Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Breaking: Trump on Jerusalem | Netanyahu Ditches US Jews | 'Say the Word'| ICC: Prosecuting Israel | More ..

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Trump Recognizes Jerusalem as Israeli Capital

The US is formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital, President Donald Trump announced Wednesday brushing aside broad-based international opposition.

He is also directing the State Department to initiate the relocation of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which is claimed by Israelis and Palestinians. The move is expected to take a number of years.

"My announcement today marks the beginning of a new approach to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians," Trump said during a public address from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.

"There will, of course, be disagreement and dissent regarding this announcement - but we are confident that ultimately, as we work through these disagreements, we will arrive at a place of greater understanding and cooperation," he said. "This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality."

Trump's decision places the US at odds with decades of American policy, as well as the rest of the international community, except Israel. No nation has its embassy in Jerusalem. It is also likely to stymy any effort to restart long-stalled peace Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

In the waning days of former President Barack Obama's administration, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said Palestinians have a shared claim to the holy city.

Trump's controversial move is nearly certain to derail peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinians have been seeking East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state. It has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Trump will sign a six-month waiver off-setting the embassy's relocation on national security grounds, according to an official knowledgeable on the matter.

Successive US presidents of both parties have signed the waiver since the Jerusalem Embassy Act went into law in 1995, perpetually forestalling the building's legislated move over concerns it could spark a diplomatic crisis and be a death knell for peace talks.

"Some say they lacked courage, but they made their best judgement based on facts as they understood them at the time," Trump said referring to past presidents who signed the waiver. "Nevertheless the record is in. After more than two decades of waivers, we are no closer to a lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. It would be folly to assume that repeating the same formula would now produce a different or better result."

Palestinian leaders have already called for three "days of rage" to contest Trump's decision.

Jerusalem is considered holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims, and changes to contested city's status quo have been met with fierce opposition.

Israel's decision to restrict Muslim access to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in 2015 set off widespread street violence between Palestinians and Israeli security forces. And an Israeli decision to install controversial metal detectors at the mosque's entrance earlier this year was ultimately reversed after being met with mass protests by Palestinians.

(MEMO, PC, Social Media)

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Netanyahu Ditches US Jews for Alliance with Christian Evangelicals and the Alt-right

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

For decades most American Jews have claimed an "Israel exemption": resolutely progressive on domestic issues, they are hawks on their cherished cause. Racism they would vigorously oppose if applied in the United States is welcomed in Israel.

Reports at the weekend suggested that Donald Trump is about to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, throwing a wrench in any peace plan. If true, the US president will have decisively prioritized support for Israel - and pro-Israel lobbies at home - over justified outrage from Palestinians and the Arab world.

But paradoxically, just as American Jews look close to winning the battle domestically on behalf of Israel, many feel more alienated from a Jewish state than ever before.

There has long been a minority of American Jews whose concerns focused on the occupation. But until now their support for Israel itself has been unwavering, despite its institutionalized racism towards the one in five of the Israeli population who are Palestinian.

A Law of Return denies non-Jews the right to migrate to Israel. Admissions committees bar members of Israel's Palestinian minority from hundreds of communities. A refusal of family reunification has torn apart Palestinian families in cases where one partner lives in Israel and the other in the occupied territories.

Most Jews have justified to themselves these and many other affronts on the grounds that, after the European holocaust, they deserved a strong state. Palestinians had to pay the price.

Given that half the world's Jews live outside Israel - the great majority in the US - their support for Israel is critical. They have donated enormous sums, helping to build cities and plant forests. And they have lobbied aggressively at home to ensure diplomatic, financial and military support for their cause. But it is becoming ever harder for them to ignore their hypocrisy.

The rift has grown into a chasm as Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government widens its assault on civil rights. It now targets not just Palestinians but the remnants of liberal Jewish society in Israel - in open contempt for the values of most American Jews.

The peculiar catalyst is a battle over the most significant surviving symbol of Jewishness: the Western Wall, a supporting wall of a long-lost temple in Jerusalem.

Jews in the US mostly subscribe to the progressive tenets of a liberal secularism or Reform Judaism. In Israel, by contrast, the hard-line Orthodox rule supreme on religious matters.

