#the palestinian people have been failed by their leadership time and time again

[curator-on-ao3]

Text:

DGA Statement on the Terrorist Attacks on Israel

October 11, 2023

Los Angeles – The Directors Guild of America released the following statement regarding the terrorist attacks on Israel.

“The DGA unequivocally condemns terrorism and joins the many voices in our community decrying the recent Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and violence against innocent civilians. We stand against the growing spread of antisemitism here in the US and abroad, and remain committed in our actions, words and deeds to supporting the Jewish people.”

This is a clear, helpful, relevant statement of care.

Love and light to the DGA and to all who co-sign these sentiments.

[hero-israel]

I don't think the Biden administration has been withholding intelligence, I think that was just some really poor wording in the Washington Post article. all other reporting shows that there has been freely shared intelligence. the Biden administration want the intelligence that's being given to be used differently but it would be absurdly foolish for a very long list of reasons and go against standard practice to withhold it.

anyway so about realignment/reshaping operations. basically it's targeted strikes with the specific goal of creating a power vacuum which sucks other people into leadership positions who are more willing to sit down at the negotiating table and transition away from warfare. neither politicians nor the general public particularly like this method bc it's time-consuming due to the amount of intelligence gathering needed to ensure the ideal people are maneuvered into the ideal position. this method mitigates civilian casualties, doesn't flatten cities, and works far better than a ground offensive in situations like this and, given the small size of Gaza, a peace deal might have been possible by now if this had been done from the beginning.

as I said before, conventional warfare against an unconventional force doesn't work; it escalates the situation by turning the bystanders into sympathizers and turning the already sympathetic into being active in the movement, whatever the movement may be and for better or worse. this holds true in other situations as well; consider any situation with a state force vs a non-state force, such as the Boston Massacre, Bloody Sunday, and anything involving police violence. to quote the article in the post you linked regarding the Houthis: “And the use of force against the Houthis in the past […] has merely allowed the group to refine its military capabilities and portray itself as a heroic resistance movement, bolstering its legitimacy at home.” because even when the non-state force is the agitator or bad guy this still holds true. hence the IDF having to return to northern Gaza bc hamas has reemerged there and the unhinged people in the west supporting terrorists that they claim are heroic freedom fighters. hamas knows this on some level as well. they know they have no chance of winning in combat but they can win the propaganda war whilst recruiting new combatants to replenish what they lose after each new round of violence.

I do disagree with the author of that article about using an entirely diplomatic response in regards to terrorism bc that's unrealistic and frankly silly (and, as an USAmerican I'm compelled to quote the meme, don't touch our boats). but at the same time, to quote the article again, “[…] the United States has only bad options because of its failed approaches to Yemen over the past 20 years. Washington must not repeat its mistakes. Decades of experience have shown, by now, that military efforts to dislodge the Houthis are unlikely to be effective. Instead, they may merely further devastate the lives of the already struggling people of Yemen.” the author isn't wrong there. the USA spent two decades in the region with little to show for it, and unless Israel changes its method of taking on hamas soon then you guys will be speedrunning the same mistakes we did.

you can't fight an unconventional force via conventional means nor can you do diplomacy with undiplomatic people, but there are options other than doing nothing and fighting forever wars. I'm not as versed in armed conflict and counterinsurgency operations as I am foreign policy and propaganda, but there's been a century's worth of research into such things and this is what it indicates according to the experts.

the USAmerican advisors/admin are also aiming for a three-point plan of a multi-national regional security force to ensure everyone stays chill upon a ceasefire, supplying tons of stuff to rebuild, and a functional Palestinian Authority/government to lead the way to actual statehood. which seems to have some growing support among Israeli officials and surprisingly even neighboring states seem to be on board. this could actually result in a real end to the conflict though it may remain tense for some time and people may have to choose between getting justice or getting peace, similar to the aftermath of the Troubles in Ireland. there's no way this ends with confetti and parades. it will likely be depressing for both sides and have many variables that could cause everything to go off the rails and back into a cycle of violence. but despite the risks and current horrors, long term peace and stability seem more optimistic now than they have ever been.

I'm not among the people who expect a simple solution that magically solves one of the longest and most complicated geopolitical issues on the planet. and I don't have an opinion on what the course of action should actually be, I'm just aware of the likelihood of various things helping or hindering peace and wanted to at least try to explain some of the foreign policy stuff that tends to go over most people's heads. (I'm so sorry for this being so long)

.

[girlactionfigure]

*ISRAEL REALTIME* - "Connecting the World to Israel in Realtime"

HAPPY CHANUKAH !!! Chanukah night 8 tonight 🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎🕎

▪️ROCKETS… short range from Gaza, around 10am.

▪️U.S. SHOOTS DOWN HOUTHI DRONE… yesterday.  Not stated whether targeting Israel or merchant ships.

▪️U.S. DELAYS GUN ORDER OVER “SETTLER VIOLENCE”… The Biden administration is holding up the sale of more than 20,000 US-made rifles to Israel over concerns about attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank, Axios said on Wednesday, citing two unnamed US officials.

▪️MASS SURRENDER AT GAZA KAMAL ADWAN HOSPITAL… pictures show them all coming out with rifles (held over their heads).  Essential medical equipment?

▪️HOSTAGE NEGOTIATIONS?  The Arabic newspaper Al Jadid quotes senior Egyptian officials that Israel has officially approached Egypt to resume negotiations with Hamas.  On the other hand, statements by senior Hamas officials that negotiations will only be possible with a complete cessation of hostilities.  “It seems that Israel is getting back to work with the Egyptians and pushing the Qataris aside.”

▪️EXCELLENT… https://x.com/Eretz_Nehederet/status/1734945981651673297?t=z-guAG1JZSTvAiE5IrNZtA&s=35

▪️MORE ON LEBANON NEGOTIATIONS… (The Arab Desk) Towards a diplomatic agreement 🤔

First option:  Hezbollah will withdraw to a distance that will not allow accurate shooting at the settlements adjacent to the fence.

Second option:  Hezbollah will withdraw beyond the Litani line.

Both options are destined for failure in advance.  Here’s why: am agreement was signed after the Second Lebanon War - UN resolution 1701, it is not worth the paper it was written on. Hezbollah over the years came back and took control of the entire southern Lebanon, built infrastructure above and below the ground, dug tunnels, built attack positions hidden from view from which, by the way, they fire missiles every day.

Hezbollah will not throw away this infrastructure in which tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested.  Their hold on South Lebanon is a strategic hold, there is no one in the world who can guarantee that something like this will not happen again if they sign such an agreement.  War with Hezbollah is not a question of if but when.  They aim to surprise us, this is their supreme goal.  

A diplomatic agreement with Hezbollah can happen, the IDF forces will withdraw and the northern border will return to normal.  Months of quiet will pass, the north will bloom again, and we will be put to sleep again and then... it will happen again, simply because the reins are in the hands of Nasrallah (Hezbollah leader) in Beirut, only this time it will be ten times stronger.  What will our leadership say then? “We didn't know, there were no early signs, the cable was disconnected, the lens of the camera was covered in dust, there was no fuel in the vehicles, there were clouds and rain.

Enough with the lies, enough with the manipulations.  We live in a different time, everything is exposed, everything is known.  All the (“peace”) concepts that have been running us for decades collapsed on Shabbat Simchat Torah, and we are paying the price in the lives of our warriors who put their lives at risk so that we can survive here another day.  (( And the lives of our citizens, and hostages, who those concepts failed! ))

Do not take Hezbollah off the table, if you take it off the table we will pay a price that we cannot afford as a country. (( and as a people and nation. ))

[honeysider]

https://www.tumblr.com/honeysider/739803375060811776/youre-pathetic-in-every-respect?source=share I'm actually interested in what you think the answer is. I'm not saying this to antagonize or bait you, I really want to know. As someone who has seen third parties fail and fail again when trying to breach into bipartisan leadership (don't get me wrong, I don't like either party) it's hard to see how leaving things to the masses (who will most likely vote for Trump) or up to a third party that probably won't win; I'm quite literally at a loss of what to do.

Here's how I see things, personally. You can't fix things in one or even two elections, and you certainly can't fix things by voting for the same party over and over again. This might get rambly.

Like, I wont even get into the viability of elections as a means of engineering political change because I'm assuming you dgaf about that (not a dig, most people consider all the other political stuff like on-the-ground work to be too much for them). I'll explain it in a way that made sense to me when I decided to not waste my time voting in presidential elections.

I do not believe in The Democratic Party or Biden's specific policies as vehicles to advance either my self interest or the interests of others in the country. The lesser of two evils argument doesn't even cut it anymore. Biden is enforcing Trump's old immigration policies even going so far as to continue building the goddamn wall. He doesn't support universal healthcare. He crumbles against any kind of pressure that isn't only rhetoric, basically threw up his hands and gave up when student loan forgiveness was attacked by the courts, and supports the genocide against Palestinians financially. He is mostly indistinguishable from a Republican, save for the theocratic aspects.

Why would I vote for someone I don't believe in?I might go vote for Cornel West because simply put I believe in more of his policies than Biden's, if I vote at all.

And that's the main thing that bothers me about the vote blue no matter who philosophy. You're never supposed to vote for who you believe in. In the primaries you are expected to unite around the Most Likely Candidate To Win The Election, not the candidate who you agree with. I remember when people screamed at Bernie voters because they were voting for the democratic socialist, not any of the mainstream moderate front runners and he started winning states. Pundits and analysts and party activists had a meltdown until the Democrats managed to wrangle everything around Biden.

So point 1, I will only vote for people I believe in. If the Republicans win as a result of enough people doing the same thing, the Democrats should have pushed a better candidate.

And that leads to point 2, Blue No Matter Who doesn't perpetuate a regrettable-but-tolerable lesser of two evils situation. It enables democrats to be as evil as their opponents, just no further than their opponents. The Democratic Party Platform used to include Universal Healthcare, and now it's literally been erased from the platform. Democrats have had three terms between Bush and now and we have only now pulled out of Afghanistan, and we still have troops in Iraq? What? Guantanamo Bay is still active? "Enhanced interrogation" is still being used? The Patriot act is renewed every time it comes up without a yell or a peep? Power is being increasingly centralized in the executive branch? All the big controversies from my childhood are still mostly unsolved today due mostly to Democratic inaction and ineptitude with a dash of Republican malevolence.

My only tool is abstaining from the process. The only thing Democrats believe in are election victories. If you just give them votes no matter who they run they won't care about seriously pursuing real beneficial policy. Let them lose elections until they get the picture.

And look. I know its hard and its scary to imagine Trump in the white house again. But Biden's doing like 99% of his policy anyways, so really all you're voting for now is a facade of political professionalism, not for what you actually believe.

So don't vote, withhold it until Democrats get a clue and get more involved or at least more knowledgeable about state and local politics.

