Annexation was advanced in the U.S. “peace plan” by Ambassador David Friedman, says Palestinian member of Knesset Ahmad Tibi: “The most dangerous figure pushing for this annexation is the American ambassador… Friedman.. He is the most dangerous, and he is to the right of Netanyahu, he is much more Yemina and Settler Council than Likud even. He is playing a very, very dangerous role.”
Israel is about to jeopardize its support in the Democratic Party by annexing parts of West Bank, but Netanyahu is going ahead evidently with Trump’s blessing. And a fire set by the Israeli military in Jordan Valley last week shows the plan to confiscate more Palestinian land, says journalist Alex Fishman of Ynet on call with Israel Policy Forum.
Ambassador David Friedman’s racist advice to Israeli — “you don’t have to live with [a] Palestinian state, you have to live with the Palestinian state when the Palestinians become Canadians,” is a perfect echo of Dov Weissglas saying Palestinians could have a state when they became Finns. And it reveals the bad faith in Trump’s deal of the century.
Trump’s “Deal of the Century” ends the two-state paradigm by endorsing Israel’s “Nationality Law” of 2018 and longstanding Zionist and biblical assertions about Jewish claims to the land and the absence of national rights of the indigenous population: the Palestinians.
The ADL has smeared lefties Max Blumenthal, Jefferson Morley and Phil Weiss as serving rightwing antisemites because they said that Trump killed Qasem Soleimani out of concern for Israel’s interest, Weiss writes. “To do so it lies about what I wrote about the number of Zionist Jews in the Trump administration.”
In an interview with Israeli press, US Ambassador David Friedman indicated support for maintaining Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank when he said evacuations of Jews or Arabs as part of a US peace plan would be “inhumane.”
US Ambassador David Friedman blatantly lied to Congress when he said he would oppose Israel’s annexation of West Bank lands and support a Palestinian state. He should be impeached for those misrepresentations, as well as for helping to block the visit to Palestine of Congress members Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Trump’s refrain that the Democrats are anti-Israel is a strategic effort to foster division among Democrats over Israel so that he can get Jewish donors and voters in 2020. That division exists. The party’s progressive base wants to strip US aid to Israel, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Israeli President Rivlin are leaping in to assure the Democratic establishment that Israel is above politics.
After White House officials joined a grotesque settlers’ celebration in occupied Jerusalem, Zionists have raised an issue rarely raised in the U.S.: Why are there so many religious Zionist Jews on the Trump negotiation team? Palestinians feel “under assault” and “surrounded” by Trump’s team, says Yaakov Katz, editor of the Jerusalem Post.