Trump Mideast "Peace Plan" Is Dead On Arrival

(Cartoon image is by Gary Huck at huckkonopackicartoons.com.)

After assuming office, Donald Trump bragged that he would come up with a plan that would solve the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of developing that plan, in spite of the fact that Kushner had no foreign policy experience or expertise.

Most people looked at the Trump administration's love for Israel and hatred for muslims (except for rich Saudis), and doubted they could find a solution in the Middle East. The doubters were right. For the last two years, Kushner met repeatedly with Israelis and did not have any meetings at all with Palestinian leaders.

It should be no surprise then that when the Trump "peace plan" was announced on Tuesday, it gave Israel everything it wanted -- including allowing Israel to annex all the land they had stolen from the Palestinians to build illegal settlements. The Palestinians would be given only limited sovereignty and a tiny piece of East Jerusalem as its capital.

The plan is abysmally unfair, and its no surprise that it was immediately rejected by Palestinian leaders. And it has a zero chance of actually solving the Palestinian crisis (or even making a tiny bit of progress toward that).

Netanyahu Will Annex The West Bank (No 2-State Solution)

The map above shows the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank (Palestinian land), and more are being built all the time.

The myth here in the United States is that it is the Palestinians that have been the obstacle to peace in the Mid-East, by refusing to negotiate with Israel -- and that Israel is willing to negotiate a two-state solution that would create a Palestinian nation. That is simply not true.

It is Israel that has been blocking the negotiations by continuing to build settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank. They obviously have no intention of ever giving up these settlements and allowing the Palestinians to control their own land. Now, finally, an Israeli politician has been honest about Israel's intentions.

Prime Minister Netanyahu (who is running for re-election) has openly stated that when he is re-elected he will annex the West Bank -- making it an official part of the nation of Israel. This comes as no surprise to honest viewers of the situation in the Mid-East. This has long been the unspoken desire of the Israeli government. Why would they continue to build these settlements if they had any intention to one day give them up?

They wouldn't. They have never intended to allow the Palestinians to create a nation of their own (composed of the West Bank and Gaza). Netanyahu's desire to annex the West Bank is not different from the desires of other Israeli politicians -- he's just a bit more honest about Israeli intentions.

Here's what he said:

"A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years, no prime minister has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny."

"Will we move ahead to the next stage? Yes. I will extend sovereignty but I don't distinguish between the settlement blocs and the isolated ones, because each settlement is Israeli and I will not hand it over to Palestinian sovereignty." 

"I will not divide Jerusalem, I will not evacuate any community and I will make sure we control the territory west of Jordan." 

It's Time For The U.S. To Show Israel Some "Tough Love"

(The image above was found at Eine Kleine Nichtmusik.)

The nation of Israel is very popular with citizens in this country, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has used that to his advantage for years now. Under his leadership, Israel has basically operated two giant concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank, engaged in the theft of Palestinian land by continuing to build Israeli settlements on that land (settlements they have no intention of giving up), and refused to negotiate a two-state solution to end the crisis in the Middle East.

Netanyahu claims all of this is necessary to protect Israel, and sadly, Americans have bought that lie for far too long now. The truth is that the Netanyahu government doesn't want to negotiate a settlement, because that would stop their theft of Palestinian land. And he made that clear to Israeli voters in the recent election -- assuring them that there would be no two-state solution as long as he was in power.

Now that he has been re-elected, he is trying to walk back that statement -- saying he actually does support a two-state solution. That is a lie. His assurances during the election, and his past actions, both show he is opposed to negotiating a two-state solution (or ceasing to steal Palestinian land). His recent statements are just to try and placate the United States government -- who have been protecting Israel in the United Nations, and continue to give them billions of dollars of foreign aid.

Israel has gone far beyond just defending itself. Under Netanyahu, it has become an international criminal state -- and it is time for the United States to show them some "tough love". The United States should stop vetoing United Nations resolutions condemning Israel's criminal behavior, and it needs to severely cut (or eliminate) the foreign aid it sends. It needs to do both until Israel ceases it criminal theft of Palestinian land and its obstruction of peace talks leading to a two-state solution.

Israel has a right to exist, but it does not have the right to be an international pariah under the guise of self-defense. With the re-election of Netanyahu, Israel has clearly shown it has no intention of curbing their criminal behavior. It is time for the United States to act.

Chomsky On The Failure To Solve Israeli/Palestinian Crisis

The picture at left is of Professor Noam Chomsky (Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The photo is by Duncan Rawlinson, and was found on Wikipedia.

