Or: ‘Palestine Is Being Led to the Crematorium’, Raouf Halaby, June 27, counterpunch.org

I’d asked permission, and have received it, from the author and the CP editors to reblog Halaby’s entire essay.  I hadn’t wanted to try to rewrite it, interpret it, and I’m posting most all of i; all bolds and italics are mine.  What the author wrote to me as he’d answered my email clearly demonstrated why this is such a burning issue for him, as it for so many others.  Salam, Raouf.  This diary is longish, but allow me to remind you that the authors of this hellacious dreck are largely the same underwriters of the current War on Iran.

“Would one employ a convicted pedophile to work in an early childhood center? Would one employ a convicted felon with a mile-long record to be a Boy Scout Master? And, would one employ a convicted serial killer to patrol school hallways?

How silly of me; of course not.

Donald Trump, the consummate-narcissist-in-chief, the one who loves to make a spectacle of every decision he makes and every policy he pontificates, and the one who loves to hold court while he signs a miscellany of edicts with maximum media pageantry, appointed his wet-behind-the-ears Harvard-purchased admission school boy as the Near East negotiator.

Kushner is a real estate wheeler dealer who’s been accused of leveraging his business with loans from a variety of sources, including Emirati, Saudi, and Gulf nations, and oil tycoons with deep pockets eager to buy favor with Donald Trump. In return, Trump’s Iran policy is dictated by Israel and her new BFF’s; Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s MBS have placed U.S./Iran policy in the Trump/Pompeo/Bolton crosshairs. Why not? If you can sucker the school yard bully to fight your wars, you’re home scot free. Think Iraq, Syria, Libya and soon – Iran.

While many former Presidents and Secretaries of State have miserably failed to broker a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israel, the Palestinians’ forever brutal masters and occupiers, Donald Trump appointed his inept son-in-law as the gatekeeper and master of ceremonies for the Bahrain so-called Peace conference.

Jared Kushner is an avowed hardcore Zionist. His family’s friendship with Netanyahu spans decades. Observers have pointed out that Netanyahu’s overnight stays at the Kushner house were the indoctrinating sessions on which young Kushner was suckled and cut his teeth, visits that inculcated the young apprentice with the same Bibi Netanyahu venom of hatred, anger, vengeance, and bigotry that have become Israel’s trademark.

As a prelude to the Trump/Kushner crematorium in which the dream of a free and independent Palestinian state has been deposited, Trump moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem; he severed diplomatic relations with the Palestinian leadership; he cut off UNRWA funding to starve an already emaciated population under the most brutal occupation of the last 50 years, he warned the entire world that should Israeli violations/violators of human rights abuses and brutalities be held accountable for their crimes at an international tribunal, the U.S. would retaliate in a variety of ways (including his favorite weapons – freezing diplomatic relations, the implementation of sanctions, tariffs, and embargoes, and possibly annihilation); he shut down the PLO office in Washington, D.C.; and he recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights for which he was rewarded by Netanyahu, his like-minded bosom buddy, by having a Jewish community on the Golan Heights named after him.

Who knows, perhaps a Trump Golan Golf Course of the Century will soon be part of the “Ultimate Deal.”

Now wouldn’t this be the sweetheart real estate deal of The Century?

I wish someone had kept a detailed record of Trump’s obsession and preoccupation with money. Only recently he told Chuck Todd that “his only interest in the Middle East are [sic.] preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and protecting Israel and Saudi Arabia.” As for Saudi Arabia’s MBS having to account for the barbaric use of a hack saw to surreptitiously dispose journalist Khashoggi’s mutilated corpse, Trump would not have any of that.

During the interview Trump affirmed the following: “That’s all [money] I care about. … Look, Saudi Arabia is buying $400 billion worth of things from us. That’s a very good thing.” The actual purchases are more like $15 billion, yet one more manufactured fact that only Trump could fabricate. Furthermore, Saudi money “means something to me, it’s a producer of jobs, [and they are] a big buyer, [for this reason I am] willing to overlook [Saudi] bad behavior.” To drive his point home, he assured Todd that he would “Take their money, Take their money, Chuck.”

