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Trump is Trying to Pay His Way to an
Annihilation of Palestinian Statehood, and an Erasure of Israel’s Crimes
Posted
By Robert Fisk On March 12, 2019 @ 2:00 am
Photo Source U.S.
Embassy Dedication Ceremony
“Palestine”
has been compared to many things. The world’s longest colonial war, a
“hell-disaster” – Churchill’s memorable epithet – and the site of Israel’s
“war on terror”, a conflict in which we are supposed to believe that the
Palestinians are playing the role of al-Qaeda or Isis or any other outfit which
the west and its allies have helped into existence, and which Israel is going
to fight on our behalf.
But there are
times when Palestine turns out to have been located in the Bermuda Triangle.
The Palestinians disappear. They cease to exist. They are forgotten,
irrelevant, outside the landscape of fear, pain, injustice and occupation that
we once heard about so often. No one can imagine what has happened to these
Palestinians. Like the aircraft and boats which strayed into the mythical
triangle, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Sad to see them
go. But it’s a mystery.
The last two weeks have been a case in
point. Trump’s fey and vain son-in-law Jared Kushner, a supporter of Israel’s colonial
expansion on Arab land, set off with Trump’s “special representative to the
peace process” Jason Greenblatt (the man who says that “West Bank settlements
are not an obstacle to peace”) to work out the economic underpinning of Trump’s “deal
of the century” to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Kushner went to
visit some Muslim killer-states, some of them with very nasty and
tyrannical leaders – Saudi Arabia and Turkey among them – to chat about the
“economic dimension” of this mythical deal.
Middle East leaders may be murderers with
lots of torturers to help them stay in power, but they are not entirely stupid.
It’s clear that Kushner and Greenblatt need lots and lots of cash to prop up
their plans for the final destruction of Palestinian statehood – we are talking
in billions – and the Arab leaders they met did not hear anything about the
political “dimension” of Trump’s “deal”. Because presumably there isn’t one.
After all, Trump thinks that by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and
declaring it the capital of Israel, he has taken that most holy of cities “off
the table”.
Our titans of
journalism were silent – maybe they, too, fell into the Bermuda Triangle – and
had absolutely nothing to say, absolutely zilch, about Kushner’s march of folly
around the Middle East. They called it, inevitably, a “whirlwind tour” in which
this foolish young man would – readers will recognise CNN’s equally inevitable
clichés – “prep allies for a spring rollout” of the “plan”.
This very
vagueness is amazing, because the Kushner-Greenblatt fandango was in fact a
very historic event. It was unprecedented as well as bizarre, unequalled in
recent Arab history for its temerity as well as its outrageous assumption.
For this was the
first time in modern Arab history – indeed modern Muslim history – that America
has constructed and prepared a bribe BEFORE the acquiescence of those who are
supposed to take the money; before actually telling the Palestinians and other
Arabs what they are supposed to do in order to get their hands on the loot.
Usually, the
Americans or the EU come up with highfalutin “peace” proposals – two states,
security for Israel, viability for Palestinians, talks about a joint capital, an
end to Jewish colonies on occupied Arab land, mutual trust-building, refugees,
the usual paint-pots – and then gently suggest that it might be financially
worthwhile for everyone to start talking.
But now the bank
account is being set up before the customers’ agreement. The banks themselves –
we have to include Saudi Arabia, do we not? – have not even been told what
investments their funds are meant to support. How many times can you fit a
South Sea Bubble into a Bermuda Triangle?
It’s not a blank
cheque the Americans want from the Arabs. It’s going to be a very big cheque
with specific amounts, to be given to a people who have never – as an occupied,
repressed, abandoned community – ever demanded cash from anyone. Sure – and
this has been a Kushner theme – Palestinians would be happier if they were
better off.
But who has ever
seen, in all the bloody Palestinians protests, demonstrations and cries of
despair and massacres, a single poster – just one demand – for prime business
opportunities, new motorways, five-star hotels, hospitals or pre-natal clinics?
Palestinian
demands have been uniformly identical: justice, dignity, freedom and – yes –
the return of lost lands, if only of those properties thieved from them by
Israel in the West Bank. Of the thousands of unarmed innocents eviscerated in
the great Gaza wars, which of their families is now going to settle for an
American cheque in return for the end of all their ideals, dreams and political
demands? But then again, what do we care for any of those families?
For the Bermuda
Triangle sucked into its vortex these past few days yet another Palestinian
victim: the UN’s preliminary report on the mass killings by Israeli troops and
snipers of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza demonstrating since 30 March last year
– against their imprisonment in the enclave and their right, under UN General
Assembly Resolution 194, to return to their families’ original homes or receive
compensation for them.
More than 200
Palestinians have been killed and around 18,000 wounded. The UN investigated
189 fatalities. Its researchers thought that perhaps on two occasions, armed
Palestinian men may have infiltrated the crowds to shoot at the Israeli army,
but even the briefest reading of the UN report’s 22 pages makes it perfectly
clear that the dead were largely the victims of deliberate and aimed shots.
They included journalists, health workers, children. Israel may have committed
war crimes, the UN report concluded.
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But each new war,
each new set of casualties, each new UN report has become normal. Or perhaps
the word is “normalised”. None more so than the 25 February UN document. The
demonstrators belonged to the “terrorist” Hamas, according to Israel. The
investigation was a “theatre of the absurd”, announced Israel’s spokesman,
“a report that is hostile, mendacious and biased against Israel”.
But what did we
expect? Ever since Israel trashed and demeaned and politically destroyed that
great Jewish jurist Richard Goldstone after his devastating critique of the
2008-2009 Israeli bombardment of Gaza – the accusations by Israel and Jewish
Americans of his antisemitism and his innate “evil” (the latter from Alan
Dershowitz, of course) make even US Democrat Ilhan Omar’s sins look childlike –
UN reports have been little more than wallpaper. Yet none of this matters.
The Palestinians
are even supposed to be duped by the closure of the US consulate in Jerusalem
and its merger with Washington’s embassy in Israel to enhance “the efficiency
and effectiveness of [America’s] diplomatic engagements”, according to the
ambassador David Friedman, who also, by extraordinary chance, supports
Israel’s land expropriations in the West Bank but claims he wants a “two-state
solution”.
Hanan Ashrawi
simply and eloquently explained that the merging of the consulate with the
embassy “is not an administrative decision. It is an act of political assault
on Palestinian rights and identity, and a negation of the consulate’s
historic status and function, dating back nearly 200 years.” She was quite
right. And no one paid the slightest attention. The US consulate simply got
swallowed up by the Bermuda Triangle.
Is all this
because Trump has now steamrolled morality and so indelibly soiled the American
flag that we have all, somehow, closed down in the Middle East on ideas like
principles, promises and humanity, and accepted everlasting night – even if the
latter is referred to as the deal of the century? Is that what happens when you
fall into the Bermuda Triangle? Goodbye to the Palestinians. Didn’t they know
this was dangerous territory? Hadn’t they heard the stories? It’s all a mystery
if you ask me.
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
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