Few Americans are aware of the fact that no U.S. government official, to include congressmen, can in any way mention or discuss Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which is estimated by some observers to consist of as many as 200 tactical nuclear weapons which can be delivered on target by air, land or sea. The prohibition is spelled out in a Department of Energy “classification bulletin” graded Secret, which was issued on September 6, 2012 and bears the file number WPN-136. The subject line reads “Guidance on Release of information Relating to the Potential for an Israeli Nuclear Capability.” It would be interesting to learn exactly how the text of the memo reads, but in spite of repeated attempts to obtain a copy under the Freedom of Information Act, the entire body of the document is completely blacked out.

What is known in that the memo is basically a gag order, presumably issued by the Barack Obama Administration to block any official from making a comment that might be interpreted to mean that the federal government recognizes that Israel has nuclear weapons. The silence over the Israeli arsenal dates back to an agreement made by President Richard Nixon with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. In its most recent manifestation, President Barack Obama, when asked if he knew of “any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons,” responded “I don’t want to speculate.” He was, of course, lying.

The bulletin’s first known victim was Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear policy specialist James Doyle who in 2013 wrote a sentence suggesting that Israel had a nuclear arsenal. It appeared in an article entitled “Why Eliminate Nuclear Weapons?” which had been security cleared by Los Alamos and appeared in the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. An unknown congressional staffer demanded a review and Doyle had his home computer searched before being fired.

Israel, as is so often the case, gets a free pass on what is for others criminal behavior. Its nuclear program was created by stealing American uranium and weapons technology. Preventing nuclear proliferation was in fact a major objective of the U.S. government when in the early 1960s President John F. Kennedy learned that Tel Aviv was developing a nuclear weapon from a CIA report. He told the Israelis to terminate their program or risk losing American political and economic support but was killed before any steps were taken to end the project.

Israel accelerated its nuclear program after the death of President Kennedy. By 1965, it had obtained the raw material for a bomb consisting of U.S. government owned highly enriched weapons grade uranium obtained from a company in Pennsylvania called NUMEC, which was founded in 1956 and owned by Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, head of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. NUMEC was a supplier of enriched uranium for government projects but it was also from the start a front for the Israeli nuclear program, with its chief funder David Lowenthal, a leading Zionist, traveling to Israel at least once a month where he would meet with an old friend Meir Amit, who headed Israeli intelligence. NUMEC covered the shipment of enriched uranium to Israel by claiming the metal was “lost,” losses that totaled nearly six hundred pounds, enough to produce dozens of weapons. Such was the importance of the operation that in 1968 NUMEC even received a private incognito visit from a top Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan who later ran the spy Jonathan Pollard.

Also there was physical evidence relating to the diversion of the uranium. Refined uranium has a technical signature that permit identification of its source. Traces of uranium from NUMEC were identified by Department of Energy inspectors in Israel in 1978. The Central Intelligence Agency has also looked into the diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant and concluded that it was part of a broader program to obtain the technology and raw materials for a nuclear device for Israel.

With the uranium in hand, the stealing of the advanced technology needed to make a nuclear weapon, which is where Hollywood movie producer Arnon Milchan comes into the story. Milchan was born in Israel but moved to the United States and eventually wound up as the founder-owner of New Regency Films. In a November 25, 2013 interview on Israeli television Milchan admitted that he had spent his many years in Hollywood as an agent for Israeli intelligence, helping obtain embargoed technologies and materials that enabled Israel to develop a nuclear weapon. He worked for Israel’s Bureau of Science and Liaison acquisition division of Mossad, referred to as the LAKAM spy agency.

Milchan admitted in the interview that “I did it for my country and I’m proud of it.” He was not referring to the United States. He also said that “other big Hollywood names were connected to [his] covert affairs.” Among other successes, he obtained through his company Heli Trading 800 krytons, the sophisticated triggers for nuclear weapons. The devices were acquired from the California top secret defense contractor MILCO International. Milchan personally recruited MILCO’s president Richard Kelly Smyth as an agent before turning him over to another Heli Trading employee, future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for handling. Smyth was eventually arrested in 1985 but insofar as is known neither Milchan nor Netanyahu has ever been questioned by the FBI regarding the thefts.

Israel’s nukes are now in the news because of an Op-Ed that surprisingly appeared in the New York Times on August 11^th written by Peter Beinart entitled “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes.” Beinart wrote that “Israel already has nuclear weapons. You’d just never know it from America’s leaders, who have spent the last half-century feigning ignorance. This deceit undercuts America’s supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, and it distorts the American debate over Iran. It’s time for the Biden administration to tell the truth.”

Beinart points out that the American public can hardly make an informed judgement regarding what should be done in the Middle East if it is uncertain whether Israel is a nuclear power or not, but one issue he does not discuss is the issue of money. IRMEP’s Grant Smith, who has been challenging the secrecy surrounding the Israeli arsenal, recently observed that “The Symington & Glenn provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC §2799aa-1: Nuclear reprocessing transfers, illegal exports for nuclear explosive devices, transfers of nuclear explosive devices, and nuclear detonations) forbid U.S. foreign aid to countries with nuclear weapons programs that are not signatories to the Treaty on the Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, absent required special procedures… But no member of Congress has taken up this issue — or even mentioned Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal.”