If you want to hear about the Revolution and stuff there are better people to talk to than me tho lol

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

mike luckovich :: [@mluckovichajc]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 6, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

FEB 7, 2024

MAGA Republicans appear to have killed the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, after senators and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas spent four months writing the border security piece of the bill that the House MAGA Republicans themselves demanded. House Republicans insisted that border security be added to the supplemental national security bill that provided additional assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and provided humanitarian aid to Gaza. 

It turns out that they were apparently hoping to kill support for Ukraine, which is widely popular both in Congress and with voters across the country, and figured that Democrats would never agree to their demands for a border measure. Thus they could kill aid to Ukraine and hammer Democrats for leaving the border in crisis. 

But Democrats see aid to Ukraine as so fundamental to our national security that they were willing to give up even the path to citizenship for the Dreamers, those brought to the U.S. as children, a requirement on which they have previously stood firm, in order to get Republicans to pass the national security measure. The final compromise, released by the Senate negotiators late Sunday night, had much of what Republicans have wanted to impose on the border for a long time. 

But Trump, who wants to use the confusion on the border as a campaign issue, pressed the Republicans to reject the measure. While the Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take it up, enough Republicans have now come out against it that it appears to have little hope of advancing. As the headline of Carl Hulse’s analysis in the New York Times puts it: “On the Border, Republicans Set a Trap, Then Fell Into It.”

In a speech at the White House today, President Joe Biden urged Congress to pass the bill. He thanked the negotiators who have worked so hard on it, and blamed Trump for shooting it down. Trump has been working the phones, calling Republican lawmakers to “threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal,” Biden said. “And it looks like they’re caving.” 

Biden pointed out that “everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Border Patrol [Union] to the…United States Chamber of Commerce support[s] this bill,” and that the Border Patrol Union endorsed Trump in 2020. 

“[I]f the bill fails,” Biden told Republicans, “I want to be absolutely clear about something: The American people are going to know why it failed. I’ll be taking this issue to the country, and the voters are going to know that…just at the moment we were going to secure the border and fund these other programs, Trump and the MAGA Republicans said no because they’re afraid of Donald Trump.”

“Every day between now and November, the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secure is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends. It’s time for Republicans in the Congress to show a little courage, to show a little spine to make it clear to the American people that you work for them and not for anyone else.” 

Then, this afternoon, House leadership called a vote on the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas, who they insist is not enforcing the laws that should protect the border. Just to be clear, good leadership would never call such an important vote unless they were absolutely certain it had the votes to pass. 

You know where this is going, right?

It did not have the votes to pass. Three Republicans joined the Democrats to make up a majority of 216, while the Republicans could muster only 214. Republicans say they will bring the measure up again later. 

Then House leadership decided to bring to the House floor a standalone bill providing $17.6 billion to Israel, without aid for Ukraine or Taiwan, or humanitarian aid for the Palestinians. That, too, failed, by a vote of 250 to 180. 

Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News posted on social media: “I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing days for different House Republican leadership teams. This one is pretty high on the list. They lost a vote to impeach Mayorkas. And then they lost a vote to send $17.6 billion to Israel. They didn't need to vote on the Israel bill today. They knew it would fail. They chose to.” 

News broke today that Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel is planning to leave her position under pressure from Trump, who wants a more fervent loyalist in the job—despite the unquestioned loyalty that had McDaniel participating in Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election—and is unhappy with the RNC’s dismal finances. The RNC’s chief of staff under McDaniel, Mike Reed, will also be stepping down.

Meanwhile, former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson released a video today confirming that he is in Moscow to interview Russian president Vladimir Putin. He says he plans to tell people the “truth” of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Carlson says that no U.S. journalist has tried to interview Putin since the conflict began, a comment that drew the astonishment of CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, who pointed out that real journalists (unlike Carlson, whose lawyers have successfully defended him in court from slander charges by saying he should not be expected to tell the truth) have been trying to get an interview with Putin since the war began but he will only talk to propaganda outlets.

Putin has, of course, imprisoned American journalists Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal and Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. 

Carlson said Elon Musk is permitting him to post the interview on X, formerly Twitter.

And finally today, last but very much not least, the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reviewing the question of whether Trump is immune from criminal prosecution for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election released their decision. 

He is not immune.

The panel wrote: “We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power—the recognition and implementation of election results. Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count….

“We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter….

“For the purposes of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution….”

Trump’s lawyers say they will appeal the decision.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nicklloydnow]

“For too long, Israel has withheld from fully confronting Hamas and other terror groups. It's done so to appease countries and institutions that speak about Israel's right to defend itself in theory but grow squeamish with the reality of what this looks like. It's done so to placate those who fail to realize that Hamas's continued existence threatens both Israeli and Palestinian lives.

Israel can no longer afford to defer to those who live a world away and whose approach would neuter its response yet again. Those days are over.

After all, Hamas's homicidal designs against Israelis and Jews have been there all along. The terror group's charter speaks of the complete destruction of the Jewish state, and it spent the last 15 years firing rockets and executing terror attacks as proof they mean what's written. Iran, which provides the financial backing for Hamas's campaigns, has also been explicit about its designs to "uproot and destroy Israel."

(…)

Israel must retaliate determinedly both to eliminate the threat from Hamas and to send a message to the region. In the Middle East, the weak are preyed upon. Iran and its terror proxies must see that attacking Israel would bring devastating consequences.

The case for this is straightforward. After all, the gruesome evidence of Hamas's attacks crystallized two truths.

First, Hamas has no interest in a two-states solution. Just the opposite, they are trying to make good on the promise in their charter to annihilate Israel and its people, to make sure the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is Judenrein, cleansed of Jews.

Second, the argument that Hamas is fighting occupation is wrong. While Gaza's borders are controlled by Israel on one side and Egypt on the other out of security necessity, there is not a single Jewish community or Israeli soldier stationed in the Strip. In fact, the only Jews in Gaza are the ones now being held captive by Hamas.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, Palestinians had an opportunity to build the infrastructure and organs of their own state. They didn't. Hamas stole aid dollars intended for building hospitals, schools, and other critical infrastructure and instead funded the web of terror we now see on display.

Israel is on the frontline of a war for civilization. It will do what it must to destroy the Hamas war machine, including its leadership, its infrastructure, and its weapons—once and for all. It will do so with as much precision as possible to avoid civilian casualties even as Hamas intentionally operates behind the civilian population of Gaza.

(…)

For the past two weeks, it was not a matter of if but when questions from the West about Israeli restraint or a ceasefire would become more frequent, and the tide of support buoying Israel would turn. So here we are. Politicians and human rights activists are drawing a false equivalency between attacking civilians and acting in self-defense to defend civilians.

But Israel must stand up to the expectations of these "Western sensibilities." Its leaders cannot allow those sitting comfortably in their homes on the safer side of the world to dictate how Israel keeps its own citizens safe.

Israel did that once before. And this month, we saw the brutal, senseless, and savage results on display.”

[jewelleria]

idk tho i feel like there’s a point where we have to cut our losses and say, “okay, we’ve done everything for the sake of peace for the past 75 years, we’ve sacrificed way more land than anyone asked us to, we’ve made more compromises than was ever requested of us, and they are still determined to kill us.”

and no, “they” doesn’t mean all palestinians, it means the leaders who make the decisions on behalf of the palestinians. and we have never, not once, seen a palestinian leader get far enough away from the legacy of violence in order to leave it behind.

israel has seen every rejection, every single time a peace deal has fallen through because of them, and each time they have tried one more time to create a lasting solution for peace. they have seen the lasting impression left by the palestinian leaders’ insatiable desire for violence, destruction, and war after war after war. they have made sacrifice after sacrifice. they purposely withdrew all israeli soldiers and all jewish civilians from gaza, against the wishes of those 10,000 jewish civilians, dragging them from their homes—because the deal was that if israel pulled out of the gaza strip, there would be peace. so israel agreed.

maybe palestinian self-determination was beneficial before. maybe it could have been good for everyone at one point in time, before every single representative of the palestinian people, every single palestinian leader, failed to accept every offer for peace from israel.

and before you say, “it’s not about what the leadership wants, it’s about what the people want,” let me remind you that these leaders were democratically elected by the palestinian people. let me remind you that leaders are the ones refusing to hold elections, the leaders are the ones hurting their people, and the leaders are the ones with the power to make peace. the people alone can’t make peace, and saying that the peoples’ opinions are more important than the opinions of their representatives that are on the international stage is missing the point of democracy. a leader cannot have all the power (that would be a dictatorship), but neither can the people (that would be anarchy). that’s how democracy fucking works.

honestly, the fact that the entire world is advocating for palestinian self-determination when the palestinians themselves have made it incredibly clear that they don’t want that is more anti-palestinian than anything. oh, you don’t know how they’ve made it clear? hm, well, let’s see:

the palestinians were offered a state in 1948, and they refused because it wasn’t “from the river to the sea.” israel begged them to compromise, but they said no in the form of declaring war.

they could have merged the west bank with jordan in 1967, when israel offered to give back all of the land—all of it!—that it won in the six day war. for the sake of peace. again: they refused.

they were offered a state in 2000 during the oslo accords, along with billions of dollars in reparations and economic aid, and arafat walked. that refusal, on the part of the palestinian leadership, motivated the people to AGREE with arafat by launching the second intifada.

and there were all these complaints too—yeah, each state offer was smaller than the one before. that’s what happens when you don’t accept the most generous one THE FIRST TIME.

what’s the common denominator here? oh, i don’t know. maybe the fact that each time the palestinians refused peace by declaring war, the world blamed israel for responding and insisted that israel started it. well, by their logic, yeah—they did start it. THEY STARTED IT BY EXISTING.

so, no. self-determination is not an inherent right. it starts out as one, that’s for sure. but it stops being one once the people who claim to want self-determination actually just want to kill the people who want to live beside them in peace.

they don’t want a state. they just don’t want us to have one.

wake up. open your eyes. when people tell you who they are, over and over and over again, BELIEVE THEM.

we had peace on october 6th. saying that isn’t a metaphor or a sound bite. it’s a fact. we were on the path to forming alliances with the arab world.

october 7th was the palestinian way of saying, no. peace is not an option. it was never an option.

say it with me: self-determination stops being an inherent right when the people who claim to want it do everything in their power to reject it.

SELF-DETERMINATION STOPS BEING AN INHERENT RIGHT WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO CLAIM TO WANT IT DO EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO REJECT IT.

I want Palestinian self-determination because I think that it's beneficial and an inherent right

You want Palestinian self-determination because you think it will get rid of all the jews and that jewish self-determination is lesser than Palestinian self-determination.

We are not the same.

[politicaltheatre]

Empathy, pt.3

Let’s start with this: Jamal Kashshoggi was a man.