Since the 1967 occupation, Israel's Orthodox rabbis have controlled prayers at the Western Wall, marginalizing women and other streams of Judaism. That has deeply offended Jewish opinion in the US.

Trapped between American donors and Israel's powerful rabbis, Netanyahu initially agreed to create a mixed prayer space at the wall for non-Orthodox Jews. But as opposition mounted at home over the summer, he caved in. The shock waves are still reverberating.

Avraham Infeld, a veteran Israeli liaison with the US Jewish community, told the Haaretz newspaper this week that the crisis in relations was "unprecedented". American Jews have concluded "Israel doesn't give a damn about them".

Now a close ally of Netanyahu's has stoked the fires. In a TV interview last month, Tzipi Hotovely, the deputy foreign minister, all but accused American Jews of being freeloaders. She condemned their failure to fight in the US or Israeli militaries, saying they preferred "convenient lives".

Her comments caused uproar. They echo those of leading Orthodox rabbis, who argue that Reform Jews are not real Jews - and are possibly even an enemy.

According to a report in the Israeli far-right newspaper Makor Rishon, which is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a US casino billionaire and Netanyahu's patron, the Israeli prime minister set out his rationale for sacrificing the support of liberal Jews overseas at a recent closed-door meeting with officials.

He reportedly told them that non-Orthodox Jews would disappear in "one or two generations" through low birth rates, intermarriage and more general assimilation. Liberal Jews were a "lost cause" in his view, and wedded to a worldview that was incompatible with Israel's future.

Both on demographic and ideological grounds, he added, Israel should invest in cultivating stronger ties to Orthodox Jews and Christian evangelicals.

Netanyahu's demographic predictions may turn out to be faulty, but they are clearly now driving his policy towards liberal Jews at home and abroad.

In fact, as Israel's attacks on liberals in Israel echo Trump's rhetoric and policies towards minorities in the US, American Jews are gradually being forced to reassess their longstanding double standard towards Israel.

For some time the Netanyahu government has tarred Israeli anti-occupation organisations like B'Tselem and the soldier whistle-blowing group Breaking the Silence as traitors. Last week it widened the assault.

The education minister, Naftali Bennett, accused the veteran legal group the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) - Israel's version of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) - of "supporting terrorists". Forty years of ACRI programs in schools are in jeopardy.

The move follows recent decisions to allow pupils to provide racist answers in civics exams and to expand gender-segregation to universities. Meanwhile, two new bills from Netanyahu's party would crack down on free speech for Israelis promoting a boycott, even of the settlements. One proposes seven years in jail, the other a fine of $150,000.

New guidelines have empowered the police to bar media access to incident scenes to prevent critical coverage, especially of police violence.

Defence minister Avigdor Lieberman is seeking stronger powers against political activists, Jews and Palestinians alike, including draconian restraining orders and detention without charge or trial.

And for the first time, overseas Jews are being grilled on arrival at Israel's airport about their political views. Some have signed a "good behavior oath" - a pledge to avoid anti-occupation activities. Already Jewish supporters of boycotts can be denied entry.

The Netanyahu government, it seems, prefers as allies Christian evangelicals and the US alt-right, which loves Israel as much as it appears to despise Jews.

Israel is plotting a future in which American Jews will have to make hard choices. Can they continue to identify with a state that openly turns its back on them?

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

- Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "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 his website: www.jonathan-cook.net.

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'Say the Word': What the Rohingya Struggle is Really About

By Ramzy Baroud

Pope Francis lost a historical opportunity to truly set his legacy apart from previous Popes. Alas, for him, too, political expediency trumped all else. In his visit to Burma (Myanmar) on November 27, he refrained from using the word "Rohingya."

But what's in a name?

In our frenzied attempts at understanding and articulating the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma, we often, perhaps inadvertently, ignore the heart of the matter: The struggle of the Rohingya is, essentially a fight for identity.

Burma's Buddhist majority and its representatives, including the powerful military and the country's de-facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, understand this well. They use a strictly-guarded discourse in which the Rohingya are never recognized as a unique group with pressing political aspirations.

Thus, they refer to the Rohingya as "Bengali," claiming that the Muslim minority are immigrants from Bangladesh who entered the country illegally. Nothing could be further from the truth.