Last Tuesday, Professor Chomsky gave a speech to 800 people in the United Nations General Assembly hall. That speech was about the Israeli-Palestinian situation -- and it was the best explanation of what has been happening over there that I have ever read or seen. If you really want to know what is happening there, and why peace seems impossible, then I urge you to go over to Democracy Now and read or listen to the whole thing.

Here is some of what Professor Chomsky had to say:

Many of the world’s problems are so intractable that it’s hard to think of ways even to take steps towards mitigating them. The Israel-Palestine conflict is not one of these. On the contrary, the general outlines of a diplomatic solution have been clear for at least 40 years. Not the end of the road—nothing ever is—but a significant step forward. And the obstacles to a resolution are also quite clear.

The basic outlines were presented here in a resolution brought to the U.N. Security Council in January 1976. It called for a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border—and now I’m quoting—"with guarantees for the rights of both states to exist in peace and security within secure and recognized borders." The resolution was brought by the three major Arab states: Egypt, Jordan, Syria—sometimes called the "confrontation states." Israel refused to attend the session. The resolution was vetoed by the United States. A U.S. veto typically is a double veto: The veto, the resolution is not implemented, and the event is vetoed from history, so you have to look hard to find the record, but it is there. That has set the pattern that has continued since. The most recent U.S. veto was in February 2011—that’s President Obama—when his administration vetoed a resolution calling for implementation of official U.S. policy opposition to expansion of settlements. And it’s worth bearing in mind that expansion of settlements is not really the issue; it’s the settlements, unquestionably illegal, along with the infrastructure projects supporting them.

For a long time, there has been an overwhelming international consensus in support of a settlement along these general lines. The pattern that was set in January 1976 continues to the present. Israel rejects a settlement of these terms and for many years has been devoting extensive resources to ensuring that it will not be implemented, with the unremitting and decisive support of the United States—military, economic, diplomatic and indeed ideological—by establishing how the conflict is viewed and interpreted in the United States and within its broad sphere of influence.

There’s no time here to review the record, but its general character is revealed by a look at what has happened in Gaza in the past decade, carrying forward a long history of earlier crimes. Last August, August 26th, a ceasefire was reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. And the question on all our minds is: What are the prospects for the future? Well, one reasonable way to try to answer that question is to look at the record. And here, too, there is a definite pattern: A ceasefire is reached; Israel disregards it and continues its steady assault on Gaza, including continued siege, intermittent acts of violence, more settlement and development projects, often violence in the West Bank; Hamas observes the ceasefire, as Israel officially recognizes, until some Israeli escalation elicits a Hamas response, which leads to another exercise of "mowing the lawn," in Israeli parlance, each episode more fierce and destructive than the last. . .

The pattern is very clear. And so far, at least, it appears to be continuing. The latest ceasefire was reached on August 26th. It was followed at once by Israel’s greatest land grab in 30 years, almost a thousand acres in the Gush Etzion area near what’s called Jerusalem, Greater Jerusalem, about five times the size of anything that Jerusalem ever was, taken over by Israel, annexed in violation of Security Council orders. The U.S. State Department informed the Israeli Embassy that Israeli—I’m quoting it now—"Israeli activity in Gush Etzion undermines American efforts to protect Israel at the United Nations," and urged that Israel shouldn’t provide ammunition for "those at the [United Nations] who would interpret [Israel’s] position as hardening." Actually, that warning was given 47 years ago, in September 1967, at the time of Israel’s first colonization, illegal colonization, of Gush Etzion. Israeli historian Gershom Gorenberg recently reminded us of this. Little has changed since, in the last 47 years, apart from the scale of the crimes, which continue, without a break, with constant U.S. support.

Well, as for the prospects, there is a conventional picture. It’s repeated constantly on all sides—Israel, Palestine, independent commentators, diplomats. The picture that’s presented is that there are two alternatives: either the two-state settlement, which represents an overwhelming international consensus, virtually everyone, and if that fails, there will have to be one state—Israel will take over the West Bank, the Palestinians will hand over the keys, as it’s sometimes said. Palestinians often have favored that. They say then they will be able to carry out a civil rights struggle, maybe modeled on the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, fight for civil rights within the whole one state controlled by Israel. Now, Israelis criticize that on the grounds of what is called "the demographic problem," the fact that there will be too many non-Jews in a Jewish state—in fact, pretty soon a majority. Those are the alternatives that are presented, overwhelmingly, hardly an exception.

My own opinion, which I’ve written about repeatedly—without convincing many people, apparently, but I’ll try to convince you—is that this is a total illusion. Those are not the two alternatives. There are two alternatives, but they’re different ones. One alternative is the international consensus on a two-state settlement, basically the terms of January 1976. By now, it’s virtually everyone—the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States, includes Iran, Europe, Latin America—informally, at least, about everyone. That’s one option. The other option, the realistic one, is that Israel will continue doing exactly what it is doing right now, before our eyes, visible, with U.S. support, which is also visible. And what’s happening is not a secret. You can open the newspapers and read it.