Do you remember him? He was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories.

He was also a journalist. After years of supporting the Saudi royal family and their authoritarian regime, he was murdered in 2018 for writing and speaking out against their abuses and, eventually, their war in Yemen. That was the version of him who fled Saudi Arabia, and the one who was marked for death by the Saudi crown prince he had once called a friend.

Last fall, the Saudi regime commuted the death sentences of the men it offered up as his murderers. Three months ago, an investigation confirmed that it was the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had ordered his death.

We’re forgetting him. Even now, reading this, we are already forgetting. We can’t help it. At least, we tell ourselves we can’t.

In many ways, Kashshoggi was a lot like Alexei Novalny. Novalny hasn’t left the news quite yet. Like Kashshoggi, he supported the corrupt, authoritarian regime in his country, Russia, before turning against it. The attempt on his life, by poison, failed. Barely. He’s still alive, locked up in a Russian prison, a cautionary tale for those daring to oppose Vladimir Putin.

How long before we’ve forgotten him, too?

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves, remembering everyone around us. Sure, in some abstract way most of us try, “Good will towards men,” and all that, but we have the luxury of looking away and of not having to commit ourselves to thinking of others the way those two men did.

For each of them, it was an inescapable empathy for the suffering of they saw around them that compelled them to risk their lives to draw attention to it. They did so knowing the cost.

That cost - personal loss, imprisonment, death - is enough to keep most of us looking away. So much of what we do is to enable us to look away, to keep unpleasant reality at a distance. When others are already physically far away, it only makes it that much harder for us to do the right thing.

Looking out past our borders, the world today is filled with men, women, and children suffering, more than a few at the hands of authoritarian regimes, and of them far too many paying that cost for standing up against abuse.

The most present case this past week, because videos on social media have made it impossible to ignore in ways that it has been, has been that of the Palestinians.

The facts of this latest series of abuses against them should not be in doubt. During the last days of Ramadan, Israelis began forcing Palestinians out of their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district in East Jerusalem. This was followed in quick succession by Israeli troops occupying the Al-Aqsa mosque following a confrontation between Palestinians at the mosque for Friday prayers and Israelis celebrating the capture of the mosque in 1967.

This was all a deliberate provocation, beyond the aggressive offense of what the Israelis were doing. The timing of it, during the Muslim holy month while right wing Benjamin Netanyahu struggles to cling to power, was intended to add insult to injury.

It worked. Clearly.

Hamas, ever eager for an excuse to be violent and to be seen to be violent, gave an ultimatum that would make Netanyahu’s regime look weak if accepted, Netanyahu gratefully rejected it, and Hamas began firing rockets, knowing that Israel would escalate and retaliate with a kind of brutality that can only be described as criminal.

The unpleasant reality is that both political powers rely on perpetuating the conflict between them, doing so at the expense of the people they claim to want to serve and protect. And those people pay the cost of it.

Note, please, how I have avoided referring to those instigating these atrocities as Muslims or Jews. That they use their religions and their histories as justification for violence and abuse should not be taken as representative of either religion. If anything, it should be taken as a kind of cruel irony, or perhaps an insight into how the abused, as individuals or groups, can become abusers themselves.

Zionism is not Judaism. It never was and never will be. It grew out of two things: the technology-driven late 19th century belief by Europeans, and their North American “cousins”, in their right to colonial domination of non-Europeans; and the centuries-old, routine and systematic attacks on Jews - pogroms - especially in Central and Eastern Europe that led millions of Jews to flee for their lives, many of them to the United States.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 followed the same pattern: that same, late 19th century belief in the right to claim or assign ownership of others’ land - no matter that it had once belonged to your ancestors; and the routine and systematic attempted genocide of all Jews in Europe - the Holocaust - by Europeans who chose to believe Jews not to be Europeans but some other, lesser race from West Asia.

That, of course, has been the assigned role for Jews the world over: they are accepted as insiders when times are good and scapegoated as outsiders when times are bad. To be Jewish - I am - is to understand that this never quite goes away. There’s always somebody having a bad day, always a big lie ready for justification.

Technically, it is true that Jews are Asian, in the way that Palestinians are also Asian, and that Egyptians are, too, but also African because different people have had different maps which they used for different purposes at different times.

Also true is that these things are only true due to the arbitrary drawing of continental lines on maps made by Europeans, from the ancient Greeks to those carving up the “New World” in the century after Columbus to the 1885 conference in Berlin carving up Africa for colonial exploitation.

This is not, strictly speaking, a European thing. Every culture has a tendency to see themselves as the center of the world. Just ask those living in China, or as they call it, Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom”.

The difference here is that modern day Israel was carved out of Palestine, a colonial “protectorate” which was itself carved out of the Ottoman Empire and awarded to the British following World War I. As a spoil of war, formerly-Ottoman Iraq, with its vast oil reserves, had greater value to the British. Palestine had ports on the Mediterranean - “the center of the world” - but was otherwise an afterthought.

Not, however, to the Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We must remember that the rest of the world didn’t want them. Jews attempting to flee the atrocity they and everyone else couldn’t help but see coming were turned away by everyone else, including the United States.

This in no way justifies what was done in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s, it’s just to place it in context. By turning Jews away, by attempting to forget them and their suffering, the world gave weight and power to right wing groups within the refugees.

Starting in the 1930s, those groups began to engage in terrorism against Arabs to force their position into Palestine and against the British to force them out. Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) and later the Stern Gang carried out assassinations and killed hundreds of Arabs and British with bombs.

After what the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, memorialized in newsreels for all the world to see, who would take the Arabs’ side? Who could? The British were in no position to hold onto their colonial possessions anywhere, so they gave up and pulled out and in 1948 the state of Israel was born. Palestinian Arabs were forced from their homes and stripped of rights they had held under the Ottomans and even the British.

Again, this was not Judaism. As the name “Irgun” suggests, those terrorists were a right wing, nationalist militia doing what right wing, nationalist militias have done before and since, using an ethnic or religious identity to justify committing atrocities to take land and property.

After standing by and allowing the Nazis to do what they did, the world vowed never to forget; part of the price they were willing to pay - that they were willing to allow the Palestinian Arabs to pay - was to forget what Irgun and the Stern Gang had done, and to turn a blind eye to anything the Israelis did going forward.

There was a racist element to it, to be sure. This is part of the pattern of colonial withdrawal, negotiating a partition of land and possessions among the colonized groups, pitting them against each other, and then letting them fend for themselves. Nothing like creating a power vacuum to draw out the worst of us.

The British did the same thing in South Asia in 1947, pitting Muslim and Hindu groups against each other, erupting in spasms of violence before settling into a Cold War, complete with nuclear weapons. Even in their most secular eras, religious nationalism has defined the politics and leadership of each nation.

The result of this, naturally, has been an increasingly corrupt leadership exploiting religious hatred and mistrust to gain more power and wealth for themselves. It should be noted, yet again, that the political entities of Pakistan and India, though led by religious nationalists, do not represent Islam or Hinduism.

Their actions and failures do not represent those religions in any way. They are the actions and failures of men and women seeking power, seeking to acquire it and seeking to hold onto it. They are no different than the Netanyahu regime or Hamas, or our own right wing leaders in the United States.

For all of them, it is in their interest to cling to memory of conflict as a means of manipulation; in Israel and Palestine, nationalist leaders preach as if 1948 or 1967 are now; in India and Pakistan, it’s still 1947; and for America’s white nationalists, it’s either 1865 or 1965, take your pick. For the Serbs slaughtering thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica twenty-six years ago, it was 1389, the year the Ottomans conquered the Balkans.

The wars, cold or hot, can never end because time is never allowed to change. This, again, is a function of proximity. By freezing themselves in the increasingly distant past, the leaders and those choosing to follow them do not have to accept the changes facing them in the present. Their fantasy is to return to that idyllic, earlier time, when they possessed everything and did not have to be accountable to anyone.

And they will all fail for the same reason: in the present or near future, we will have reached a point at which we can no longer allow ourselves to ignore those suffering and in doing so forget them.

That is what we have done to the Palestinians. What has been done and what is being done now is in no small part because we forget them, routinely and systematically and purposefully.

The videos sent from Gaza of children being pulled from rubble should help us remember. They should. Ideally, they will have the same effect as those of last year’s Black Live Matter protests, but the people of Gaza remain far away. For many of us, it will be enough that the missiles and rockets have stopped.

Videos sent from India’s emergency rooms and crematoria should help us remember, but they, too, remain far away. Already, we’re starting to put India’s crisis behind us.

Will we remember either of them a month from now? Two? Or will they fade into the background, as the imprisoned Hong Kong democracy protesters have, or those dying of Covid-19 in Brazil, or those shot down in the streets fighting police brutality in Columbia, or those caught between warring factions in Ethiopia’s Tigray region? Or, for that matter, those half a century ago in Argentina who were simply “disappeared”?

What about the coup in Myanmar? Remember that? How about the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya people, supported by the now-deposed and jailed regime of fallen-hero Aung San Suu Kyi? What was done to them was no different than what was done to the Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. That genocide was recently recognized by President Biden, an act of official, international recognition that took over a century and which itself is already being forgotten. The Rohingya may have to wait as long to be remembered themselves, or longer.

The point of all this isn’t that we forget, try as we might, but that despite it we find ways to remember. That Biden recognized the Armenians came because they did not forget and did not allow that crime to be forgotten. 

If this sounds like what nationalists all claim to do themselves - always demanding that everyone remember this date or that insult - remember that actual justice never seems to be their goal.

Justice requires memory, full memory. For us to remember anything fully, we must take the good with the bad. We must recognize the good and bad in each of us and in each group and in each series of actions. We must understand that for the worst act done by anyone in the name of any group or religion, there remain those within those groups and religions who stand against it.

So, let’s end with this: George Floyd 

George Floyd was a man, a human being, and like any of us he had hopes and dreams and memories. He died one year ago today in no small part because we forgot him. 

We remember now, today especially, because of what was done to him on this date, but we should recognize the role that forgetting him and people like him played in the events that led to his murder. We as a society have looked away from the suffering of minorities in this country, and from the violence done to certain groups within our society.

The easiest thing to say, certainly as we watched that video and the countless videos of police brutalizing non-violent protesters all last summer, was that “all cops are bad”. They aren’t. Hard as it may be to hear, they aren’t.

They are, however, led by men and women who push an adversarial culture, who encourage violence and racism, who are corrupt, and who thrive on the failure of reform. And most of them, far, far too many, stand by in silence as men and women are murdered in that culture’s name. In that silence, they have failed us all.

If we want to change that culture, we need those who would stand for justice to stand up and speak. They are there, just as they are in Israel and Palestine, and in Pakistan and India and elsewhere: intimidated, ostracized, and struggling to be heard.

