Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
After 18 months of flirting, hinting and promising, rumour has it that America’s President-In-Law is going to finally unveil his “Deal of the Century” peace plan for Israel and Palestine. It does have a ring to it, like a TV game show, or a Noel Edmonds fruit machine at the local pub. Another exciting business deal hatched in Trump Tower, but will it work?
Thankfully, some of the initial details have drifted out in Rupert Murdoch’s internal deep state communications journal (safely locked behind a pay wall, their own digital equivalent of a gated community), the Times of London. It’s official: the Old Testament has a new estate agent, wunderkind Jared Kushner. What could possibly go wrong?
We’re told by the President that his son-in-law’s plan is, “Really, really amazing. So amazing,” and nothing short of genius. Simply put, Kushner hopes to bribe the Palestinians with various ‘economic offers’ whilst keeping the real details of the deal secret and under wraps until a later opportune date. In other words, this will be the first time in history that the United States has initiated a ‘peace process’ without actually putting forward any actual peace plan. Kushner’s basic strategy pays homage to that great colonial tradition whereby, you try and lure the natives to the negotiation table with promises of treasure and status. Initially, this means a bit of money up front, along with photo opportunities with the world’s most execrated political figures from US, Israel, GCC and lower Manhattan, all in the hope that the Palestinians might end up signing some intermediary memorandum of understanding before August. And the clock is ticking; this road show needs to get moving before the summer holiday break, so that Trump can claim some kind of intermittent victory going into the upcoming 2020 election cycle.
The Palestinians should be forewarned, as they may as well be walking into a tacky business suite at some Holiday Inn off an I-95 turnpike somewhere in south Florida. On its face, Kushner’s vaunted Deal looks to be an inch deep, and is based on a profound lack of understanding not only of America’s own sordid role in the failed peace process, but also a failure to recognise Palestinian sovereignty. Hence, it is destined to go down in history the geopolitical equivalent of Glengarry Glen Ross, only transplanted in the Gulf. The same wool suits, the same long con job. It could be the world’s biggest-ever timeshare scam.
To add a little more sleaze to the picture, the Trump Administration is hoping to stage a ‘donors conference’ at the end of June, hosted by Saudi Arabia’s own off-shore pleasure haven, the Kingdom of Bahrain, where the deal-makers hope to dazzle a beleaguered Palestinian delegation with a week of high-level meetings, punctuated by opulent buffets, canapé parties, and more photo-ops with Arab sheikhs and American envoys. In the evening, delegates will retire to Bahrain’s finest 24 hour casinos, where they’ll be plied with even more food and drink, lots of gambling, and an endless parade of Miss Universe contestants to entertain the distinguished visitors. Yes, it may sound gaudy and cheap, but rest assured the organisers “care deeply” about the plight of the Palestinian, enough to spend “a lot of money” on this epic geopolitical junket.
Father-In-Law, Donald J. Trump
The front end of the deal might seem reasonable enough to benevolent slumlords at Trump & Sons, who will insist their intentions are purely altruistic and that they’d like nothing more than to see a ‘win, win’ deal where everyone can walk away happy. Quite simply, these enterprising estate agents are convinced that the unruly natives can be persuaded to give up their fanciful dreams of an independent Palestinian State in return for a few billion dollars of ‘direct foreign investment’ (DFI). You can only image what strings will be attached to those investments (private foreign ownership comes to mind).
As with all good timeshare scams, there’s always a catch which is usually buried in the fine print at the bottom on the back of a smudged, mimeograph carbon copy contract. One of the main reasons this deal is so likely to fail is that it’s devised in such a way that it’s based on a framework which most normal and intelligent people have already roundly rejected, which is the now defunct Two State Solution. The estate agents at Trump & Sons appear confident that the poor Palestinians would like nothing more in life that to own two little slivers of land in Gaza and the West Bank, surrounded by Israel and its IDF and call it a Palestinian State. The only problem is that the Two State option is dead and everyone knows it – which is exactly why Kushner’s Deal is predicated on it, and therefore designed to fail. Most sensible and intelligent people already accept that the only sustainable future is One State, a pluralistic society where everyone lives together as equals, including equal rights and equal protection under the law, like in any normal democracy or republic. Presently, this is an anathema to contemporary Zionist thinking, which is moving increasingly to the right in advocating for ethno-nationalism and racial uniformity within a “pure Jewish state.” In this respect, the current Netanyahu regime is more radical than any Israel government before it, occupying the far reaches of the right-wing, and cannot envision any future which includes Arabs and non-Jews within the State of Israel. Their saviour of the moment is Donald Trump, who they believe is the one leader who can help them achieve their goal of biblical revanchism. The first step in formalising this process came when Washington recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved its embassy there from Tel Aviv. Naturally, Israel supporters see this as a major win which will strengthen their negotiation position going forward but by doing this, they also spoiled the conditions for any meaningful steps forward – by ignoring previous UN resolutions which observed the neutrality of the Holy City.
No one is saying that a One State solution would be easy, or even desirable for many people on both sides of this issue. Some might even say it’s impossible. But if a sustainable solution is the goal, then such an option should not be ruled out. The idea is now getting more traction too. But this is certainly not what Trump & Sons has in mind.