Israel is taking over what they call Jerusalem, as I mentioned, a huge area, maybe five times the area of historic Jerusalem, Greater Jerusalem, big area in the West Bank, includes many Arab villages being dispossessed, destroyed, bringing settlers in. All of this is doubly illegal. All the settlements are illegal, as determined by the Security Council, advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. But the Jerusalem settlements are doubly illegal, because they’re also in violation of explicit Security Council orders going back to 1968, with the U.S. actually voting for them at that time, barring any change in the status of Jerusalem. But it continues. That’s Greater Jerusalem. There are then corridors extending to the east. One major corridor extending from Jerusalem almost to Jericho, virtually bisecting the West Bank, includes the Israeli town of Ma’ale Adumim, which was built largely during the Clinton administration, Clinton years, with the obvious purpose of bisecting the West Bank—still a little contested territory, but that’s the goal. There’s another corridor further to the north including the town of Ariel, partially bisecting what remains. Another one further to the north including the town of Kedumim. If you look at the map, these essentially break up the West Bank into pretty much cantons. It looks, from a map, as though a large territory is left, but that’s misleading. Most of that is uninhabitable desert. And that’s separate from what I mentioned before, the slow, steady takeover of the Jordan Valley to the east—again, about a third of the arable land, the country.

Israel has no official policy of taking it over, but they’re pursuing the policy in the way that has been carried out now for a hundred years, literally—small steps so nobody notices, or at least people pretend not to notice, establish a military zone. The Palestinians who live there have to be displaced because it’s a military zone, no settlement allowed, and pretty soon there’s a military settlement, Nahal settlement, and another, then, sooner or later, it becomes an actual settlement. Meanwhile, dig wells, dispossess the population, set up green zones—a large variety of techniques which have, by now, reduced the Arab population from about 300,000 in 1967 to roughly 60,000 today. As I mentioned, that essentially imprisons what’s left.

I don’t think Israel has any intention of taking over the Palestinian population concentrations, which are left out of this, these plans. There are analogies often made to South Africa, but they’re quite misleading. South Africa relied on its black population. That was 85 percent of the population. It was its workforce. And they had to sustain them, just like slaveowners have to maintain their capital. They tried to sustain the population. They even tried to gain international support for the bantustans. Israel has no such attitude toward the Palestinians. They don’t want to have anything to do with them. If they leave, that’s fine. If they die, that’s fine. In standard neocolonial pattern, Israel is establishing—permitting the establishment of a center for Palestinian elites in Ramallah, where you have nice restaurants and theaters and so on. Every Third World country under the colonial system had something like that.

Now, that’s the picture that’s emerging. It’s taking shape before our eyes. It has so far worked very well. If it continues, Israel will not face a demographic problem. When these regions are integrated slowly into Israel, actually, the proportion of Jews in Greater Israel will increase. There are very few Palestinians there. Those who are there are being dispossessed, kicked out. That’s what’s taking shape before our eyes. I think that’s the realistic alternative to a two-state settlement. And there’s every reason to expect it to continue as long as the United States supports it.

Public Didn't Like Willard's Mideast Remarks

The time since the party conventions has not been good for Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie). He got no bounce from his own convention, and had to watch as the president got a very nice bounce in the polls from the Democratic Convention. That would have been bad enough, but then Willard had to shoot himself in the foot by trying to make it look like he knew something about foreign policy.

When the embassies of this country were attacked in the Mideast (especially in Egypt and Libya, where Americans were killed), Willard was quick to jump in and try to score some political points from the tragedy by blaming the riots on President Obama. And he did this at a time when Americans should have been standing behind the president. Many people found Willard's attempt to score political points off the death of American officials to not only be inappropriate, but unpatriotic.

This is verified by a survey done between September 13th and 16th by the Pew Research Center. Only 26% of all Americans approved of Romney's remarks on the Mideast turmoil (which is even less than the number of Americans who self-identify as Republicans). In fact, as the chart above shows, all demographic groups disapproved of Willard's remarks except one -- Republicans, and even there only 58% approved. This was truly a gaffe that hurt the Romney campaign.

About the only good thing about this affair for Romney is that it was pushed off the media front pages after only a few days. Unfortunately for the Romney campaign, the story that pushed it out of the media's glare was another shot to the foot by Willard -- the video of his disdain for half of the American people. Willard seems to be just stumbling form one disaster to another right now.