Of course, May 25th, 2020 wasn’t just any other day in America. It was Memorial Day. That is a cruel irony. Another is how little we do to honor that day. It was created to honor those who died for this country, to remember not only them but what they did and what they supposedly did it for. Instead, we grill meats and drink beer and forget our troubles for just one day.

Few deaths may have the lasting impact on this country that George Floyd’s has had and will have, and he died in no small part because he, too, had been forgotten. This coming Memorial Day, let us take a moment to remember him and all of the others everywhere in this world who have died and deserve to be remembered.

- Daniel Ward

[chiseler]

The Chiseler Interviews  Palestinian-American Journalist and Editor of “The Palestine Chronicle”, Ramzy Baroud

The following interview was conducted by phone on May 18th, 2021.

Chiseler: Help our readers to understand what’s happening in Gaza: are Israel’s ongoing attacks simply the latest iteration of its larger and well-documented behavioral pattern? Every few years, after all, Israel unleashes extreme military violence against Palestinian civilians. 

Ramzy Baroud: Unlike previous Israeli wars on Gaza, namely 2008-9, 2012, and 2014, this time around Israel seems to have no particular strategic objectives—aside from, of course, just carrying out wanton destruction, mass-scale destruction, and wanton killing—with the hope that this is going to turn public opinion in Palestine itself against the resistance. However, Israel has miserably failed, even in achieving that, despite the fact that they have already killed hundreds and wounded thousands.

Chiseler: In your opinion, could Prime Minister Netanyahu be pursuing a set of personal ambitions? Does the military aggression he's ordered bolster him politically, within and without Israel?

Ramzy Baroud: Netanyahu’s strategic goal did not start in Gaza, but rather in East Jerusalem. For him, changing the demographics of East Jerusalem completely in favor of a Jewish majority, and the ethnically cleansing of Palestinians from a place that Israel—of course, contrary to international law—considers its eternal and undivided capital, has been the raison d'être of Netanyahu’s government policies.

What he had hoped to achieve in Sheikh Jarrah in particular was the rallying and mobilization of the right-wing camp in Israel, which is now the dominant political camp, around him at the time that he needs to number one, stay out of jail (because of the corruption trial), number two remain at the helm of Israeli politics a little bit longer, or at best win a decisive majority in a possible fifth election in Israel.

So, in other words, Netanyahu’s strategic motives or objectives were entirely related to Netanyahu’s own power, Netanyahu’s own personality, and own political ambitions. Yet, what he did not anticipate is that Palestinians might be divided politically, and might be divided geographically (as a result of the divisions of the West Bank into various areas A, B, and C, the isolation and siege on Gaza, the different legal status of oppressed Palestinians in Palestine ’48, today’s Israel, the isolation of Jerusalem), but he did not anticipate the Palestinians, as a people, do not perceive themselves to be disunited.

Chiseler: So you believe that Netanyahu miscalculated? And, in so doing, inadvertently helped spark a historic Palestinian uprising? 

Ramzy Baroud: Netanyahu was up for a major surprise when Palestinians in Gaza fought back in defense of the people of Sheikh Jarrah, and he was even up to a bigger surprise when he saw that Palestinians in Israel itself were rising in protest as well, and even a much bigger surprise when he saw that areas within occupied West Bank— which are under the dual oppression of Israeli military occupation and the corrupt Palestinian leadership— also rising up. That completely muddled the picture for him and completely confused any strategic objectives he could possibly have had (and again, he really had none).

Only later on, he tried to present himself to Israel’s political elites, and to the right wing in Israel, that he was planning this all along. As though it were simply another routine military operation, “mowing the grass” in Gaza, aimed at destroying the “terrorist infrastructure.” But of course, that was never the case. And this is why Israel is losing, and losing at a massive scale—not just in Palestine, but internationally as well, as international solidarity is shifting in a tremendous way, especially compared to the past, in favor of Palestine and the freedom of the Palestinian people.

***

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of five books. His latest is “These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons” (Clarity Press). Dr. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) and also at the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC). His website is http://www.ramzybaroud.net 

[96thdayofrage]

The Black Wall Around Barack Obama: Who Does It Protect Him Against?

When we build a black wall around Barack Obama, we are only protecting him from accountability to us.

The presumption that Barack Obama, no matter what he does or doesn't do, enjoys nearly unanimous black support is a veritable wall around the president. But who does it protect him against? Republicans? Banksters? Tea partyers, warmongers, torturers? Or does it protect him against black people and the left, his supposed base?

It was the summer of 2007, and I was in the study of a prominent black Atlanta pastor. The conversation turned, as did so many that season to the coming presidential election, still a good 16 months away. “We've got to unite and build a wall, a solid black wall around Brother Obama,” the reverend declared.

I tried to ask whether one man's career was really more important than the needs of forty million black people, what obligations candidate Obama would owe the black community, and how we might ensure these were fulfilled. But the pastor wasn't hearing any of this. All the obligations, in his view, seemed to flow from the bottom up, while the power flowed from the top down. It's never easy to stop a preacher on a roll.

“If we can build that solid black wall,” he continued, “if we can unite black people behind Brother Obama, he will have the power to do anything he wants to do. Can't you see it?” he asked. “If we do that, nothing any of his opponents say or do will be able to touch him.” Almost four years later, it looks like black America's legacy leadership are still following the pastor's playbook.

The black political wall around Barack Obama is a reality, and one of the president's most powerful political assets. It trades upon African America's historic credibility as a people of struggle, the people who produced Nat Turner and Ida B. Wells, Charles Hamilton Houston, Kwame Toure and Martin Luther King and many, many others.

White liberals and progressives often tend to follow the lead of black America, whether right or wrong. You want to know what you should do? The president's black and black people are supporting him? What else do you need to know? But who is inside that wall, and who is outside? Who does the black wall the Atlanta preacher described protect Barack Obama against?

The black wall around Barack Obama doesn't protect him from the war makers and war criminals of the bipartisan military industrial complex.

From the beginning, the architects of the Bush-Cheney policies of torture and unjust war have been on the inside of Barack Obama's wall, not outside it. With U.S. troops in 144 countries, the most powerful person in government outside the White House is the Secretary of Defense. Obama was the first president in U.S. history to keep a Secretary of War (the office's pre-1948 name) from the other party. He ran promising to expand the military, to escalate the war in Afghanistan, crack down on the Palestinians, continue the provocations and threats toward Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and so forth, and to close Guantanamo and end illegal torture.

In office Obama kept Guantanamo and the network of global secret prisons remain open. He “legalized” torture, declined to prosecute Bush-Cheney crimes. This president has kept all his warlike promises, breaking only his peaceful pledges. The president has viciously prosecuted whistle blowers, like those who leaked video of U.S. troops gunning down innocent civilians in Iraq.

The black wall around Barack Obama protects the president, but it protects the war machine too. But while black America remains the most antiwar section of the U.S. polity, black critics of the imperial wars are not heard. They are on the outside of Obama's black wall.

Don't criticize the dear leader too loudly, they are told, lest you weaken him. Look--- over there --- it's President Michelle Bachman!

The black wall around Barack Obama doesn't protect him from greedy Wall Street banksters and corporate thugs.

Like the war makers, the banksters were inside the Barack's wall long before the inauguration, even before the election. When George Bush couldn't pass his own bailout bill through Congress, he had to summon Barack Obama to D.C. Obama halted his campaign for a week or two and lined up Democrats to vote for the Bush bailout. Without their votes, it could not have passed. Once in office, Obama doubled down on the bailout, doling out more than $21 trillion to his benefactors thus far.

Homes are the principal assets of most who have them. The continuing wave of foreclosures, disproportionately affecting black families, is the most serious raid on black wealth in decades, widening the already vast wealth gap between blacks and whites.

The black wall around Barack Obama protects the president, and the banksters with him. Those opposed to the foreclosures, who want to rein in and prosecute Wall Street predators, who organize against foreclosures find themselves outside Barack Obama's black wall, not inside it. ACORN registered voters to elect this president. But Obama stood by and watched them falsely accused, smeared and broken.

Look --- over there! It's the Tea Party! Circle the wagons, get back in line!

The black wall around Barack Obama doesn't protect him against the forces aiming to privatize public education

From the beginning President Obama has been an enthusiastic supporter of efforts to blame and defame public school teachers, and to charterize and privatize public education. As Chicago Schools CEO his infamous Secretary of Education fired hundreds of dedicated, qualified Chicago teachers in order to replace their schools with charters. Obama has taken Duncan's failed Chicago policies national, firing for example, a whole school district of teachers in Providence, Rhode Island. Obama's Race To The Top forces states to reorganize public education to suit the dictates of the Gates, Broad and Walton Family Foundations, the private sector actors who gave birth to the charter school industry, which is firmly inside Barack Obama's black wall.

This week the president is scheduled to make his first public appearance since announcing his re-election campaign at the national convention of Al Sharpton's National Action Network, along with Arne Duncan. Together with Newt Gingrich, Duncan and Sharpton have been campaigning for charters and school privatization nationwide for the last two years. Gingrich, Duncan and Sharpton, the three stooges of corporate school reform are firmly inside Barack Obama's black wall, along with their foundation benefactors. Public school teachers and the communities they server are as usual, on the outside, but required to man the barricades for Obama's re-election.

Watch out! It's Mike Huckabee and Mitch Romney! You don't want that to happen, do you?

The black wall around Barack Obama doesn't protect him against Republican-led assaults on democratic rights.

Restrictive voter-ID laws are proliferating in Republican-led legislatures across the country with the clear intent of reducing the number of student and minority voters. Perhaps the first was in Georgia, where the Voting Rights Act gives the US Justice Department authority to block any changes in election law that disproportionately affect blacks. The wave of disenfranchisement could have been prevented. But black legacy leadership didn't pressure the Obama administration, and the Department of Justice didn't lift a finger.

The traditional black leadership are so bankrupt that when right wing propagandist Andrew Breitbart smeared Shirley Sherrod, a local human rights activist of 45 years standing, even the NAACP, who doubtless knew her history, rushed endorsed the calumny. Shirley Sherrod, along with millions of black, brown and young voters are on the outside of Barack Obama's wall.

Republican governors and legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana have passed ambitious efforts to end public sector unions, ban union political contributions. Michigan passed a measure that would let governors overrule or dissolve school boards and local governments by declaring a “fiscal emergency” and appointing an individual or corporation to rule in their place.

But the fiscal hawks are inside Barack Obamas wall, not outside it. The president himself promotes the fictions that “national debt is like family debt” and that cuts in wages, benefits, Medicare, Medicaid and social security are the solution to his fictitious problem.

