by Oui
Sat Feb 8th, 2020 at 11:39:50 AM EST
Lacking substance and results as the world drifts towards permanent war, militarization, boosting arms sales and making the world in America's image of violence. It's time to say NO THANKS!
Anyone heard the voice of Macron from France this week?
○ Macron unveils nuclear doctrine, warns EU 'cannot remain spectators' in arms race | France24 |
See my post - US Navy Deploys Low-Yield Nuclear Warheads.
More below the fold ...
Why It's Wrong to Tell Palestinians to Surrender to Trump's Plan | Haaretz - Opinion |
A man reads about the Trump Plan of the Century on the daily Asharq Al-Awsat at a coffee shop in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. (Phoro credit: Amr Nabil, AP)
As Benn noted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to sell Trump the (false) narrative, which maintains that the Palestinian national movement is a crime organization that convinced Adolf Hitler to murder the Jews of Europe so that they wouldn't settle in the Land of Israel. The man who is suspected of criminal offenses has recruited a megalomaniacal president to support his life's project - the destruction of the Palestinian national movement, in order to keep it out of the Land of Israel.
Benn believes the reason for the time-out that Trump gave the Palestinians for the purpose of digesting and adopting the plan was apparently to wait until the end of Abu Mazen's tenure and the rise of a successor, one less committed to the narrative of injustice, victimization and the right of return. "Jibril Rajoub, are you listening?" asks Benn, referring to one of the claimants to the throne.
I know Abu Rami (as Rajoub is known). I haven't noticed that he has any suicidal tendencies, either physical or political. I know a Palestinian politician who loves life, who is treating the document that Netanyahu dictated to Trump as a basis for talks.
You need a very rich imagination to identify an "independent state" in the Rorschach blot that Trump presented at the bizarre ceremony in the White House. Anyone who believes that there is a Muslim leader who will sign a document that grants the Jews sovereignty in the Holy Basin in Jerusalem has not been here in recent centuries.
Nations don't give up their identity and their right to self-determination. They fight for them until blood flows, and in the end they win. A phenomenon like Trump reminds us almost daily that the announcement of the "death of history" was premature. It's possible that in a few months from now "the deal of the century" will join his portfolio of tall tales, along with the "nuclear agreement" with North Korea and the denial of global warming - the portfolio is full of tall tales.
Trump transition team: Sabotaging Anti-Settlement UN Resolution in Dec. 2016
○ The Geneva Accord - Open Forum | Carnegie Inst. Washington DC - Dec. 2003 |
The Geneva Accord, an unofficial " virtual" peace agreement negotiated over the last two and a half years by leading Israeli and Palestinian private citizens, many of whom were involved in the former Oslo peace process, was introduced in Geneva recently at a ceremony attended by Jimmy Carter and other world leaders. On December 3, Americans for Peace Now, the Foundation for Middle East Peace, and the American Task Force for Palestine sponsored an open forum for six of the drafters of the Accord in Washington at the Carnegie Endowment. The Geneva team included Yossi Beilin, Daniel Levy and Shaul Arieli from Israel, and Yasser Abd Rabbo, Sami al Ahbed, and Nabil Kassis from Palestine. Philip C. Wilcox, Jr., President, Foundation for Middle East Peace, Debra deLee, Chief Executive Officer, Americans for Peace Now, and Rafat Dajani, Executive Director of the American Task Force for Palestine introduced the group. TNI advisor Peter Weiss attended the forum.
○ Israelis, Palestinians Open US-Backed Conference with Vague Statement on Timeline, Goals | DemocracyNow! - Nov. 2007 |
Israel and the Palestinian Authority have agreed to launch immediately peace negotiations with the goal of reaching a full treaty by the end of 2008. But Israel has already said it will delay talks on core issues, including the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the fate of Palestinian refugees.
Ten ways Trump has launched a relentless assault on the very idea of Israeli-Palestinian peace | The Prospect |
By Daniel Levy, a negotiator Oslo Accords for the State of Israel
From the mid-1990s to the early noughties, much of my professional life was spent in a rather niche pursuit that came flooding back to me with yesterday's release of President Trump's "Peace Vision."
The drafting of Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements became my thing--sometimes in uniform serving in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), sometimes as a concerned citizen in informal and often clandestine talks, and sometimes as an adviser in the offices of the Israeli prime minister and then justice minister during official negotiations.
I was a negotiator at the agenda-setting Oslo B agreements under Yitzhak Rabin; submitted texts from afar to Clinton's Camp David Summit with Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak; and then joined the follow-up talks between Israelis and Palestinians, in Taba in January 2001.
In the intervening and often gloomy years of entrenched conflict and occupation, I often questioned the wisdom of what we had attempted. Those memories and uncertainties hit me like a punch to the gut when reading the lengthy White House plan issued Tuesday: "Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People."
Had these talks after all been an exercise in softening the Palestinians, prematurely extracting concessions based on the ultimately dashed premise that an Israeli partner would emerge? In its outward appearance, the plan had such a familiar feel to it, like returning to a place of one's childhood. But as I absorbed the words, nostalgia gave way to a feeling of having entered a topsy-turvy Alice in Wonderland. The language of peace had been cut and pasted, then put through a grinder, delivering an act of aggression dripping with the coarse syntax of racism. A hate plan, not a peace plan.
Here are ten ways in which the document released on Tuesday is a relentless assault on the very idea of Israeli-Palestinian peace:
1. Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Peace Plans
Terms of surrender and peace plans are not the same thing. But even terms of surrender have more chance of being durable if they are constructed in such a way as to maintain a semblance of dignity of the defeated party.
[...]
Jared Kushner blames Palestinians for violence since release of US peace plan | France24 |
The chief architect of the U.S. blueprint to resolve the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians on Thursday blamed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas for soaring tensions and violence in the occupied West Bank since the plan's release last week.
Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and adviser to President Donald Trump who spent nearly three years working on the plan, said leaders who are ready for a state "don't call for days of rage and encourage their people to pursue violence if they're not getting what they want."
He said he thinks Abbas "was surprised with how good the plan was for the Palestinian people, but he locked himself into a position" by rejecting it before it came out.
The Palestinian president is going to different forums and putting forward old talking points when the situation on the ground has changed and "this might be the last chance that they have to actually resolve it in a good way," Kushner said.
How a biased mediator sealed the death of a viable Palestinian State ...
○ Trump son-in-law's ties to Israel raise questions of bias | Times of Israel - March 2017 |
○ U.S. Ambassador Friedman ties to illegal settlements on West Bank | Tikun Olam |
○ US envoy Greenblatt: Security Council's 'obsessive' focus on Israeli settlements is a 'farce' | Israel Hayom | free circulation daily newspaper, owner Sheldon Adelson is a fervent supporter of Netanyahu and Trump
Related reading from my diaries ...
○ Xenophobia, Israel, Alt-right and the Jewish Question
