The New York Times Editorial Board should be ashamed of their cowardly full-page opinion in today’s paper. In the past, Times editors have occasionally shown some spine on Israel/Palestine, but this editorial is a dishonest embarrassment.
Some of the editorial sounds reasonably harmless, a tedious recitation of the details of the Trump/Netanyahu “peace plan” that will already be familiar to anyone following the story. But the Times mostly refuses to give the “plan’s” features the contempt or even the skepticism they deserve, so overall the implication is that we should at least take it seriously.
The paper explicitly reinforces that view in this sentence:
Yet the conflict has gone on too long, with too much suffering, to dismiss any new initiative out of hand.
Then, the heart of the paper’s argument:
This could well be the “last opportunity” for their own state that the Palestinians will ever have. . . or at least the makings of the best deal they can expect. . . that may not be a just outcome, but it is perhaps becoming the realistic one.
In short, the New York Times Editorial Board is asserting that “Might Makes Right,” although they are too afraid to come right out and say it.
Here’s another example of the editorial’s dishonesty. It notes that the Trump/Netanyahu “plan” includes a proposal that Israel would “cede some land, including possibly transferring an area of central Israel where Arab citizens of Israel live.” The editorial does not judge this proposal, other than noting: “This is a step long favored by Israeli nationalists as a means of sharply reducing the number of Arab citizens of Israel.”
The Times says its Editorial Board has 17 members. Was not a single one of them aware that what Netanyahu and Trump are proposing is called “denationalization,” and that it is regarded as a crime against humanity?
Another way was possible. The Washington Post, which is usually even more pro-Israel than the Times, published its own editorial the other day, and it was far more hard-hitting, refusing to take the Netanyahu/Trump “peace plan” at all seriously. There was no respectful talk about a “new initiative.” The Post ended by stating the obvious: “Mideast peace was an already distant prospect, but these cynical and self-seeking leaders have made it more so.”
James: “Was not a single one of them aware that what Netanyahu and Trump are proposing is called “denationalization,” and that it is regarded as a crime against humanity?”
Oh, they are aware, but that would mean that they would have to admit that Israel’s nationality law is a crime against humanity, too, because it denationalizes Palestinian refugees. And that’s something even the so called “liberal Zionists” will never do.
A “Must read.” Few people know the Middle East as well as Robert Fisk.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump-israel-palestinian-peace-deal-century-netanyahu-middle-east-a9309396.html
“Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’ is so absurd and banal, its impossible to take it seriously”
By Robert Fisk, The Independent, January 31/20
“When the two old political fraudsters emerged at the White House this week with the most deranged, farcical tragi-comedy in Middle East history, it was difficult to know whether to laugh or cry.
“The 80-page ‘peace’ plan from the White House contained 56 references to ‘Vision’ in its first 60 pages – and yes, with a capital V on each occasion to suggest, I guess, that this ‘deal of the century’ was a supernatural revelation. It was not, though it might have been written by a super-Israeli.
“It said goodbye to Palestinian refugees – the famous/infamous ‘right of return’ and all who now rot in the camps of the Middle East; farewell to the old city of Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital; adieu to UNRWA, the UN relief agency. But it welcomed a permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the total annexation of almost every Jewish colony built there against all international law.
“It’s a given, of course – and has been for days – that this nonsense might just cast some magic dust over the travails of the leaders of America and Israel. As the two rogues, Donald Trump under impeachment and Benjamin Netanyahu charged with corruption, grinned to the applause of their supporters in Washington, it became clear at once that this mendacious document – containing absurdity, burlesque and dreary banality in about equal measure – destroyed forever any hope of an independent Palestinian state of any kind. That’s not what it said, but you only had to glance at the verbiage – where Israel’s occupation, the longest in modern history, was described as a ‘security footprint’ and where the Oslo accord was trashed as an agreement which produced ‘waves of terror and violence.’
“Truly, all must read these 80 pages. And every reader should go through them twice, in case, first time round, they missed some extra egregious indignity inflicted upon the Palestinians.
“The document wasn’t just a gift to Israel. It embodied every Israeli demand ever made to Washington (plus a few more) and effectively destroyed every effort made by the United Nations Security Council; every UN resolution on Israeli withdrawal; every effort of the EU and the Quartet on the Middle East to produce a just and fair resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli war.
“In short, Israel will – under this wretched ‘deal,’ doomed though it was within seconds – get all of Jerusalem forever, most of the West Bank, own almost every Jewish colony in occupied land and dominate a disarmed, truncated, neutered Palestinian people who must promise to call Israel the ‘nation state of the Jewish people’ (albeit almost 21 per cent of its people are Arabs), censor its own schoolbooks, arrest and interrogate anyone daring to oppose the Israeli occupier, and who will have a cluster of villages outside Jerusalem’s walls to call a capital.