Unions are outside Barack Obama's black wall too, although he gratefully accepts their campaign contributions, and allows their leaders to sit on commissions and meet with him from time to time. Union leaders invited the president to come to Madison, Wisconsin during the face-off with the legislature. Fortunately, he declined. They invited the vice-president. He demurred. They invited the Secretary of Labor. No way. Here again, the president's freeze on the pay and rights of federal workers set the stage for Republican moves to take it one step further.

Look --- over there! It's President Sarah Palin! Can you live with that? Shut up and drink your kool-aid.

In every case, the black wall around Barack Obama protects him not from Tea Partyers and Republican foes, whom he is anxious to meet more than half way. The black wall around Barack Obama protects him from accountability to black people, to his supposed base.

Increasingly we can expect the White House and its allies will demand that all grassroots political agitation and organizing not explicitly connected with turning out the vote for the president and his party cease. That's been the traditional pattern. Antiwar movements, housing and human rights work, all of it folds in even numbered years, as activists allow all their efforts to be diverted into electing Democrats.

As 2012 looms, the black wall around Obama remains a crucial asset. It's why his first campaign appearance will be on the arm of Al Sharpton. The pressure will be on to circle the wagons again, to build the wall higher. As the pastor predicted, the black wall around Barack Obama wall insulates the president against his foes, not from the right, but from the left. It protects the president not against the Pentagon, the banksters, the corporate thugs, the privatizers and the Republicans, all of whom he seems to get along with just fine --- but against us. It makes him democracy-proof and people-proof. It protects him against his own supposed base.

It's time for black America to answer the questions the Atlanta pastor wouldn't. What's more important? Stopping the foreclosures, ending war and mass incarceration, reining in the banks and corporadoes, saving the public education and the environment, creating jobs and doing justice? Or protecting and prolonging the career of one man, a man who doesn't protect us?

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and based in Marietta GA, where he serves on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.

[ruminativerabbi]

Israelis and Emiratis

This week’s surprise announcement that the United Arab Emirates and Israel have decided to establish full diplomatic relations, including the cultural and commercial ties that such relations traditionally bring in their wake, caught me completely off guard—and everybody else in the world too apparently except for the players directly involved. Who saw that coming? And yet, now that I’ve had time to think about it a bit, I see this not only as something that was probably inevitable, at least eventually, but as a move that has the potential to alter the political reality in the Middle East in a way that could possibly actually lead to a peaceful resolution of one of the most traditionally intractable face-offs on the planet, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

It’s hard even to know where to start in assessing the potential impact of the agreement, but probably most important of all is that it makes it crystal clear that the Sunni Arab world is not going to refuse to make common cause with the one country in the region, Israel, that can and does stand up to Iran in its relentless effort to extend its malign, imperialist influence into Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen merely because the Palestinians don’t wish them to. The Gulf States feel vulnerable because that’s precisely what they are—and the UAE decision to recognize Israel is simply their way to make themselves feel less vulnerable and more in control of their own destiny. Nor is it at all likely that this is the sole deal of its kind in the offing: most of the experts I’ve read this last week seem to agree that it is now only a matter of time before Oman, Bahrein, Kuwait, and even Saudi Arabia follow suit and establish formal relationship with Israel. (Morocco and Sudan won’t be far behind.) It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic shift than the one constituted by this week’s agreement. It really is a whole new world out there.

The message the UAE-Israel deal sends out directly to the Palestinians is key. For decades, the Palestinian leadership has presumed the right to turn down whatever is offered to them—and there have been so many offers over the years that it’s hard even for experts to keep them all straight—not because of any specific detail included or not included, but merely because entering into a peace arrangement with Israel would obviously require the Palestinians to agree to live in peace with their neighbors, something they have never been able to bring themselves to do.

I have returned to this theme many times in this space. Well over 100 nations have already recognized the non-existent nation of Palestine, so it’s not like the Palestinians have to worry if their state will be internationally recognized. Indeed, the Palestinians could easily proclaim their independence tomorrow, like the Israelis did in 1948, and then get on with the business of nation-building. Yes, they’d have to work through various issues with the Israelis, including some thorny ones regarding a future Jewish presence in the new Palestinian state, but once all that was successfully done the Palestinians would still have to bring themselves to live in peace with the Israelis next door. And that is what they appear unwilling or unable to bring themselves to do.

The UAE-Israel speaks directly to that set of issues.

First, it makes it clear that the Palestinians do not have a veto over other nations’ decisions to act in their own best interests. They had an inkling of that sentiment in 1979 when Sadat came to Jerusalem and Egypt established diplomatic relations with Israel, and then again in 1994 when Jordan followed suit. But 1994 was quite some time ago and things have changed considerably in the Near East since then. The Palestinians are eager to describe the UAE decision as a stab in their collective back. But a more realistic appraisal would be that the decision simply constitutes an instance of a nation declining to pass up a chance to prosper through a judicious alliance merely because of a different people’s intransigency.

Second, it makes it clear that the threat posed by the Iranians to the neighboring states of the Middle East is serious and real…and not only in Western eyes but in the eyes of the players on the ground in the region. In other words, this week’s agreement signals that the nations who see themselves as future victims of Iranian expansionism are not going to sacrifice their nations on the altar of somebody else’s national aspirations…and particularly not when those aspirations could be brought to fruition easily and effectively in a matter of days or weeks if there were any real desire to live in peace and to prosper not as a nation of perennial victims, but as a free, independent, autonomous player in the forum of nations.

Third, the Palestinians have always acted as though time were on their side, as though all they had to do was wait long enough and Israel would just go away and their problems would be solved. The UAE deal signals that the opposite is actually the case, that time is specifically not on their side, and that the time has clearly come to act if they want to resolve their conflict with Israel effectively and fairly. The Palestinian story is a tragic one that began with their leaders’ failure to seize the moment in 1948 and establish the “other” state that the Partition Plan for British Palestine was supposed to create. That was already seventy-two years ago, however, and yet they remain mired in tactical decisions that failed them in the 1940s and are still failing them. Clearly, at least some of the Arab world is tired of waiting for the Palestinians to act in their own best interests.

And, finally, the UAE-Israel agreement makes it clear that the oft-insisted-upon fantasy that Israeli cannot live in peace with any Arab nation until it caves into the demands of the Palestinians, no matter how radical or unimaginable, is simply not true. It probably wasn’t ever really true. But now it’s clearer than ever that the moment for the Palestinians to move forward as an independent state is upon them…if they have the courage to seize the day and make the requisite compromises any deal will inevitably entail.

What the Palestinians have to learn, the Europeans also need to take to heart. The endless EU-based rhetoric based on the assumption that the key to Israeli-Arab relations is resolving the Palestinian conflict needs to be set aside and replaced with words reflective of a new reality. If the member states of the EU want to contribute to peace in the Middle East, in fact, they need to press the Palestinians to realize that their problems are being dwarfed in the region by the hegemonic aggression of the world’s two largest non-Arab Muslim states, Iran and Turkey. And that the smaller states in the region see that aggression not only as irritating or destabilizing, but as an existential threat. Since peoples who are facing existential threats generally do what it take to address those threats regardless of what bystanders think appropriate or reasonable, the time has clearly come to press the Palestinians to negotiate a just peace and then to move ahead from there into the future.

Suddenly, all sorts of dreams I’ve had for years are becoming slightly more possible. Could Lebanon ever live in peace with Israel? Not with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah pulling the strings, but what if Lebanon suddenly found the wherewithal to become free of foreign influence? What then? Would a seriously isolated Iran be willing to renegotiate the so-called Iran Deal of 2015 and agree actually to turn away from the possibility of becoming a nuclear power? Could the people of Syria ever seize the real reigns of power in their country, get rid of the Iranians camped out on their territory, and establish the kind of close ties with Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel that should have long ago made that specific part of the Near East into the economic powerhouse it could and should be? The irony, of course, is that these developments—pie-in-the-sky though they may sound now—these developments would only bring prosperity and autonomy to the Palestinians too, who would then be part of a thriving economic region.

In the meantime, exciting things are happening. The Israeli and UAE foreign ministers have had their first phone call and are apparently going to meet in person soon. Embassies are going to be opened, ambassadors appointed. Omer Adam, the Israeli singer, was invited personally by the royal family of the UAE to perform in Abu Dhabi. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin formally invited the Emirati crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to visit Israel. It is expected that it is only a matter of time, possibly only weeks, before direct flights begin between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi.

Americans should be proud of the role our government played in this enormous break-through. But the lion’s share of the credit goes to the Emiratis themselves who found the courage to act in their own best interests. That their move could conceivably lead the Palestinians to abandon their traditional intransigency and negotiate a just and real peace deal with Israel—that really would be the icing on the cake. Whether that will happen, none can say. But it was a pretty good week for the Middle East, and particularly for Israel and for the UAE, and for that we should all be grateful.

[jordanianroyals]

15 January 2020: King Abdullah II delivered an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, covering a number of regional and international concerns.

Addressing parliamentary representatives of the European Union’s member states, King Abdullah stressed the importance of leadership, noting that leaders have a responsibility to safeguard their people’s long-term interests and welfare.

His Majesty highlighted developments in the region and the world over the past decade. (Source: Petra)

Following is the full text of the King’s address to the European Parliament:

“In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,

Mr President, Honourable Members, Your Excellencies, My friends:

Thank you all. It is an honour to speak before the European Parliament once again.

As I look around this historic Chamber, I see it holds many hundreds of people. But in truth, there are with us today millions more, from different countries, histories, and perspectives.

So we, who are gathered here, have two things in common. First, is our responsibility to these millions—the people who have entrusted us with their hopes and fears.

And second, we are all very fortunate—for a life spent in the service of others, is a life fully lived. But only if we live up to the expectations of the millions of people with us in this hall today.

If we falter, the most vulnerable pay the highest price—the young men and women who look to their future and see nothing; bewildered refugee mothers, clutching their children, with no place to call home; or anxious fathers who cannot find jobs to provide for their loved ones; and the many who feel sidelined, their identity under threat.

The defining feature of the past decade has been people finding their voices. Millions across the world have poured onto the streets, marched, occupied, sat down, sat in, tweeted, podcast, hashtagged what they want—loud and clear.

And they all want the same thing—a fair chance, a fighting chance.

Dear friends,

People around the world have voiced their desired destination, but are looking to us to guide them along the path; looking to us to foresee and prepare for the obstacles ahead.

This calls for several "what-if" questions.

And these questions are not merely a whimsical or theoretical exercise, especially in my region, where worst-case scenarios do not lay comfortably within the realm of the hypothetical, but often wander too closely to the borders of our reality. Furthermore, what happens in the Middle East has a way of making itself felt everywhere around the world.

So, let me start with our region’s deepest wound. What if the world gives up on the two-state solution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

Seventy-plus years of conflict have played havoc with hopes for justice. Today, one-staters are actively seeking to impose an unthinkable solution on the region and the world—one state, propped up by structural inequalities, with Palestinians as second-class subjects; one state, turning its back on its neighbourhood, perpetuating divisions among peoples and faiths worldwide.

