about his own country's massive nuclear arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction. Listening to him preach fabricated history to the incurious American media, one would think that militarily powerful Israel is occupied by hostile Palestinian foreigners, and not vice versa.

Netanyahu claimed his people belonged to Palestine as the French belonged to France and the Chinese to China. But if European Jewish immigrants are the natives of Palestine, then what is one to make of Palestinians? How is one to explain their existence on land that has carried their collective name for millennia?

This is inconsequential to the US government and mainstream media. US media is as uninformed about the realities of the Middle East as Trump, who seems to have only two main talking points about the whole issue, both embarrassingly bizarre:

Israel has been treated "very, very badly" by the US, and he has a "really great peace deal" in store.

On the contrary, Palestinians have been treated "very, very badly" by the US, the most generous supporter of Israel. Israel has used mostly American weapons in its wars against Palestinians and other Arab nations, with thousands of Palestinians losing their lives because of this blind American patronage.

As for his "really great peace deal", Trump has nothing. "Really great" seems to be his answer to everything, to the point that his words are becoming ineffectual clichés, suitable for twitter jokes and comedy.

Furthermore, Netanyahu, urged on by - to quote former Secretary of State, John Kerry - the "most right-wing coalition in Israeli history" - wants the US to unconditionally support Israel as the latter is finalizing its future "vision".

Now, it seems that Israel is concluding that territorial quest. The "Regularization Law" passed recently in Israel's parliament - the Knesset - will retroactively validate all Israeli illegal settlers' claims over Palestinian land. Top Israel officials now openly speak of annexation of the West Bank, using language that was formerly reserved for Jewish extremists.

Israel's president believes annexation is the answer. "I, Rubi Rivlin, believe that Zion is entirely ours. I believe the sovereignty of the State of Israel must be in all the blocs," Rivlin said, emphasizing that he was referring to the entire West Bank, as quoted by the Times of Israel.

The consensus among Israel's ruling class is that a Palestinian state should never be established. Trump, although incoherent, granted them just that.

So what does Netanyahu want? We know he does not want a Palestinian state and plans to annex all Jewish colonies, while continuing to expand over stolen Palestinian land. He wants Palestinians to exist, but without political will of their own, without sovereignty, forced to accept that Israel is a Jewish state (thus signing off on their historic right to their own land); to remain subdued, passive, disarmed, dehumanized.

Netanyahu's end game is Apartheid, racist segregation where one party, Israeli Jews, dominates and exploits the other - Palestinian Arabs: Muslims and Christians.

But human dignity is not open for negotiation, no matter how a "good negotiator" Netanyahu is - according to Trump's assertion.

Palestinians have resisted Israel for nearly 70 years because they challenge their servitude. They will continue to resist.

Israel has the military means to punish Palestinians for their resistance, to push them behind military checkpoints and trap them behind walls. Yet, it is not a matter of firepower, and no wall can be high enough to stymie the echoes of oppressed people striving for freedom, human rights, equality and solidarity.

Netanyahu must feel triumphant because of Trump's assuring words. The Israeli leader wants any victory, however illusive, to buy time and the allegiance of his camp of extremists, especially now that he is being investigated for fraud and is likely to be indicted.

He may even initiate a war against Gaza to create further distraction, and will readily spin facts so that his country is presented as a victim, to test American support and to "downgrade" Hamas' and other Palestinian groups' defenses.

However, none of this will change the reality that Netanyahu has unwisely constructed. His vision for Israel is the perpetual subjugation of Palestinians through a system of racial discrimination that will continue until the world unravels the lies and the propaganda.

Having Trump by his side, Netanyahu will work diligently to perfect the Palestinian prison in the name of Israel's security.

Palestinians must now respond, without the irrelevant rhetoric of a "two-state solution", but with a unified universal message to the rest of the world: expecting - in fact, demanding - freedom, equality, full rights in a society that is not predicated on racial order, but on equal citizenship.

Israel has laid out its dark vision. Palestinians must present the antithesis to that destructive vision: a road map towards justice, equality and peace for all.

- Dr. Ramzy Baroud has been writing about the Middle East for over 20 years. He is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant, an author of several books and the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His books include "Searching Jenin", "The Second Palestinian Intifada" and his latest "My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story". His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.

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COMMENTARY

Trump Has Reminded Palestinians That It was Always about One State

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

For more than 15 years, the Middle East "peace process" initiated by the Oslo accords has been on life support. Last week, United States president Donald Trump pulled the plug, whether he understood it or not.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could barely stifle a smile as Trump demoted the two-state solution from holy grail. Instead, he said of resolving the conflict: "I am looking at two states or one state ... I can live with either one."

