In 1996 a task force, led by Richard Perle, produced a policy document titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then in his first term as Prime Minister of Israel, as a how-to manual on approaching regime change in the Middle East and for the destruction of the Oslo Accords.
First, the bottom line: If you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover. That is where we are now. A sealed-off, ‘exceptionalist’ mindset has brought about – surprise; surprise – an exceptionalist outcome. We have both a deluge of avoidable deaths, and clearly, a staggering amount of possibly avoidable economic damage (albeit some of which was destined to occur soon, anyway).
Elections are supposed to solve problems by reordering government, adopting new policies, and putting new people in control. But how many elections must Israel have before it realizes it can do none of those things because it’s caught in an intractable constitutional bind?
Take Jordan (or Lebanon) as an example: Both have a broken economic model. One, (Lebanon), has had its huge deficits financed by expatriate remittances; and the other (Jordan), has had its budget deficits (6% of GDP), until now covered by annual stipends provided by Gulf States and the US (the EU provides relatively little financial subsidy). For both, these external inflows are either in, or are heading toward draught conditions (as the low price of oil eviscerates Gulf State finances).
There was never much doubt that Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was going to roll out as his much-ballyhooed “Middle East Peace Plan” an 80-page contrivance that would hand large portions of the West Bank to the Israelis and relegate the Palestinians to a powerless “state” composed of enclaves totally surrounded by heavily-militarized Israeli territory.
Coercive might and money may be all that matter in Manhattan real estate. But they are bound to sink the president’s take-all-you-want “deal of the century” for Israel.
Patrick LAWRENCE
Daniel McADAMS
There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.
Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.
Jonathan COOK
Much of Donald Trump’s long-trailed “deal of the century” came as no surprise. Over the past 18 months, Israeli officials had leaked many of its details.
The so-called “Vision for Peace” unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.
Ignoring past Israeli prime ministers who warned that annexation of the West Bank would introduce legal apartheid to Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu said the first phase of annexations would go to the Cabinet on Sunday, reports Joe Lauria.
Joe LAURIA
Within hours of the so-called Trump peace plan on the Palestine-Israel question being revealed on Tuesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would propose the first phase of West Bank annexation to the Israeli cabinet on Sunday.