Five years ago, I stood in this Chamber and spoke of the dangers of failing to move forward with peace. And today, I must say frankly that the dangers have grown—violence continues; settlement-building continues; disregard for international law continues.

I have said it countless times, and in countless ways, but I will say it again and again. A more peaceful world is not possible without a stable Middle East. And a stable Middle East is not possible without peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

What if Jerusalem, a city that is close to my heart personally and of great historic significance to my family, remains disputed? Can we afford to rob Christians and Muslims alike of the spirituality, peace, and coexistence that this city symbolises, and instead allow it to descend into political conflict?

Now, fast forward to the most recent standoff between the United States and Iran. What if, next time, neither side steps away from the brink, dragging us all towards untold chaos? An all-out war jeopardises the stability of the entire region. What's more, it risks massive disruptions of the entire global economy, including markets, but threatens a resurgence of terrorism across the world.

And I ask you another "what-if"; what if Iraq fails to realise the potential and aspirations of its people and slips back into an erratic, seventeen-year cycle of recovery and relapse, or worse yet, conflict?

Iraq is home to 12 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves. But, more importantly, it is home to over 40 million people, who have suffered through four decades of war, crippling sanctions, occupation, sectarian conflict, and the terror of ISIS. Today, their future rests on a fragile peace. And I, for one, will not abandon our brothers and sisters there.

Now, what if Syria remains hostage to global rivalries and spirals back into civil conflict? What if we see a re-emergence of ISIS, and Syria becomes a staging ground for attacks against the rest of the world?

Syria may be out of the headlines, with its suffering out of sight and out of mind, but the crisis is far from over. Over the past nine months, more than half a million people have been displaced, many of them already refugees.

Do any of us, in this hall, want to see another Syrian refugee crisis unfold, with all its horror and heartbreak? Or another innocent child washed up on your shores?

I know I speak for everyone when I say, absolutely not.

And let me ask you, what if Libya collapses into an all-out war, and ultimately, a failed state? What if Libya is the new Syria, just much closer to the continent you all call home?

And let me say again, what if Arab governments fail to create the more than 60-million jobs our youth will need in the coming decade? And if we fail, wouldn't we in fact be creating a perfect setting for extremist groups? We make their job of recruitment easier if we leave behind a trail of vulnerability and hopelessness.

Can we afford to let the region’s young people live without hope?

My friends,

Let this reflection upon “what-if” scenarios be a productive exercise, one that can pre-empt countless tragedies and safeguard our people along their journey.

My faith in God reinforces my optimism and my belief in the strength and resilience of humanity. There is always a better and much more united version of us around every corner.

The Holy Quran teaches us that “Those who endure [in patience] and put their trust in their Lord” will enjoy the greatest rewards.

Patience is hard in a world that never seems to slow down, where people make split-second decisions and expect instantaneous results.

Leadership, however, demands the very opposite—reflection, wisdom, and the long view. More than ever, we need patient politics. Because we all have a responsibility to safeguard our people’s long-term interests and welfare; to react to rapidly unfolding events with measured responses, not knee-jerk reactions; because politics is not a game where the fastest win. Sometimes, the faster we go, the farther away we end up from the finish line.

My father, the late King Hussein, taught me that peace making is always the harder but the higher path. And a tough road is best walked with our friends, friends like you and the people of Europe, so that together, we can reach the future that both our peoples aspire for, and that they and our whole world deserve.

Thank you very much.”

[bountyofbeads]

With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos https://nyti.ms/305ERbG

With Trump as President, the World Is Spiraling Into Chaos

Trump torched America’s foreign policy infrastructure. The results are becoming clear.

By Michelle Goldberg, Opinion Columnist | Published August 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

Earlier this week, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Asad Majeed Khan, visited The New York Times editorial board, and I asked him about the threat of armed conflict between his country and India over Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over the Himalayan territory, which both countries claim, and which is mostly divided between them. India recently revoked the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the part of Kashmir it controls and put nearly seven million people there under virtual house arrest. Pakistan’s prime minister  compared India’s leaders to Nazis and warned that they’ll target Pakistan next. It seems like there’s potential for humanitarian and geopolitical horror.

Khan’s answer was not comforting. “We are two big countries with very large militaries with nuclear capability and a history of conflict,” he said. “So I would not like to burden your imagination on that one, but obviously if things get worse, then things get worse.”

All over the world, things are getting worse. China appears to be weighing a Tiananmen Square-like crackdown in Hong Kong. After I spoke to Khan, hostilities between India and Pakistan ratcheted up further; on Thursday, fighting across the border in Kashmir left three Pakistani soldiers dead. (Pakistan also claimed that five Indian soldiers were killed, but India denied it.) Turkey is threatening to invade Northeast Syria to go after America’s Kurdish allies there, and it’s not clear if an American agreement meant to prevent such an incursion will hold.

North Korea’s nuclear program and ballistic missile testing continue apace. The prospect of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine is more remote than it’s been in decades. Tensions between America and Iran keep escalating. Relations between Japan and South Korea have broken down. A Pentagon report warns that ISIS is “re-surging” in Syria. The U.K. could see food shortages if the country’s Trumpish prime minister, Boris Johnson, follows through on his promise to crash out of the European Union without an agreement in place for the aftermath. Oh, and the globe may be lurching towards recession.

In a world spiraling towards chaos, we can begin to see the fruits of Donald Trump’s erratic, amoral and incompetent foreign policy, his systematic undermining of alliances and hollowing out of America’s diplomatic and national security architecture. Over the last two and a half years, Trump has been playing Jenga with the world order, pulling out once piece after another. For a while, things more or less held up. But now the whole structure is teetering.

To be sure, most of these crises have causes other than Trump. Even competent American administrations can’t dictate policy to other countries, particularly powerful ones like India and China. But in one flashpoint after another, the Trump administration has either failed to act appropriately, or acted in ways that have made things worse. “Almost everything they do is the wrong move,” said Susan Thornton, who until last year was the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, America’s top diplomat for Asia.

Consider Trump’s role in the Kashmir crisis. In July, during a White House visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump offered to mediate India and Pakistan’s long-running conflict over Kashmir, even suggesting that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked him to do so. Modi’s government quickly denied this, and Trump’s words reportedly alarmed India, which has long resisted outside involvement in Kashmir. Two weeks later, India sent troops to lock Kashmir down, then stripped it of its autonomy.

Americans have grown used to ignoring Trump’s casual lies and verbal incontinence, but people in other countries have not. Thornton thinks the president’s comments were a “precipitating factor” in Modi’s decision to annex Kashmir. By blundering into the conflict, she suggested, Trump put the Indian prime minister on the defensive before his Hindu nationalist constituency. “He might not have had to do that,” she said of Modi’s Kashmir takeover, “but he would have had to do something. And this was the thing he was looking to do anyway.”

At the same time, Modi can be confident that Trump, unlike previous American presidents, won’t even pretend to care about democratic backsliding or human rights abuses, particularly against Muslims. “There’s a cost-benefit analysis that any political leader makes,” said Ben Rhodes, a former top Obama national security aide. “If the leader of India felt like he was going to face public criticism, potential scrutiny at the United Nations,” or damage to the bilateral relationship with the United States, “that might affect his cost-benefit analysis.” Trump’s instinctive sympathy for authoritarian leaders empowers them diplomatically.

Obviously, India and Pakistan still have every interest in avoiding a nuclear holocaust. China may show restraint on Hong Kong. Wary of starting a war before the 2020 election, Trump might make a deal with Iran, though probably a worse one than the Obama agreement that he jettisoned. The global economy could slow down but not seize up. We could get through the next 17 months with a world that still looks basically recognizable.

Even then, America will emerge with a desiccated diplomatic corps, strained alliances, and a tattered reputation. It will never again play the same leadership role internationally that it did before Trump.

And that’s the best-case scenario. The most powerful country in the world is being run by a sundowning demagogue whose oceanic ignorance is matched only by his gargantuan ego. The United States has been lucky that things have hung together as much as they have, save the odd government shutdown or white nationalist terrorist attack. But now, in foreign affairs as in the economy, the consequences of not having a functioning American administration are coming into focus. “No U.S. leadership is leaving a vacuum,” said Thornton. We’ll see what gets sucked into it.

If You Think Trump Is Helping Israel, You’re a Fool

By barring Representatives Omar and Tlaib, Netanyahu made the president happy. But he has poisoned relations with America.

By Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion Columnist | Published Aug. 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted August 16, 2019 |

I am going to say this as simply and clearly as I can: If you’re an American Jew and you’re planning on voting for Donald Trump because you think he is pro-Israel, you’re a damn fool.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. Trump has said and done many things that are in the interests of the current Israeli government — and have been widely appreciated by the Israeli public. To deny that would be to deny the obvious. But here’s what’s also obvious. Trump’s way of — and motivation for — expressing his affection for Israel is guided by his political desire to improve his re-election chances by depicting the entire Republican Party as pro-Israel and the entire Democratic Party as anti-Israel.

As a result, Trump — with the knowing help of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — is doing something no American president and Israeli prime minister have done before: They’re making support for Israel a wedge issue in American politics.

Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.

As Dore Gold, the right-wing former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and once a very close adviser to Netanyahu, warned in a dialogue at the Hudson Institute on Nov. 27, 2018: “You reach out to Democrats, and you reach out to Republicans. And you don’t get caught playing partisan politics in the United States.’’

Trump’s campaign to tar the entire Democratic Party with some of the hostile views toward Israel of a few of its newly elected congresswomen — and Netanyahu’s careless willingness to concede to Trump’s demand and bar two of them, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, from visiting Israel and the West Bank — is part of a process that will do huge, long-term damage to Israel’s interests and support in America.

Netanyahu later relented and granted a visa to Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, for a private, “humanitarian’’ visit to see her 90-year-old grandmother — provided she agree in writing not to advocate the boycott of Israel while there. At first Tlaib agreed, but then decided that she would not come under such conditions.

Excuse me, but when did powerful Israel — a noisy, boisterous democracy where Israeli Arabs in its parliament say all kinds of wild and crazy things — get so frightened by what a couple of visiting freshman American congresswomen might see or say? When did Israel get so afraid of saying to them: “Come, visit, go anywhere you want! We’ve got our warts and we’ve got our good stuff. We’d just like you to visit both. But if you don’t, we’ll live with that too. We’re pretty tough.’’

It’s too late for that now. The damage of what Trump and Bibi have been up to — formally making Israel a wedge issue in American politics — is already done. Do not be fooled: Netanyahu, through his machinations with Senate Republicans, can get the United States Congress to give him an audience anytime he wants. But Bibi could not speak on any major American college campus today without massive police protection. The protests would be huge.

