The Trump-Netanyahu-Kushner Apartheid Plan
David Finkel
February 13, 2020
Many appalling details of the apartheid-annexation Steal of the Century proclaimed as the Middle East “peace plan” by Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Jared Kushner – the troika of the impeached, the indicted and the idiotic — have been pretty well covered by the progressive media and Middle East commentators. (I’ll suggest a brief list of sources at the conclusion of this article.)
Predictably, the plan rollout was timed to boost Trump’s standing with his Christian-Zionist fundamentalist base and the right wing of the Jewish community, and his crony Netanyahu’s standing in Israel’s pending third election within the last year (the main opposition candidate, Benny Gantz, also welcomed the plan to annex Israel’s West Bank settlements and the Jordan Valley).
In the White House drafters’ calculation, a “peace” deal on any terms would facilitate the strategic project to incorporate Arab regimes and Gulf monarchies, led by Kushner’s Saudi buddy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, into the U.S.-Israeli alliance against Iran. That’s also what lay behind the U.S. drone assassination of Iranian general Qassim Soleimani.
Writing in The New Yorker online (February 10, 2020), however, Bernard Avishai observes that
the Trump Administration’s plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace has already been so widely discredited for its one-sidedness and its political deviousness that there is a risk of ignoring its most immediate threat — which is not to the Palestinians but to Jordan.
In Israel, the plan, or “Vision,” as the document unveiled at the White House calls it, has been received as an American warrant for the Israeli government to annex West Bank territory. This could precipitate a crisis in the Hashemite kingdom of Abdullah II, whose stability is critical to Israel’s security, and to that of America’s regional allies, particularly in any effort to thwart Iranian forces in Syria, Iraq, and the Gulf.
The Most Immediate, Unexpected Threat of Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan
If those are unintended consequences, many others are entirely intentional consequences of previous acts of the Trump and earlier administrations. The handwriting was on the wall when Trump named his bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, a supporter and financier of the rightwing Israeli settler movement, as U.S. ambassador to Israel, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and announced that the United States no longer considers Israeli settlements contrary to international law…
Community Knowledge and Water Justice in East Tennessee
A Land We Drink From
East Tennessee summers are full of storms. The humidity and damp gathers in the air and coalesces on every surface. Throughout the morning the air grows heavier and heavier, the clouds gather. Sometime in the afternoon, it breaks. The wind picks up and the birds go quiet. Forks of lightning slash through the sky and the storm blows the heaviness away. By the time the sun sets, the air feels light again; the earth smells like...
Audio from a recording between Stephen and Matt
Each year the International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam, the education arm of the Fourth International , conducts an annual event entitled the Ecosocialist School . Although eco-socialism is a prominent theme, the school can be described more accurately as an intense boot camp for Marxist education.
This year Solidarity sent two students, one from their own ranks, Stephen Mahood (also a DSA member), and the other from the ranks of...
On November 26, 2018, General Motors announced a number of plant closures in North America, the largest of which is in Oshawa, Ontario. The Oshawa facility, once the largest auto complex on the continent, was to end all its assembly operations by the end of 2019.
The response of the federal government, which had used the preservation of jobs to justify giving GM billions in public funds during the financial crisis, was a tepid ‘disappointment’. The provincial government, which had been plastering...
Audio from Boston Socialist Day School 2019.
This panel covers a wide range of topics touching on health justice. The panelists represent perspectives of both those who receive healthcare and healthcare workers.
Myranda Pierce from the Right Care Alliance gives an account of her struggles to receive adequate care as someone living with type I diabetes. She recounts the systemic hurdles that she and her family had to navigate to try to receive the care she needed both as a child and now as an adult....
The movement for the withdrawal of the pension counter-reform entered its 46th day of strike at the RATP and SNCF on 18 January, the 46th day of mobilisation in various forms across the country.
The strike movement is still supported by a large majority of the population, support shown by the flow of donations into the strike funds, the various expressions of sympathy even from employees inconvenienced by transport strikes, support shown by all the opinion poll institutes, reminding us week after...
The nationwide general strike in France, now entering its record seventh week, seems to be approaching its crisis point. Despite savage police repression, about a million people are in the streets protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s proposed neoliberal “reform” of France’s retirement system, established at the end of World War II and considered one of the best in the world. At bottom, what is at stake is a whole vision of what kind of society people want to live in – one based on cold...
Introduction by Scott McLemee
The Caribbean writer and revolutionary C.L.R. James and his family hosted Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife in London in 1957. The following day, James wrote an account of their discussion that circulated among his comrades in Correspondence, a small Marxist group in the United States that published a newspaper of the same name. Much of the text is self-explanatory, but it is worth clarifying a few references and matters of context first…
A visit with Martin...
Both sides of the establishment want to bury the legacies of struggle in the communities that abandoned Labour in the 2019 General Election. Ray M, Unite Rep, Aerospace and Shipbuilding Sector, argues that the left cannot afford to do the same.
This essay follows on from two recent articles. The first was written before polling day and defined the election as the ‘Revenge Election’ . It argued that Labour needed to articulate the desire for revenge felt by working-class...
The British ruling class has much to celebrate. Their party — the party of the rich and the corporations — has won its biggest majority since 1987. Our party — the party of working people — has suffered its worst result since 1935.
They are right to celebrate. Millions of working-class people, many of them in once rock-solid Labour seats based on traditional industry and union power, have voted for the party of the bosses. This is the story in many former mining constituencies,...
The student mobilization on 29 November 2019 had a deep echo across Pakistan. Affirming solidarity with all the discriminated and exploited sectors of society, it became a rallying point for a wide range of social and progressive movements in a country and a state undermined by numerous regional, national or religious fractures and by abysmal social inequalities.
This is why repression strikes severely. Activists prosecuted for “sedition” have avoided immediate imprisonment by paying bail. (1)...
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