Given the huge asymmetry of power, Israel now has a free hand to entrench its existing apartheid version of the one-state solution - Greater Israel - on the Palestinians. This is the destination to which Netanyahu has been steering the Israel-Palestine conflict his entire career.

It emerged this week that at a secret summit in Aqaba last year - attended by Egypt and Jordan, and overseen by US secretary of state John Kerry - Netanyahu was offered a regional peace deal that included almost everything he had demanded of the Palestinians. And still he said no.

Much earlier, in 2001, Netanyahu was secretly filmed boasting to settlers of how he had foiled the Oslo process a short time earlier by failing to carry out promised withdrawals from Palestinian territory. He shrugged off the US role as something that could be "easily moved to the right direction".

Now he has the White House exactly where he wanted it.

In expressing ambivalence about the final number of states, Trump may have assumed he was leaving options open for his son-in-law and presumed peace envoy, Jared Kushner.

But words can take on a life of their own, especially when uttered by the president of the world's only superpower.

Some believe Trump, faced with the region's realities, will soon revert to Washington's playbook on two states, with the US again adopting the bogus role of "honest broker". Others suspect his interest will wilt, allowing Israel to intensify settlement building and its abuse of Palestinians.

The long-term effect, however, is likely to be more decisive. The one-state option mooted by Trump will resonate with both Israelis and Palestinians because it reminds each side of their historic ambitions.

The international community has repeatedly introduced the chimera of the two-state solution, but for most of their histories the two sides favoured a single state - if for different reasons.

From the outset, the mainstream Zionist movement wanted an exclusive Jewish state, and a larger one than it was ever offered. Some even dreamed of the recreation of a Biblical kingdom whose borders incorporated swaths of neighbouring Arab states.

In late 1947, the Zionist leadership backed the United Nations partition plan for tactical reasons, knowing the Palestinians would reject the transfer of most of their homeland to recent European immigrants.

A few months later they seized more territory - in war - than the UN envisioned, but were still not satisfied. Religious and secular alike hungered for the rest of Palestine. Shimon Peres was among the leaders who began the settlement drive immediately following the 1967 occupation.

Those territorial ambitions were muffled by Oslo, but will be unleashed again in full force by Trump's stated indifference.

The Palestinians' history points in a parallel direction. As Zionism made its first inroads into Palestine, they rejected any compromise with what were seen as European colonisers.

In the 1950s, after Israel's creation, the resistance under Yasser Arafat espoused a single secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Palestinians' growing isolation in the early 1990s, did Arafat cave in to European and US pressure and sign up for partition.

But for Palestinians, Oslo has not only entailed enduring Israel's constant bad faith, but it has also created a deeply compromised vehicle for self-government. The Palestinian Authority has split the Palestinian people territorially - between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza - and required a Faustian pact to uphold Israel's security, including the settlers', at all costs.

The truth, obscured by Oslo, is that the one-state solution has underpinned the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians for more than a century. It did not come about because each expected different things from it.

For Israelis, it was to be a fortress to exclude the native Palestinian population.

For Palestinians, it was the locus of national liberation from centuries of colonial rule. Only later did many Palestinians, especially groups such as Hamas, come to mirror the Zionist idea of an exclusive - if in their case, Islamic - state.

Trump's self-declared detachment will now revive these historic forces. Settler leader Naftali Bennett will compete with Netanyahu to take credit for speeding up the annexation of ever-greater blocs of West Bank territory while rejecting any compromise on Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Palestinians, particularly the youth, will understand that their struggle is not for illusory borders but for liberation from the Jewish supremacism inherent in mainstream Zionism.

The struggle Trump's equivocation provokes, however, must first play out in the internal politics of Israelis and Palestinians. It is a supremely clarifying moment. Each side must now define what it really wants to fight for: a fortress for their tribe alone, or a shared homeland ensuring rights and dignity for all.

(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)

- Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jonathan-cook.net.

FEATURE

26 Oscar Stars Turn Down Free 5-star Trip to Israel

Hollywood stars including Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon were amongst Oscar celebrities who were offered luxury trips to Israel; however none have taken advantage of the offer.

The offers were for $55,000 personalized trips and came as part of the gift bags handed out to a host of famous faces at the prestigious awards ceremony.

Critics have criticized the trip as a means for Israel to highlight its narrative and ensure abuses to Palestinian rights and Israel's illegal actions are not on show during the trip.

"This is a success," Yousef Munayyer of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, which ran the campaign against the visits along with American organisation Jewish Voice for Peace, told AFP.

"I am very glad there's no evidence that people went. I think it is clear the objective of using the actors to whitewash Israel has failed."

The news agency said Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence gave the offer to her parents.

(MEMO, PC, Social Media)

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