“True, this is a unique and historic document that the Trump menagerie (especially son-in-law Jared Kushner) has produced, since its belief that the Palestinians would dream of accepting such a deranged, farcical set of political demands is without precedent in the western world. But when should we journalists take all the stops out, I asked myself when I’d finished reading the 56 ‘Visions’ – there are others, by the way, in lower case, and several ‘missions’ – and the list of prohibitions imposed upon the Palestinians? These included, we should note, the instruction that ‘the State of Palestine may not join any international organisation if such membership would contradict commitments of the State of Palestine to demilitarisation and cessation of political and judicial warfare against the State of Israel.’ So goodbye as well to the protection of the International Criminal Court.
“Some of my colleagues lapsed into apoplexy, like Marwan Bishara of Al Jazeera. Farce, fraud, fury, surrealistic, opportunistic, populist and cynical. He used all these descriptions – but surely he was mincing his words. Gideon Levy, my hero from the Israeli daily Haaretz, was not so apoplectic. He was apocalyptic. It was ‘the final nail in the coffin of that walking corpse known as the two-state solution,’ he wrote, and created a reality ‘in which international law, the resolutions of the international community and especially international institutions are meaningless.’
“There is no Palestinian state, quoth Levy, and there never will be. It’s got to be one democracy between the Jordan and the Mediterranean – equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians – or Israel is going to be an apartheid state. Trump had created ‘a world in which the US president’s son-in-law is more powerful than the UN General Assembly. If the settlements are permitted, everything is permitted.’ Quite so.
“But do we writers and journalists and ‘experts’ and analysts still possess the tools to deal with this mumbo-jumbo? Is this not a moment – not just the end of morality, justice, integrity, dignity – to ask an ever-more important question: when will journalists have to stop taking this stuff (and themselves) seriously? Merely to write about this Trump ballyhoo as if it is real or workable or even discussable is somehow demeaning, humiliating, preposterous. Not just for media rabbits, but for those who must suffer the consequences of this dreadful document; the Palestinians and all who have faithfully supported their perfectly reasonable demands for freedom and fairness.
“I realised a few hours after reading it that, for every anti-Israel Muslim who believes in the fantastical, crazed verbiage of the ‘Zionist conspiracy,’ these 80 pages of White House notepaper would only reinforce those mind-boggling beliefs. In cases like this, perhaps we should invite our comedians to become reporters. Or ask our cartoonists to write the story. Or maybe I should turn to that fine old Ripley’s Believe It or Not feature to get the message across. Believe it Or Not: a US president gave a foreign power the right to eternally occupy someone else’s land. To me, that captures the story in 15 words.
“But let’s not forget that in return for their abject surrender, the Palestinians will get cash, cash and more cash – millions of greenies set out in pages of graphs and funding plans, and ‘fast-track’ tourism (that phrase is actually used in the document) and massive investment, ‘social betterment’ (sic), ‘self-determination’ (sic again, I guess), and ‘a path to a dignified national life, respect, security and economic opportunity…’
“And didn’t our Boris Johnson tell Trump it was ‘a positive step forwards’? And didn’t our Dominic Raab call it ‘a serious proposal’ worthy of ‘genuine and fair consideration?’
“Believe it or not, indeed.”
Plan Dalet again.
https://www.redressonline.com/2020/01/trumps-deal-is-bid-to-complete-the-evil-plan-dalet/
I recommend the leader (editorial) in the Financial Times, offering a stark contrast with the blather in the NYT.
For those who like a good farce have a read of Mad Melanie Phillips ` take on the steal of the Century:
https://www.melaniephillips.com/palestinians-bluff-called-over-to-you-world/
THE PALESTINIANS’ BLUFF HAS BEEN CALLED. OVER TO YOU, WORLD
JANUARY 31, 2020 MELANIE “DEAL OF THE CENTURY”, ISRAEL, PALESTINIANS, PRESIDENT TRUMP
U.S. President Donald Trump’s Middle East “deal of the century” offers the Palestinians a state. They have rejected it and threatened instead to ramp up violence against Israel.
No one can be surprised. They have rejected every offer of a state previously made to them in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2008 and 2014.
So is this latest deal anything more than Groundhog Day for the Middle East all over again? Yes, because this isn’t a deal. It’s an ultimatum.
Israel intends to enact its part in the plan unilaterally by declaring sovereignty over the Israeli settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley. The big change is that, despite the subsequent crossed wires over timing, the United States will accept this.
That’s because this isn’t a “peace process” in which both sides must progress in tandem with each other — a process that gave the Palestinians an effective veto even while they continued to wage their war of extermination against Israel.
For the first time, here’s an American plan that puts the security of Israel first and foremost. It’s therefore the first time that the United States has unequivocally supported Israel’s future existence.
For if a country cannot defend itself against enemies sworn to liquidate it, that country can’t survive. Yet until now, even U.S. administrations supposedly sympathetic to Israel imposed upon it requirements that undermined its security and defense against attack.
Other supposed allies, such as Britain or the European Union, have also paid mere lip service to Israel while denying the validity of its claim to the disputed territories in Judea and Samaria. Yet its claim to these territories is legal many times over, both under international laws of self-defense and through the international community’s decision in the 1920s to designate the whole of Palestine as the homeland of the Jews alone.
By denying Israel’s right to all the land, Britain and the rest of the west have effectively undermined the Jews’ entitlement to any of it.