U.S. Vetoes Mideast Peace

Most people in the United States don't understand the real causes blocking peace in the Mideast. They have bought the old Israeli argument that the peace talks can't be held because the Palestinians won't agree that Israel has a right to exist. The problem is that's an outrageous lie. It's not the Palestinians that are blocking peace talks by their actions -- it's the Israelis.

All of the relevant Palestinian groups have either said they recognize Israel's right to exist, or that they are willing to negotiate that. That should have cleared the way for peace talks, but it didn't. It didn't because the Israelis are not ready for peace talks -- they haven't finished stealing Palestinian land. Ever since they took East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, the Israelis have been spreading out into that territory by building settlements -- in violation of international law.

Israel has no intention of holding peace talks -- talks that could result in a Palestinian nation and a true peace, because the day that happens they can no longer steal any more land. It is obvious that they have no intention of ever giving up any of the Palestinian land they have stolen, and the longer they can delay peace talks the more land they can steal.

George Bush encouraged this illegal action by the Israelis, which is why no progress was made toward peace during his eight-year term. It was hoped that President Obama would be more neutral with the opposing parties, and thus be able to mediate a road to peace. At first it looked like that may be true, since he joined other world leaders in asking Israel to stop building settlements on Palestinian land. Unfortunately, the Israelis didn't take Obama seriously and continued to build.

Now it looks like the Israelis had correctly assessed the situation (and President Obama). The Obama administration has made it clear they are backing the illegal Israeli actions. The president has had several opportunities to punish the Israelis for not stopping the building, but has done nothing. Aid money could have been cut (or at least threatened to be cut), but Obama has made no move to do that.

Now the Obama administration has gone even further in defending the illegal settlement building. For a while now, a resolution has been making its way through the United Nations that would condemn Israel for continuing to build the settlements even though it has been made clear to them that it is a violation of international law. Last month a "number of prominent scholars, activists, and former U.S. diplomats" sent the president a letter asking him to support the U.N. resolution. They warned that a U.S. veto would "severely undermine US credibility and interests, placing us firmly outside of the international consensus, and further diminishing our ability to mediate this conflict."

But the president didn't listen. He destroyed what little credibility this country had as a neutral mediator and seriously damaged any hope of Mideast peace any time soon. He instructed the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. to veto the resolution when it became apparent it would be easily passed. Any hope of peace talks have been set back indefinitely.

Now neither side wants to come to the peace table. The Israelis aren't through stealing land, and the Palestinians can't trust us to be a fair mediator.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said the veto didn't mean the U.S. was in favor of the Israeli settlement building, and that they were afraid the resolution would have resulted in increased building. That is not just ridiculous -- it may be the most outrageous lie told by the Obama administration to date. If the Obama administration really opposed the continuing building of the settlements, they would have joined the rest of the world in condemning the Israeli actions.

Once again the United States has taken a stand in defense of illegal activity, to the consternation of the rest of the civilized world. This is incredible -- and very wrong.

Does Israel Want To Negotiate ?

It has become obvious to everyone in the civilized world that there will never be peace in the Middle East until there is a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is mutually acceptable to all sides.   Everyone, except Israel, that is.   It's starting to look like Israel is happy with the status quo.

President Obama has made it clear the Israel must stop building new settlements on the West Bank, because these settlements are an impediment to the peace process.   The European Union agrees, and they've been putting pressure on Israel this week during Netanyahu's European visit.

Netanyahu has refused to just stop the building of new settlements.   Instead he has said he is working toward a compromise.   The compromise would let Israel continue to build settlements already approved, while not approving any new settlements.

That's not really a compromise, but instead is an Israeli victory -- for a couple of reasons.   The watchdog group Peace Now says Israel could go on building indefinitely just using plans that have already been approved.   There are already 300,000 Israelis living in the West Bank and more are moving there every day.   

It's obvious what Israel is trying to do.   The longer they delay and the more settlements they build, the easier it will be for them to argue that at least part of the West Bank should remain a part of Israel -- even if a two-state solution is finally reached.   In a word, they're trying to steal Palestinian land by delaying and building.

Israel could negotiate a real peace if they wanted to right now.   If they pulled all Israelis out of the West Bank, and let a Palestinian state be set up in the West Bank and Gaza (a real Palestinian state not under Israel's control), I think peace could finally come to that part of the world.   It is achievable and the Palestinians are ready to negotiate.

The real impediment to the peace process is Israel itself.   They have America's guarantee to defend their existence, and also the opportunity to expand their territory by building on Palestinian land.   There is no real reason for them to negotiate right now.

Maybe it's time for the United States to give them a reason to negotiate.   The United States should suspend all foreign aid directed to Israel until they stop building settlements and start negotiating.   Otherwise, we'll just see more delay and land theft by Israel.