If “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby,” then for sure Trump’s proposed Deal of the Century (Palestine/Israel proposed peace) is all about taking “their money.”

Recently Reporter Eli Clifton observed the following about the Benjamins used to buy/influence Trump’s foreign policy vis à vis Palestine, Israel and Iran:

Those funds came from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Paul Singer and Bernard Marcus, donors who have made no secret, both through public statements and funding think tanks that support military action against Iran, of their desire for the United States to destroy the Islamic Republic.

Adelson, who alongside his wife Miriam are the biggest donors to Trump and the GOP, contributed $205 million to Republicans [with $130 million to Trump’s campaign] in the past two political cycles and reportedly sent $35 million to the Future 45 Super PAC that supported Trump’s presidential bid.

The above does not include tens of millions of dollars’ worth of tax free contributions to fund illegal Israeli settlements and other Zionist projects at home and abroad.

Masquerading as a Kushnerized version of a peace proposal, the plan is a version of the Clinton/Bush/ Rabin/Sharon/Netanyahu/Zionist plan with one exception – it is a plan on steroids to legitimize apartheid, place the Palestinians under permanent occupation, and make them the orphans of the Middle East in perpetuity.

The Clinton peace deal forced the Palestinians to become economically dependent on Israel for every aspect of their lives. Israel collected taxes on Palestinian goods and dispensed the funds when and if they wished. Israel controlled all borders, security, education, health care, electric grids, water resources, the use and development of natural resources, economic growth, and infrastructure. Under Bush the Dumber, Tony Blair, Bush’s Poodle, spent years pretending to develop the decimated Palestinian infrastructure caused by Israel’s Nazi policies. Needless to say, while Blair got rich off his Balfourian (after Lord Balfour) scheme, a scheme which gave Israel the cover to steal more land and to impose sanctions on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza (especially Gaza, the world’s largest open air prison in which over 2 million people are caged), he helped cement and institutionalize Israeli apartheid. Above all, Blair’s criminal policies condoned, excused, and ameliorated Israel’s brutality by making it palatable to his European EU compadres.

Obama inherited a Palestinian patient so brutalized and, instead of changing course by pumping life into a by-now body on life support, he was outmaneuvered by Netanyahu at every turn. For eight years Obama, ever the docile servant, played field hand to Bibi Netanyahu, carrying his water, begging, cajoling, pleading, and apologizing. One of the most humiliating White House scenes is the embarrassingly demeaning confrontation during which the Netanyahu-lecturing-Obama-episode took place. Barack Obama, the President of the most powerful nation on the face of this earth blinked. Emboldened, Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of a tiny country whose survival is solely dependent on American beneficence, went on to address an equally servile Congress that gave him 67 standing ovations.

In his final weeks in office Obama played his last cowardly Israel hand; he gifted Israel a guaranteed 38 billion precious tax payer dollars. Like Casey’s final stand at the bat, he struck out; how servile the Mighty Obama became. After all, the Presidential library must be built in Chicago, and donors have to be courted to write checks in the millions of Benjamins.

So Kushner is proposing a $50 billion dollar [over ten years] scheme to cinch the Deal of the Century.

Like a shrewd real estate investor, he is using the OPM formula (Other People’s Money scheme) to cough up the $50 billion dollars. Some 10 billion will go to Egypt, and another 7 billion to Jordan – to buy their complicity. I call this hushing the opposition with Benjamins.

The rest of the funds will (supposedly) be invested in West Bank/Gaza infrastructure projects. The mercurial behavior of Gulf Arabs, EU, and U.S. donors, as evidenced by their reneging on previous financial commitments to Palestinians, makes this a very iffy proposition.

And finally, will the Israelis, who’ve always cashed in on Palestinian misery by stealing their lands, their cultural heritage, and their natural resources, and by ruining their lives and killing them with impunity, exploit this proposal by becoming the brokers, deciders, planners, controllers, exchequers, arbitrators, and the-go-between of this, The Deal of Century?

Rest assured that Trump is looking for his cut.

As long as this Deal of the Century does not address the aspirations of a free and independent Palestine state, the Palestinians will forever live in servitude, humiliation, and degradation.