And listen now to some of the leading Democratic presidential candidates, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — you can hear how unhappy they are with the behavior of this Israeli government and its continued occupation of the West Bank. And they are not afraid to say so anymore. As The Jerusalem Post reported on July 11, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whose presidential candidacy has rallied in recent weeks, told two Jewish anti-occupation activists ‘yes’ when they asked her for support.’’

But who can blame them? Trump is equating the entire Democratic Party with hatred for Israel, while equating support for Netanyahu — who leads the most extreme, far-right government that Israel has ever had, who is facing indictment on three counts of corruption and whose top priority is getting re-elected so that he can have the Israeli Knesset overrule its justice system and keep him out of court — with loving Israel.

How many young Americans want to buy into that narrative? If Bibi wins, he plans to pass a law banning his own indictment on corruption, and then, when Israel’s Supreme Court strikes down that law as illegal, he plans to get the Knesset to pass another law making the Supreme Court subservient to his parliament. I am not making this up. Israel will become a Jewish banana republic.

If and when that happens, every synagogue, every campus Hillel, every Jewish institution, every friend of Israel will have to ask: Can I support such an Israel? It will tear apart the entire pro-Israel community and every synagogue and Jewish Federation.

Then add another factor. By moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — and turning that embassy, led by a Trump crony, Ambassador David Friedman, into an outpost for advancing the interests of Israeli Jewish settlers, not American interests — Trump has essentially greenlighted the Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

Again, should Netanyahu remain prime minister — which is possible only if he puts together a ruling coalition made up of far-right parties that want to absorb the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinians into Israel — Israel will be on its way to becoming either a binational state of Arabs and Jews or a state that systematically deprives a large and growing segment of its population of the democratic right to vote. Neither will be a Jewish democracy, the dream of Israel’s founders and still the defining, but endangered, political characteristic of the state.

Don’t get me wrong. I strongly oppose the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — which Representatives Omar and Tlaib have embraced — because it wants to erase the possibility of a two-state solution. And I am particularly unhappy with Representative Omar.

I know a lot about her home district in Minnesota, because I grew up in it, in St. Louis Park. Omar represents the biggest concentration of Jews and Muslims living together in one district in the Upper Midwest. She was perfectly placed to be a bridge builder between Muslims and Jews. Instead, sadly, she has been a bridge destroyer between the two since she came to Washington. But anytime she is legitimately criticized, Democrats automatically scream “Islamophobia’’ and defend her. That’s as disturbing as Trump.

I know that more than a few Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, who face so many challenges — from gang violence to unemployment — are asking why is Omar spending time on the West Bank of the Jordan and not on the West Bank of the Mississippi?

I love Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs — but God save me from some of their American friends. So many of them just want to exploit this problem to advance themselves politically, get attention, raise money or delegitimize their opponents.

In that, Trump is not alone — he’s just the worst of the worst.

[yesjustcallmewes]

Peace in the Middle East - Is it possible?

Would there finally be peace in the Middle East if the Palestinians were granted a state of their own?

Since this is a long-standing demand of the Palestinians, you might think so. But not so fast.

In the simplest of terms, until 1947 in the Middle East there were two stateless peoples - the Jews and the Arabs. There was much history of conflict between them, and it is instructive to examine some of it.

In 1919, after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, Britain took control of most of the Middle East land, including the area that constitutes modern Israel and the surrounding land.

Seventeen years later, in 1936, the Arabs rebelled against the British, and against the Jews with whom the Arabs had shared that land - not without conflict. In Britain, the Peel Commission was formed to examine the cause of the insurrection and to map out a solution to the violence.

Their conclusion was as simple as it was obvious. They concluded that the problem was that two peoples – Jews and Arabs – wanted to govern the same land at the same time. Simple in its complexity. But no solution to the now defined problem was proffered, and the violence continued.

That's the way things stood until 1947, when the newly minted UN offered each group a land of their own, to be carved out of the Middle East land that Britain had "owned" since WWI, for the creation two separate States - one Jewish and one Arab. This was the first mention of which I’m aware of the "two-state solution."

It should be noted that the suggested split was heavily in favor of the Arabs. The British offered them 80 percent of the disputed territory; the Jews, the remaining 20 percent. Yet, despite the tiny size of their proposed state, the Jews voted to accept this offer. But the Arabs ignored the fact that the offer was very much slanted in their favor, rejected it out of hand and resumed their violent rebellion, launching an all-out war against the new state of Isreal.

Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria joined the conflict on the side of the Arabs. But they failed. Israel won the war and got on with the business of building a new nation. Most of the land set aside by the UN for an Arab state – the West Bank and east Jerusalem – became “occupied” territory; but importantly, occupied not by Israel, but by Jordan. Arab against Arab – but Arabs with a common enemy; Isreal.

I was born in the same year as Isreal (1948), so for my entire life until I was 19 my only knowledge was of Isreal and a bunch of Arabs who constantly attacked it. I had little understanding, or interest, in any of this, but I vividly remember that in 1967, the Arabs, led this time by Egypt and joined by Syria and Jordan, once again sought to destroy the Jewish State. The 1967 conflict, known as the Six Day War for obvious reasons, ended in a stunning victory for Israel.

Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the area known as the Gaza Strip, fell into Israel’s hands for the first time. Thus begins the first of the continuing wrestling match over the city of Jerusalem, which had not yet been split into Jerusalem and East Jerusalem.

The Isreali government split over what to do with this new territory. Half wanted to return the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt in exchange for peace. The first “land for peace” offer by Isreal.

The other half wanted to give it to the region’s Arabs, who had begun referring to themselves as the Palestinians, in the hope that they would ultimately build their own state there.

Neither initiative got very far. A few months later, the Arab League met in Sudan and issued its infamous “Three No’s” dictate:

No peace with Israel.

No recognition of Israel.

No negotiations with Israel.

And so another two-state solution offered by the Israelis was dismissed by the Palestinians

In 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met at Camp David with Palestinian Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to conclude a new two-state plan. Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94% of the West Bank with EAST JERUSALEM as its capital. The rest of Jerusalem would remain under Isreali control as its capital. But the Palestinian Leadership rejected the offer. In the words of US President Bill Clinton, Arafat was “Here 14 days and said ‘no’ to everything.”

And so another two-state solution offered by the Israelis was dismissed by the Palestinians (formally known simply as the ‘Arabs’).

Instead, the Palestinians launched a bloody wave of suicide bombings that killed over 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands more – on buses, in wedding halls, and in pizza parlors.

In 2008, Israel tried yet again. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went even further than Ehud Barak had, expanding the peace offer to include additional land to sweeten the deal. Like his the predecessor, the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, turned the deal down.

 In between these last two Israeli offers, Israel unilaterally left Gaza, giving the Palestinians complete control there. Instead of developing this territory for the good of its citizens, the Palestinians turned Gaza into a terrorist base, from which they have fired thousands of rockets into Israel.

Each time Israel has agreed to a Palestinian state, the Palestinians have rejected the offer, often violently.

 My take on this? If you’re interested in peace in the Middle East, maybe the answer is not to pressure Israel to make yet another offer of a state to the Palestinians. Maybe the answer is to pressure the Palestinians to finally accept the existence of a Jewish State.

And of the original purpose of this essay, the fate of the capital of Isreal, it is clear to me that Isreal has every right to name Jerusalem as its capital, and we have every right, every duty, in fact, to place our Embassy in Isreal’s capital.

And since the US first formally recognized Jerusalem as Isreal’s capital, in 1995, every president has indicated their intent to move our Embassy there. But not until President Trump has that decision been announced and the process begun. Is that a fully justifiable and even brave move by Trump, or a reckless folly by Trump?

I believe it is a long overdue move, and that however many are bloodied or killed in the resultant fighting by the Palestinians are blood solely on the hands of the Palestinians.

Just my two cents . . .

[newsmanmdgn]

Israel Poised to Silence Palestinians in Latest Round of Violence

Death toll rises from air strikes in Gaza and rocket fire on Israel

Israel carried out hundreds of air strikes in Gaza on Wednesday and Palestinian militants fired multiple rocket barrages at Tel Aviv and the southern city of Beersheba in the region’s most intense hostilities in years.

At least 49 people have been killed in Gaza since violence escalated on Monday, according to the enclave's health ministry. Six people have been killed in Israel, medical officials said.

A Palestinian source said truce efforts by Egypt, Qatar and the United Nations were continuing but without progress so far. U.N. Middle East peace envoy Tor Wennesland said the United Nations was working with all sides to restore calm.

Reuters

But I thought Jared Kushner solved Middle East conflicts?

Liz Cheney set to become a martyr today

GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, who appears likely to be stripped of leadership duties by her fellow House Republicans, does not plan to stop blasting former President Donald Trump for repeating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, according to people familiar with the matter.

Cheney, a staunch conservative, has been telling key donors and supporters behind the scenes that she is going to continue to hold Trump and the Republican Party accountable for what she has called the “Big Lie,” said these people.

CNBC

I will tell you this: She gave an excellent speech last night on the House floor. It made me feel like I was 17 year-old Republican again.

This time tomorrow, it's likely Cheney will have lost her third-in-line GOP leadership role in the House. It remains to be seen if she has the tenacity of her evil father, Dick, who avenged what he thought was the failure of the Gulf War when he persuaded Congress and President Bush to wage war a second time in Iraq a decade later.

Federal judge denies NRA attempt to declare bankruptcy in win for New York state attorney general

A federal judge Tuesday denied an effort by the National Rifle Association to file for bankruptcy protection, ruling that the gun rights group had filed the case in a bad-faithattempt to fend off a lawsuit by the New York attorney general.

“The Court finds, based on the totality of the circumstances, that the NRA’s bankruptcy petition was not filed in good faith but instead was filed as an effort to gain an unfair litigation advantage in the NYAG Enforcement Action and as an effort to avoid a regulatory scheme,” Judge Harlin Hale wrote in a 37-page decision.

The decision was a victory for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who filed a far-reaching civil suit against the group last August accusing top officials of fraud and self-dealing. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre and his legal team had contended that the lawsuit was a political act intended to destroy the organization.

Washington Post

You mean to tell me the NRA acted in a dishonest way? Pffft! No way.

New book portrays a Secret Service riven by scandal and growing pains

On Sept. 11, 2001, Secret Service agents raced Vice President Richard B. Cheney to a secure underground bunker below the White House — only to realize that they couldn’t immediately usher him inside to safety because they didn’t have the tightly guarded S-keys required to open the shelter.

Almost a decade later, Secret Service agents allowed a disoriented homeless man to wander through an unguarded staircase and get within steps of first lady Michelle Obama’s suite at the Beverly Hilton hotel.

Years after that, President Donald Trump — who had a penchant for surrounding himself with people who looked like they were out of central casting — was consumed with getting overweight Secret Service agents removed from their posts, saying he wanted “these fat guys off my detail” and asking: “How are they going to protect me and my family if they can’t run down the street?”