But historical accuracy, at least for the Buddhist majority, is beside the point. By stripping the Rohingya from any name affiliation that makes them a unique collective, it becomes possible, then, to deny them their rights, to dehumanize them and, eventually, ethnically cleanse them as has been the case for years.

Since August, over 650,000 members of the Rohingya community have been driven out of their homeland in Burma by a joint and systematic operation involving the military, the police and various Buddhist nationalist groups. They call it "Clearance Operations."

Thousands of Rohingya have been killed in this grave act of genocide, some in most abhorrent and inhumane ways imaginable.

The United Nations Human Rights Council Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein has recently referred to the purges in Burma as a "textbook example" of ethnic cleansing. There can be no other interpretation of this horrendous campaign of government-led violence.

But as thousands were pushed into the jungles or the open sea, the silence was deafening.

Only recently, US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who visited Burma last November decided to label the massive human rights violations against the Rohingya as "ethnic cleansing."

Although his statement labeled the government-centered genocide as "abuses by some among the Burmese military," it was still a clear departure from past failure to even address the issue altogether.

Still, it was a major disappointment that the Pope abstained from mentioning the Rohingya by name while in Burma. He only stated their name when he crossed the border to Dhaka. In Bangladesh, using the word "Rohingya" seemed like a safe political strategy.

It is understood that refraining from using the word "Rohingya" while in Burma was done as a "concession to the country's Catholics," reported the Washington Post. The logic goes: by challenging the popular narrative that cast the Rohingya as foreigners, the Pope would have ignited the ire of the Buddhists against the country's Christian minority, itself persecuted, at least in two Burmese states.

If the Rohingya are to be named, it means that the core of the issue would have better chances of being directly addressed. The moment they retain their collective identity is the moment that the Rohingya become a political entity, subject to the rights and freedoms of any minority, anywhere.

The Pope, as bold as he has been regarding other issues, has the moral authority to challenge the permeating - yet disconcerting - narrative in Burma that has dehumanized the Rohingya for generations. In 1982, the embattled minority group was denied the status of a minority group and was stripped form its citizenship, paving the way for eventual ethnic cleansing.

Alas, in the end, the Pope joined the regional and international powers that insist on understanding the Rohingya crisis outside the realm of political solutions, pertaining to political rights and identity.

Indeed, he is not alone. ASEAN leaders meeting in Manila, Philippines mid-November made no mention of the Rohingya by name. Worse, in their 26-page final document, they mentioned the crisis in the Northern Rakhine State - the epicenter of the Rohingya genocide - in passing:

"We ... extend appreciation for the prompt response in the delivery of relief items for Northern Vietnam flash floods and landslides ... as well as the affected communities in Northern Rakhine State."

That is how the Southeast Asian leaders respond to one of the worse political and humanitarian disasters in Southeast Asia in recent decades. Pitiful.

Standing proudly in the final photo with the rest of the leaders was Aung San Suu Kyi, who was promoted by western media for many years as a "democracy icon." The "Lady of Burma" who challenged the military junta and spent years under house arrest for her defiance has, in recent years, found a convenient political formula that allows her to share power with the military.

A political opportunist at best, Aung San Suu Kyi, too, does not call the Rohingya by their name. Worse, her government has played a major role in dehumanizing the Rohingya and, at times, blamed them for their own suffering.

Last September, in a last-ditch effort at salvaging her tattered reputation, she gave a 30-minute televised speech in which she explained her position using a most confused logic.

The best she came up with was, "We are a young and fragile country facing many problems ... We cannot just concentrate on the few." The "few", of course, being the Rohingya.

When the Pope arrived in Bangladesh, a man by the name of Mohammed Ayub was awaiting him as part of a small delegation of Rohingya refugees.

Mohammed's 3-year-old son was killed by the Burmese military. The father's message to the Pope was not seeking humanitarian relief for despairing refugees, or even justice for his own child, but something else entirely.

"He should say the word as we are, Rohingya," Mohammed told the Catholic Crux Now. "We have been Rohingya for generations, my father and my grandfather."

In Dhaka, the Pope attempted to reclaim that missed opportunity.

"The presence of God today is also called Rohingya," he said.

- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is "The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story" (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.