For the Palestinians it ain’t about the Benjamins; rather, it is about dignity, independence, freedom, the birthright of all the brutalized peoples of the world.

Donald Trump chose three politically inexperienced men to concoct the “Ultimate Deal” scheme. None of them has served in the diplomatic core, and their only qualifications are: they are Jewish, they are ardent Zionists, they’ve supported (verbally and financially) Illegal Israeli settlements, they’ve been very vocal about their support of Israeli policies, their antipathy for Palestinians mirrors Israeli thinking, and , likely, they hold dual American and Israeli citizenships. Above all, they are Trump’s fixers, confidents, and bail bonders.

I doubt that the troika of Jared Kushner, Jason Greenblatt, and David Friedman are the sole planners in a hands-off Trump foreign policy that is dictated to him by the likes of Bolton, Pompeo, Lindsey Graham, and Stephen Miller who, much like Rasputin, lurks in the shadowy hallways of the White House.

The first is Trump’s son-in-law, the second was/is Trump’s lawyer and executive vice president and Chief Legal Council to The Trump organization. The third is Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and now U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

I have no doubt that Benjamin Netanyahu, along with MBS and other Emirati and Bahraini characters (in a less active role) are the planners of this scheme. How ironic it is that proposed funding (mostly Arab money) is rewarding Israel for its 71 years of the theft of Palestine and its long history of transgressions against the Palestinian people, the orphans of the Arab world.

For his Ultimate Deal of the Century Donald Trump has chosen the wrong set of characters. And that is precisely why his plan, like most of his other “tremendous” real estate schemes, will fail.

The man who boasts about using bankruptcy as “a good business practice” is about to embark on his biggest failure of the century.”

Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist.

Trump’s “Deal of the Century” Just Means More Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Land’, June 27, 2019, TRNN

Ali Abunimah discusses Jared Kushner’s presentation of his peace plan’s economic portion in Bahrain this week. He dangled fifty billion dollars for the Palestinian economy, but no freedom, political rights, nor an end of the Israeli occupation

Ali Abunimah discusses Jared Kushner’s presentation of his peace plan’s economic portion in Bahrain this week. He dangled fifty billion dollars for the Palestinian economy, but no freedom, political rights, nor an end of the Israeli occupation.  (16 minutes)

Sadly, there’s no transcript because: Dem Debates, fake leftist ocasio-esque DA in Queens, Cabana, all of which have transcripts, even the broadcast about drought in India earlier than this has one  Ali had featured this disgusting hasbara on June 25, 2019:

‘NY Times publishes call for Palestinian “national suicide” by Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Dayon featuring this Tweet and some responses:

A national suicide of the Palestinians’ current political and cultural ethos is precisely what is needed for peace, writes Israel's ambassador to the United Nations https://t.co/cDS6DwOTBt

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) June 24, 2019

Imagine @nytimes publishing a piece asking what’s wrong with blacks, Latinx, Native American or any other community abjectly surrendering to racism, inequality & oppression. This special treatment is reserved for Arabs in general, and Palestinians in particular. https://t.co/iqfu87jnfT

— Saree Makdisi (@sareemakdisi) June 24, 2019

For further reading:

‘analyses of the leaked ‘Deal of the Century’ I/P peace plan’, May 28, 2019, caucus99percent.com

‘Trump enjoys bipartisan support for his plan to eradicate the Palestinian cause’, 15 June 2019, jonathan-cook.net (a teaser)

“Repeated delays in announcing the plan are simply an indication that Trump’s team needs more time to engineer a suitable political environment for the plan to be brought out of the shadows.

Further, the Trump administration’s vision of the future for Israelis and Palestinians – however extreme and one-sided – has wide, bipartisan support in Washington. There’s nothing especially “Trumpian” about the administration’s emerging “peace process”.

Choking off aid

Paradoxically, that was evident last week, when leading members of the US Congress from both sides of the aisle introduced a bill to boost the ailing Palestinian economy by $50m. The hope is to create a “Partnership Fund for Peace” that will offer a financial fillip to Israelis and Palestinians seeking to resolve the conflict – or, at least, that is what is being claimed.”

And any other I/P exposés at jonathan-cook.net; Cook writes from Nazareth.

(cross-posted from Café Babylon)