The Democratic Party is not anti-Trump when it comes to power politics in the Middle East. Joe Biden’s ambassador to Israel gives Trump “enormous credit” for his policy of normalizing relations between Israel and Arab countries. And President Biden sought to advance Trump’s policy last week by visiting Israel and Saudi Arabia and doing all he could to marginalize Palestinian aspirations.
Several mainstream voices say the policy of crushing Palestinian hopes is working. Yesterday at the Aspen Security Forum, Abdullah Al Khalifa, the son of the Bahraini king, gushed about Bahrain’s warm relations with Israel, and Jeffrey Goldberg gushed back.
“We have found nothing in Israel but openness, enthusiasm, and support,” Al Khalifa said. “We truly believe that is the path forward…Imagine what would happen in the next five years and what would be achieved in the next decade.”
Al Khalifa pushed the Palestinians to get on board.
“Israel is part of the region and will remain… We do believe that establishing relations with Israel does not mean abandoning the Palestinians. In fact on the contrary, we believe this would enhance all the efforts in reaching that goal. This has been the longest standing item agenda at the UN for 70 plus years. What has been achieved?”
Ehud Yaari, an Israeli broadcast journalist and advocate for Israel at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, also praised the normalization efforts in commenting on Biden’s trip to the Israel Policy Forum. Yaari praised Benjamin Netanyahu for dreaming up the outside-in process: marginalizing the Palestinians by normalizing with Arab states. “Whether one likes Bibi or not, what one is seeing now is the implementation of a vision that was there at least six or seven years ago.”
Yaari pointed out some political insults delivered to the Palestinians on Biden’s trip.
Biden’s gestures to the Palestinians were chicken-feed. The Palestinians saw that an American president “would come, would throw at them 200 300 million dollars, would express his empathy, would stress the need for dignity for Palestinians, but will say also that it is not the time to discuss a permanent agreement,” Yaari said.
When Biden met with President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem a week ago, Abbas said that peace with Israel would be based on the Arab Peace Initiative, framed by the Saudis in 2002, along the ’67 lines. But:
“The next day there is a joint communique in Jeddah with Biden and [Saudi Crown] Prince bin Salman and there is no reference whatsoever to the Arab Peace Initiative. That was dramatic. In my opinion, it was telling.”
Yaari said that Abbas “wanted badly” to visit Saudi Arabia before or during Biden’s visit, but the “Saudis gave him a firm, no nonsense negative answer.”
He said the pressure from Arab countries is transforming Palestinian politics among the elites.
“I believe the realization that the Arabs are no longer willing to live with and accept a Palestinian veto over their relations with Israel is going– I can’t tell you when– is going to force any Palestinian leadership to rethink its strategy. They realize already now, and I hear it a lot in private conversations with people in Ramallah, they realize that it doesn’t work anymore. They cannot stick to the old slogans… If they want to regain Arab support, they have to come with a more sober, more sensible procedure for how to proceed with Israel…
When Yaari speaks of a “more sober, more sensible policy” by the Palestinians, one has to interject that the leadership is already on its knees. Yaari goes on:
If you talk to the UAE leaders or Saudi Arabia leaders or even Egyptian leaders, they don’t want to hear now about the Palestinian issue, they don’t want to stick their fingers into this mess. Let Israel deal with it.”
Four other countries are walking around the Israel swimming pool and would jump in with the right signal from the chief of Saudi general intelligence, Yaari said. And though the Saudis say there will be no normalization with Israel till the Palestinian issue is resolved, they just allowed Israeli flights over their territory, and “there is much more in the pipeline of gradual moves with Saudi Arabia than is being currently reported in the press. Already agreed in principle are very important projects. I don’t think the Saudis are going to stop it.”
Benny Gantz, the Israeli Defense Minister, also spoke to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Aspen Forum yesterday and praised Arab countries for using “the bridge” of Israel’s relations with the United States to better themselves.
Goldberg brought in the Palestinian objection to the accords as an afterthought, and Gantz said, “I’m very happy that the Palestinian issue was not a blocking threshold that blocked those very positive developments as we see in the Middle East, so I’m very happy on that fact.
“From a Zionistic perspective, from a Jewish, democratic and Zionistic perspective, I’d like to see a better future between us and the Palestinians,” Gantz went on, but for now Palestinians should be happy with investments in infrastructure. And “hopefully we can down the road be able to create what I call a bridging situation” toward a “two entities situation.”
Not even a two-state solution. Just, “ways to politically separate ourselves from the Palestinians.”
Palestinians are not the only ones disappointed by Biden’s visit. Liberal Zionists had asked for concrete steps toward their dream of a two-state solution. Americans for Peace Now said that Biden should give a speech in Israel saying, that after 55 years, “The occupation must end.” Biden didn’t take their advice. Nor did he take J Street’s advice, “The time is now to push back on illegal settlements.”