WaPo

This is frightening. The Secret Service is supposed to be an elite and agile team whose sole purpose is to keep the President out of harm's way.

Three things:

Trump complained some SS officers were fat? LOLOL

I never thought, “Did you lose your keys?” would be a punchline for the Secret Service.

Did you hear one of them was sleeping around with Donald Jr.'s wife?

You can't make this shit up.

More than 1,000 gas stations run out of fuel

CHAMBLEE, Ga. – More than 1,000 gas stations in the Southeast reported running out of fuel, primarily because of what analysts say is unwarranted panic-buying among drivers, as the shutdown of a major pipeline by a gang of hackers entered its fifth day Tuesday.

Government officials acted swiftly to waive safety and environmental rules to speed the delivery of fuel by truck, ship or rail to motorists and airports, even as they sought to assure the public that there was no cause for alarm.

FOX

That last line: Conservatives just had their wet dream orgy.

Oakland Athletics to start looking at relocating elsewhere

The Oakland Athletics on Tuesday said they will start exploring the possibility of relocating with the blessing of Major League Baseball, a move that could put pressure on local government officials to greenlight a new stadium project that has spent years in limbo.

The A's, who have played in Oakland since 1968, have prioritized building a waterfront stadium in downtown Oakland at the Howard Terminal site. But after years of failed stadium plans — and weeks after the organization requested that the city council vote on the $12 billion mixed-use development before its late-July summer recess — the long-anticipated specter of the A's looking into relocation became a reality on Tuesday.

ESPN

LEAVE. That's my recommendation. Major League Baseball, along with all other professional sports, has grown too expensive to serve communities like Oakland.

Oakland is, and always has been, a blue-collar city. Sure, they have Lake Merritt and the expensive “Oakland Hills,” but let's face it: If you live in the Bay Area and your family is bigger than two, you can't afford to be a fan.

So leave. Just get out. Move to a metropolitan area that doesn't have another baseball team within 20 miles, a pro hockey team, and an NBA franchise (two if you count Sacramento). There's simply too many sporting venues to appeal to such a geographically small area.

That's my take as a lifetime fan of Oakland, the Raiders, and the A's. We can't afford you any more.

The article was originally published here! Israel Poised to Silence Palestinians in Latest Round of Violence

[chiseler]

Israel and the Far-Right American Left

Presidential elections are, for the most part, psychic events. Chimeras. Deceptions. Or, as Noam Chomsky calls them, “personalized quadrennial extravaganzas.” But Chomskyites are often puzzled to hear their anarchist role model, one election cycle after another, touting the mainstream Democrat.

So why does Chomsky, with a saddened, syllable-dragging and demoralized voice, encourage voters to participate in their own exclusion – i.e., the electoral process? His under-read Goals and Visions holds some answers. The essay, dating back to Dr. Chomsky’s heyday, makes a beautiful (and deeply counter-intuitive) case for anarchists supporting strong centralized government in the near term.

Voting is a provisional bulwark against absolute corporate tyranny, which must, so the argument goes, be defeated first – I’m not persuaded that Chomsky’s theory illuminates his latest White House hopeful, Bernie Sanders. If, as Chomsky argues, our American Democracy is some terrifying variety show, beamed into politically atomized brains, then certainly he's able to see the emperor has no clothes here. That is, Bernie (pardon the image): a butt naked cipher. I recently asked the MIT linguist a simple question.

"What has Bernie Sanders ever done to help Palestine?"

For years, international activists have been putting Palestinian dignity at the center of their program. And Chomsky's laconic response — "Not much" — won't surprise them. No stranger to equivocation where BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is concerned, I hoped to tease out whatever nuances might have created this strange contradiction on the American Left, in essence to answer my own query: "How can otherwise principled boycott supporters drop the ball and say 'oops' as historical Palestine experiences a genocide?"

If that word frightens you, you're in good company: Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and even Norman Finkelstein refuse it — despite a growing chorus that includes Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who coined “incremental genocide” to define The Holy Land's occupation/annexation/extermination agenda. I'm sitting here in Brooklyn firing off emails in a chair designed by Ray and Charles Eames (so, please, don't call me an "armchair activist") — criticizing figures in my own personal pantheon.

Forgive me for what I do.

Stoop shouldered, he gazes out over his audience like a tortoise, half as old as time, in vain and reflexive search of the shell he left behind somewhere. Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if this self-styled socialist were running for President? Sure, but Senator Bernie Sanders’ deportment and general appearance constitute a sadly instructive, big old honkin’ “tell” – only chumps and chuckleheads could possibly miss it. Outward displays of Hard Leftism fall away whenever Bernie aids and abets the Democratic Party in strange, stentorian Brooklynese.

Remember that solemn promise he made at the outset of his 2016 campaign not to run as an independent? And another obvious tip-off: pledging support for the Party’s foreknown nominee — i.e., the Monsanto shillaber with whom Sanders was so nauseatingly flirtatious. I keep these facts firmly in mind as I await honest responses to my pestering missives. Critical of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, Noam Chomsky also fails to advance any feasible alternatives.

Nor, by his own admission, has Bernie lifted a finger: "He’s moved towards support for Palestinian rights, more so than any other candidate, but he’s focusing on domestic policy." To wit, Bernie "knows very well that any word on the topic will let loose the familiar and cynical litany of ‘anti-Semitism’." But isn't it even more "cynical" to suggest, as Chomsky does, that ordinary citizens be held to a higher standard than his pick for US President? Some of us risk opprobrium, and worse, every day because party politics are obtuse to suffering in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders exploits disaffected voters by herding them back into the Democratic Party fold, under a primary assumption about their malleability, laziness and glib call for “revolution.” Though he claims to be a serious socialist, he actively supports a murderous wingnut Zionism. Take his resounding stamp of approval on “Operation Protective Edge,” which killed over 550 Palestinian children in 2014, serving Israel’s long-term agenda of land grabs, water theft, indefinite detention... a nigh endless atrocities list which includes the systematic torture of little kids (see UNICEF's Children in Israeli Military Detention, available as a PDF online).

I next decided to bother Chomsky’s old friend and political ally Dr. Norman Finkelstein, son of two Holocaust survivors and decades-long champion of the Palestinian cause. In recent years, Finkelstein has become something of a pariah on the Left thanks to his anti-BDS stance: "I think Bernie should be let alone in the primary to focus on his domestic agenda." This was getting monotonous.

Finkelstein unintentionally loops back to his mentor's essay, Goals and Visions, torpedoing its thesis as our half-assed interview progresses — acknowledging, for instance, that if Bernie couldn’t tax Jeff Bezos, and instead funded New Deal economics with attempted military cuts: “It could literally trigger a coup plot.” Responding to that same question, Chomsky answers with a devastating blow to his own theory: "Even if he were elected — a long shot — he would not be able to do much without a supportive Congress — an even longer shot.”

In plain language, Sanders and the rest of Congress are tied to the defense industry. So what about Uncle Noam’s (imagined) boundary line — the one supposedly separating captains of industry from democratically elected representatives? It’s a sham, though possibly a well-meaning one, like some avuncular bedtime story offered in lieu of reality-based hope.

Genocide kind of rubs me the wrong way.

I’m not sure there’s anything particularly “revolutionary” about pulling a bloodstained lever for state-sponsored carnage in slow motion. But, hell, that’s just my opinion. So let’s listen to Bernie himself — the old Bernie, who spoke a modicum of truth about our so-called electoral options. "Essentially, it's my view that the leadership of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are tied to big-money interests and that neither of these parties will ever represent the people in this country that are demanding the real changes that have to take place."

It’s axiomatic that we don’t launch revolutions in the ballot box. And yet, here we have Sanders fans, crowding around a Smurf with dyspepsia as if he were Big Bill Haywood. To his followers, I’d say: If you’re counting on some latter-day Dem to save you from capitalism’s war-mongering and general rapaciousness, then listen to Bernie’s earlier, slightly less dishonest incarnation. “You don’t change the system from within the Democratic Party.” Now there’s a sentiment I can agree with.

Bernie’s sheep-dogging dovetails with his oft-stated support for pugnacious Israel, since both positions coincidentally strengthen Monsanto. The agribusiness colossus, known mainly for genetically modified crops, produced Agent Orange during America’s illegal assault on Vietnam, and now makes white phosphorous doted on by the Holy Land and that (surprise!) melts human flesh. Israel routinely and, yes, illegally drops the stuff on civilians in Gaza, since... well, a bunch of Arabs live there... Go ahead and Google the images – if you can stomach them – of civilian “collateral damage” roasted by Bernie and his newfound Democrat pals.

Who needs an American Left that parses us into a hopeless corner of complicity with the ghouls over at Monsanto; or into an equally occult alliance with Bernie Sanders’ favorite arms manufacturers at Lockheed Martin: death-peddlers spanning generations which, to the surprise of no one, have their own rollicking relationship to The Holy Land’s psychopathic ethno-nationalism. The same corporations profiting on Israel’s crimes are destroying the biosphere. So what's an impressionable, idealistic soul to do? It's either make common cause with an artlessly compromised left, or enter a nihilistic hellscape populated by the likes of Ben Shapiro, or Dr. Jordan Peterson. Some choice.

Israeli talking points, a species of American PR industry-calibrated blather and Labor Day Telethon sanctimony, relentlessly fuse democracy and religious statehood – two distinct conditions which will never mesh -- into grotesque synonyms. But as of this writing, 97% of the water in Gaza is contaminated; electricity has been cut to 4 hours per day; Israeli courts convict 99.74% of Palestinian defendants (not that many people are guilty); 85% of Israel’s “security fence” (The Apartheid Wall) is on land rightfully and legally belonging to the people of Palestine.

Standing opposed to it all -- and indeed ridiculed by America's preeminent professional anti-Zionist, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, whose sole income these days derives from working the college lecture circuit where he finds himself harangued night after night by 20 year old corn-fed Methodist William Henry Harrison High School Irgun-wannabes, for daring to suggest that the state of Israel might possibly have its own problem with mass-murder -- the amateurs in BDS, wielding the kind of principled Internationalist vision which helped bring down Apartheid in South Africa, chase one last hope.

It is a movement which has become beautifully amorphous, internalized by artists who refuse to perform in Tel Aviv, or inspiring students to tell the truth. Again. Finally. Without fear. Meanwhile, courageous young people within Israel are choosing prison and the death of their social lives over a collusion so easily embraced, and even sought, throughout the rest of the industrialized world. In a Land of Soldiers and unceasing bloodshed, this requires the kind of backbone and resolve that once inspired folk tales.

Ahed Tamimi, to whom this editorial is dedicated 

by Daniel Riccuito

Special thanks to R.J. Lambert