While Americans are mostly clueless about the death of the Two State option, Palestinans know very well why their dream of a little Palestinian State died with the Oslo Accords. It was because they realised that as part of the deal, in order to feel ‘secure’, Israeli overlords reserve the right to effectively control all aspects of Palestinian life – air, sea, land, communications, resources and water, which is more or less what they do already. In reality, the Oslo Peace Process and the ‘Road Map to Peace‘ was nothing more that a 25 year-long stalling operation which allowed Israel to appropriate more territory by building hundreds of thousands of illegal settlement homes, housing some 600,000 Jewish settlers on ‘reclaimed’ (stolen) Palestinian land. By doing this, Israeli leaders have created ‘facts on the ground’ in the form of an increased Jewish population, and what they believe translates into a de facto mandate in these ‘reclaimed’ areas. This micro-colonial agenda facilitates the outright heft of any Palestinian homes, land and farms which the Israeli government deems a security threat. Award-winning journalist Robert Fisk remarked on this sleight of hand last year, saying, “Today, 600,000 Jewish Israelis live in about 140 colonies constructed on land belonging to another people, the Palestinians, either in the West Bank or east Jerusalem.”
Off-camera and lurking in the background is Jared Kushner’s close family friend, Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu, giving his young padawan hand signals along the way. The beauty of this particular scam is that even it fails, it still plays into the hands of Netanyahu, who won the last election based on the promise that he would extend Israeli sovereignty to Jewish settlements in the disputed West Bank. Forget the fact that this flies in the face of decades of UN resolutions and an international consensus on how to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Unfortunately, the current US administration will casually tear up any existing treaties or agreements it does not like. In other words, for Kushner’s peace plan, there won’t be any broader plan on paper – only a promise of it at some point in the future. In the meantime, Israeli hardliners whom Netanyahu is now wed to, will still demand an increased control over the West Bank, and Trump & Sons are the ones who will provide the necessary smoke screen to make this happen. Again, the clock is ticking because even Tel Aviv isn’t sure whether The Donald will prevail in 2020 or not, so they need to go for any land-grabs they can right now.
David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, intimated as much in a recent Bloomberg interview, explaining:
“Netanyahu’s view is that between now and 2020, this is the time to extract from Trump whatever is extractable … Netanyahu is going to try to get selective acquiescence for annexation inside the barrier, using President Abbas’s refusal to talk as a justification. If Netanyahu gets a green light for that, he will push for the plan.”
Again, Kushner’s Deal is just a recycled version of the old deal, which was an awful deal for Palestinians, so awful in fact that they rejected it – which gave Israelis and their US supporters a predictable excuse to claim that the Palestinians were offered ‘a perfectly good deal’ at Camp David but they refused it, so whatever happened after that was ‘their fault.’ A typical prisoner-warden relationship. This has become the standard Israeli negotiation tactic: to offer a lousy deal which they know will be rejected, and then proceed to blame the weaker party (who have zero leverage to begin with) for not taking up such a ‘generous’ offer. Fast forward to 2019, and Tel Aviv’s estate agent reps from Washington are simply recycling that old sales pitch. Speaking recently at the United Nations, Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s new envoy for peace negotiations, is running with the old canard, saying, “It would be a mistake for the Palestinians not to join us. They have nothing to lose and much to gain if they join us. But it is, of course, their choice.”
Screencap from a video purporting to show a plan to relocate Palestinians to Sinai. Trump’s envoy Jason Greenblatt denied this was part of Kushner’s Deal.
Ask any hardline Israeli or self-respecting Zionist and they will tell you that the ideal solution for them is for the Arabs to ‘go away’ live happily ever-after somewhere else in Arabia. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard Zionists say, “I don’t understand them (the Palestinians). There’s plenty of empty land in Saudi Arabia, or in the Sinai. Why can’t they just go there and we can all live in peace?” Before you laugh, you should note that this is actually part of Trump & Sons’ end game: to eventually relocate the native Palestinian population of Gaza to the Sinai desert in Egypt. Similarly, there is another alternative option to ship-out the West Bank natives to neighbouring Jordan. Both of these scenarios could easily end up becoming new extensions of an already redundant regional network Of Palestinians refugee camps which date right back to 1948. Both of these plans assume that Palestinians, their history, their culture – can simply be bought-off for the right price, as if their heritage were nothing more than a temporal shoal. The irony here is simply remarkable.
Like Oslo, this Deal should be viewed as yet another protracted process whereby Tel Aviv is able to buy more time to expand its territorial assets. Currently, securing as much land in the Golan Heights is a top priority for Tel Aviv. This move fulfills not only its territorial objectives in terms of establishing a security buffer with Syria and Lebanon, but it also delivers bountiful resources in terms of fresh water, fertile soil and potential oil reserves, with lucrative licenses already handed out to Genie Energy, a firm headed by the A-list of western elites including Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch and others, in a venture can be viewed as pure patronage.
In truth, every US-sponsored Middle East ‘peace process’ always descends into a shallow affair, dressed-up in platitudes and promises, but always rigged from the onset in favor of the occupying Israeli entity. The only difference now is that they’re dispensing with any pretense of goodwill. Far from the Deal of the Century, it’s the ultimate timeshare scam, led by the sort of conspicuous frontman you’d expect to see greeting an innocent retired couple in that Holiday Inn in south Florida.
READ MORE PALESTINE NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire Palestine Files
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