That’s the great flaw in the normalization process, even from a “Zionistic perspective” — as Gantz puts it. Israel can’t separate itself from Palestinians, they are half the population. Every monarchy on earth could normalize with Israel and that process only advances the reality of apartheid; and global supporters of human rights and democracy will continue to be drawn by the drama of the Palestinian struggle for rights in the face of power politics. BDS is really the mirror of the normalization process, an effort to stand up for human dignity, and it’s not going away.
Frigging HYPOCRITES!!! all of you. Jews didn’t suffer enough at the hands of the Nazis? And now Palestinians are suffering at the hand of the Jews…WHAT??? have Palestinians done to deserve this? And the world looks other way so as not to offend israel. HYPOCRITES!!!
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“Albert Einstein was a person of moral sensitivity. He turned down an offer to become Israel’s president & distanced himself from Zionism & the Israeli state. Zionist treatment of the Arabs had alienated him. In 1938, he observed, “I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain–especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our ranks.”
“In August 2002, as a consequence of aggressive Israeli behavior in the occupied West Bank, England’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, warned that Zionist state policies, as they manifest themselves in the colonization process & the associated persecution of the Palestinians, are perverting “the deepest ideals” of Judaism.
“Today, the American organization Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP); the British organization, Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JFJFP); & Jews for a Just Peace (JJP), a federation of groups in ten European countries, all keep up this tradition of admonition & critical analysis while promoting the ‘human, civil, & political rights’ of the Palestinians.
“Toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein warned that “the attitude we adopt toward the Arab minority will provide the real test of our moral standards as a people.” The conclusions drawn by every human rights organization that has examined Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians over the last 70 years, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israel’s own B’Tselem, & the Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PHRO), leave no doubt that the Zionists have failed Einstein’s test.
“Yet that conclusion is just what the Zionists have never been able to face. Thus, any reminder of the movement’s failure in the form of contemporary critiques & documentation are not only denied, but condemned as anti-Semitic. Jews who express such concerns are systematically denigrated as “self-hating.” The U.S. media, still bound by the mythology of Israel as a democratic, modern, secular state that shares America’s pioneering tradition, have traditionally ignored or downplayed critics of Zionism. This leaves most in the West ignorant of Israel’s actual policies & practices…”
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Surely, it must now be obvious that the greatest threat to Judaism is Zionism.
To wit:
https://tothepointanalyses.com/author/firstname-lastname/
By Professor Lawrence Davidson
EXCERPT:
“Ahad Ha-am (the pen name of the famous Jewish moralist Asher Ginzberg) noted as early as 1891 that Zionist settlers in Palestine have “an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility & cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, & even boast of these deeds.” He warned that such behavior stemmed from the political orientation of the Zionist movement which could only end up “morally corrupting” the Jewish people.
“As the issuance of the Balfour Declaration drew nearer, other Jews voiced their worries. In the United States, a letter representative of the Jewish opposition to Zionism was sent by Henry Moskowitz to the New York Times on 10 June, 1917. Moskowitz was a Jewish activist & cofounder of the NAACP. He wrote: “What are the serious moral dangers in this nationalistic point of view from the standpoint of the Jewish soul? First, it is apt to breed racial egotism.”
“In a 1945 essay, Hannah Arendt, one of the most insightful Jewish political philosophers of the 20th century, described the Zionist movement as a “German-inspired nationalism” (thus my use of “über alles” above). That is, as an ideology that holds “the nation to be an eternal organic body, the product of inevitable natural growth of inherent qualities; & it explains peoples, not in terms of political organizations, but in terms of biological superhuman personalities.”
“In 1948, Arendt and 27 other prominent Jews living in the United States—including Albert Einstein—wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning the growth of rightwing political influences in the newly founded Israeli state. Citing the appearance of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut) led by Menachem Begin, they warned that it was a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, & social appeal to the Nazi & Fascist parties.” Begin would go on to become one of Israel’s prime ministers. The contemporary Israeli party Likud is a successor of the “Freedom Party.” (cont’d)
Ehud Yaari was for years the government mouthpiece in Israeli broadcast media.
Now, he’s still blathering on as some “expert” while trickling propaganda and spin on the public to prepare the ground for more and more fascist policies.
If the Israeli government needed the backing of the Israeli public when it carried out operations or policies that resulted in the disposition, suffering, and worse, of innocent non-Jewish civilians, Yaari was there to prepare the ground for such action. He provided the “End Justifies the Means” arguments.
Call Palestinians subhuman, radical, fanatics, who eat human body parts for brunch, and the public is enraged. It gave the IG carte blanche.
Must watch video from Canada:
Israel / Palestine – This Needs To Be Heard – YouTube
“Israel/Palestine – This Needs To Be Heard”
“Many of you wanted clarity on the subject of Palestine and the current conflict. This, from Holocaust survivor Dr. Gabor Maté (on my podcast Under The Skin) is the most beautiful and powerful testimony on this subject I’ve ever heard. From someone with deep connections to the history of this situation.” #Israel #Palestine
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The shape of things to come:
Former Senator James Abourezk has revealed that many members of congress privately resent the control that Israel has over them. He wrote,
“I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear—fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress—at least when I served there—have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.”
http://ifamericaknew.org/us_ints/pg-abourezk.html