Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said today he plans to name a settlement in the Golan Heights after President Donald Trump. A train station under construction in Jerusalem’s Old City will also be named after Trump. Both are located in occupied territory.
Jonathan Cook writes that while there are signs politicians in the U.S. are finally ready to shine a light onto the pro-Israel lobby, the opposite is taking place in United Kingdom. He says this is due to the way the Israel lobby has recently emerged in British politics – hurriedly, and in a mix of panic and damage limitation mode due to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, and the end of the international two-state consensus.
Gerard Araud, the outgoing French ambassador to the US, says Jared Kushner has “no guts” and his peace plan is “very close” to what Israel wants. “He is so pro-Israeli he may neglect the point that if you offer the Palestinians the choice between surrendering and committing suicide, they may decide the latter.”
American liberal Zionists and rightwing Zionists wrote opposing letters to Trump this week over Netanyahu’s plans to annex West Bank settlements. The open squabbling is a result of Trump’s extreme support for Israel and also the 52-year-long occupation, which has at last brought a crisis to the Jewish establishment’s consensus, that to be Jewish means to support Israel.
The Mueller Report was released today, and one section reveals that “multiple members” of the Trump transition team, led by Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law, sought to undermine the Obama White House’s decision to allow the passage of a UN Security Council resolution in December 2016 that was sharply critical of Israeli settlements.
Before Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017, he says he got calls from “presidents, dictators, prime minister, kings, queens– everybody” and didn’t take the calls. Similar pressure kept previous presidents from making the move, he told the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas yesterday, but moving the embassy made his biggest donors, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, very happy.
Last summer, Trump’s moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem opened the floodgates for a new era of Israeli provocations on the city’s Palestinians. Helena Cobban outlines the decades-long Zionist assault on the Palestinian presence and institutions in the holy city, and says that this new period will likely see greater government support for projects to extend the extremist settlers’ matrix of control over all parts of the Old City.
Cory Booker’s secret speech to AIPAC is so fulsome it’s hard to believe. Booker would cut off his right hand before abandoning Israel. There is no “greater moral vandalism” than seeking to divide the US and Israel. Booker lobbied black congresspeople not to boycott Netanyahu’s 2015 speech because we need to show a “united front” with Israel. And Donald Trump is endangering Israel’s security in Syria.
President Donald Trump recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli territory on Monday, stating Israel depends on the lands seized from Syria in the 1967 war for “defense, and perhaps offense” from an array of enemies in the Middle East naming Hizbollah in Syria, Iran, and the Gaza Strip.
President Donald Trump today announced over social media the U.S. should recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that was captured in the June 1967 war.