The Trump plan has now swept aside that appeasement of evil, started by the British in the 1930s and which has been pursued by the American and Western foreign-policy establishment ever since.
Yet this proposal is far from being one-sided. On the contrary, it generously provides the Palestinians with a route to a state of their own consisting of most of the disputed territories (with sovereignty less limited than the conditions imposed by the allies on Germany after World War II). It is a highly detailed map for a two-state solution.
This has produced cries of dismay from Israelis for whom a Palestine state is anathema, and who view this as yet another reward being dangled for continued Palestinian terrorism and war. But this reward is entirely conditional upon the Palestinians giving up the very thing which forms their identity and without which they are nothing: their aim to liquidate the State of Israel.
Trump is telling the Palestinians to suck this up — or lose, because the Israelis are going to get what they need to survive regardless. Jared Kushner, one of the architects of this plan, says it’s the Palestinians’ last opportunity for a state.
But this assumes they want a state — which, of course, they don’t. That demand has always been a ruse to destroy Israel.
That’s why the Palestinians have always refused previous offers of a state and turned to violence instead; whereupon Israel has been pressured to offer them still more concessions. And that’s why the “peace process” has been in fact an engine of perpetual conflict.
Now the Palestinians’ bluff has been called. Once again they are responding with threats of more violence, because there are no circumstances in which they will ever accept the right of the Jews to their own ancestral homeland.
Increasingly shunned by the Arab world, their one hope of keeping alive this war of extermination lies in the support they continue to receive from the liberal west: Britain, the E.U. and increasing numbers of U.S. Democrats.
They robotically pump out the lies that the Palestinians tell. The lie that they, and not the Jews, are the indigenous people of the land. The lie that Israel illegally occupies that land. The lie that the Israelis oppress and persecute the Palestinians, whose only crime is to want their own state and whose claim to the land must therefore be given at least the same status as that of Israel.
The morally bankrupt equivalence between victim and aggressor has kept this war going. It has now been repudiated by the Trump peace plan.
But the war of extermination against Israel will stop only if the rest of the west now ends its tacit support for it.
It will end only if the west stops funding it and instead makes all aid to the Palestinians conditional on ending their institutionalized incitement to violence against Jews, the salaries they pay the families of those who murder Israelis and their glorification of terrorism.
It will end only if the “human rights” community that wages “lawfare” against Israel is now exposed as the sham that it is for hijacking the language, eviscerating the concepts of law and justice and grotesquely turning “human rights” into murderous wrongs.
Perhaps the Trump plan’s most important achievement is to put on record the truth about the Jews’ unique rights to the land of Israel. As it states, the areas that Israel is being asked to yield to the Palestinians nevertheless constitute “territory to which Israel has asserted valid legal and historical claims, and which are part of the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people.”
As for the loud protests that Israel is being allowed to “annex the West Bank,” professor of international law Eugene Kontorovich has tweeted that the United States is not proposing to recognize Israeli annexation of the territory; “it is recognizing that Israel has always had a legitimate claim on this land.” In other words, the application of Israeli sovereignty is to be based on its pre-existing rights to the land.
The most intractable element of these pre-existing Jewish rights is Jerusalem, which Israel will never allow to be divided again but to which the Palestinians lay claim as their state’s intended capital. The plan audaciously resolves this apparently insoluble conundrum by stating that the Palestine capital should be located “in all areas east and north of the existing security barrier,” including Kafr Aqab, the eastern part of Shuafat and Abu Dis, and which could be named Al Quds.
In other words, the Trump team has simply redefined Jerusalem to exclude those Arab areas of the city beyond the security barrier. This would enable the Palestinians to tell themselves their capital is Jerusalem, while Israel will have ceased to regard that area as Jerusalem at all.
Of course, the Palestinians would never agree to this. “Al Quds” to them centers on their illegitimate appropriation of Temple Mount — the most sacred site in Judaism.
But the plan states the all-important historical truth denied by the Palestinians because it vitiates their entire claim to the land — that Jerusalem was the political center of the Jewish people under King David, and has remained their spiritual center and the focus of their religious beliefs for nearly 3,000 years.
The Trump plan won’t bring peace; however, it restores the truth and justice that are essential prerequisites of peace. Crushing the lethal and poisonous fantasies about Israel and the Jewish people, as well as taking a hard-headed approach to Palestinian intentions, it replaces illusions by reality.
That’s no small achievement. Now it’s up to the rest of the world.”
A load of unmitigated B….ocks. Of particular note in this unhinged raving is Mad Mel`s claim ref” the international community’s decision in the 1920s to designate the whole of Palestine as the homeland of the Jews alone.”
Still on the bright side Since MM is in underwear shredding rapture over the “decision” of the imbecile Trump it surely surely please please please brings the day closer when she finally packs her bags and jets off permanently to her country of first loyalty where she will just be a freakish non event addition to the millions of other Ziofreaks. And hopefully hopefully in a short period of time she will be followed by the hundreds of her fellow fifth column Israel firsters who must be waxing lyrical about the attractions on offer in the Chosen Apartheid Paradise.