Smith is frustrated by the reluctance of progressives in Congress, who have opposed recent additional $735 million in military aid to Israel permitting it to rearm after its assault on the Gazans, to ignore the gag order and raise the issue of the nuclear arsenal. He writes “It seems as though even these members of Congress, as well as the rest of the U.S. government, are abiding by this secret gag order when they could take action which would challenge the administration’s refusal to acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons and possibly stop $3.8 billion in taxpayer money from going to Israel.”

That the Energy Department document exists at all is recognition of the astonishing power of the Israeli Lobby over the U.S. government at all levels, particularly as it is intended to ignore or even negate other legislation passed by congress to combat nuclear proliferation. And the denial of what everyone knows to be true, i.e. that Israel has a nuclear arsenal, appears to all come down to the ability of the United States government to continue to reward a wealthy Israel with billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year. To suggest that the arrangement is nefarious would be to put it mildly, but it is more that that. It is criminal. Israel has been allowed to get away with massive espionage directed against the United States and the theft of material and technology while also since the 1970s being engaged in a conspiracy with the U.S. government that distorts America’s foreign policy, largely done to keep getting the billions of dollars that it is not entitled to receive under existing American law. It is shameful. Beyond that, it might be construed as treason.

Many Israeli commentators are bracketing Trump with Netanyahu. Veteran correspondent Ben Caspit, for instance, asks: Is Netanyahu “a Middle Eastern clone of Donald Trump?”. He continues: “The worst could still be ahead. Barring a last-minute change, the Knesset is scheduled to swear in the new government June 13 … Will Netanyahu in a last-ditch effort, engineer a Capitol-style invasion in Jerusalem? Will he call on his followers to march on the Knesset to prevent being unseated? … his Likud party has issued statements in English, informing the world that deposing Netanyahu means turning Israel into a dictatorship and comparing his designated successor Yamina leader Naftali Bennett to the leaders of North Korea”.

To be fair, Caspit answers his question with a ‘both yes and no’. But actually, the asking of this question is a pure ‘red herring’. Superficially, some parallels might have merit; but to frame the issue in this way is disingenuous, and misses the key point that Israel’s situation is far graver, than widely understood.

Israel has painted itself into a tight corner. Trump certainly helped Netanyahu with this, but the dynamic was as much a child of Clinton-Obama myopia, as that of Trump. Netanyahuism has been a phenomenon many years in the making; although undoubtedly was accelerated, and put on steroids, during the Trump era, when the power and platform of the U.S. government became the echo chamber of the Israeli Right.

So, what precisely, is the smoke-screen of ‘is Netanyahu channelling Trump’ obscuring? It obscures the reality that Israel has turned decisively Right – across the political spectrum. This may be described as Bibi’s personal ‘doing’, but it is no longer a matter of Netanyahu’s personal charisma. Israel has become structurally right-wing. It has become culturally right-wing, too. No longer the secular, ‘socialist’ Kibbutzim of yore (long since marginalised): Israel’s military and political leadership rather, is now predominantly Religious-Nationalist and Settler. This represents a ‘cultural revolution’ largely unnoticed in Europe.

Chen Artzi Sror, writing in Yedioth Ahoronot, observes that whilst formerly, the biggest fear gripping religious Zionists had been that of surrendering territory. The fallout from the 2005 evacuation of the Gaza settlements, pushed the settler community to expand inside Israel. Thus began the move of young religious Zionists to embed themselves into policy making, communication and government.

The early cultural components of hanging on to territory have however, undergone a revolutionary shift: Settling the land of Israel is no longer the main issue occupying religious Zionism. “Most of the Israeli public holds right-wing positions when it comes to issues of security and politics – and the West Bank is positively brimming with settlements that will most likely never be evacuated”, Sror writes. “These once solitary localities have become somewhat bourgeoise … Now, significantly, the ultra-Orthodox nationalists pursue something quite different – a worldview that strictly opposes what they call “post-modernism””.

Which is to say, “Anything that seeks to change the perception of family life and advance gender equality and equal treatment of non-Jews is perceived to be an existential threat to the very foundations on which the Jewish state was built” [emphasis added]. This dictates that the ‘People of Israel’ must be saved from foreign influence – and more particularly from Leftists: “Not those [Leftists] who want to evacuate settlements in order for a Palestinian state to arise, but those who march in the Gay Pride Parade and believe in equality for men and women. The vast majority of religious Zionists are more liberal than this, and as such send their children to pre-military yeshivas and youth movements. But it is in these very places – that such extremely conservative worldviews are often introduced”.

The tensions here, with a Leftist, Biden Admin embracing BLM and LBGTQ, hardly need emphasis.

The incitement amongst the Israeli Right has become very, very aggressive. Though Netanyahu loyalists are attacking Bennett and his Yamina party MPs, they largely believe in the same causes: settlement building, annexation of much of the West Bank, and Jewish supremacy over Palestinian citizens of Israel – “Yet they now feel galaxies apart”.

Netanyahu promotes a clear message that his new rivals are “traitors” who have betrayed the “people of Israel”. He has called Bennett a “habitual liar”; the March election he described as the “biggest election fraud in the history of the country”; and he lambasted the so-called “deep state” in Israel for pushing to form a “dangerous left-wing government” backed by “terror supporters”.

Israeli analyst, Meron Rapoport, notes that whilst Netanyahu built his political base on extreme polarisation, the discourse of hatred now is eating alive the Israeli Right. And, because Netanyahu believes his only way to maintain power is to call Bennett a traitor, as his supporters threaten to kill Knesset members, the atmospherics are being compared to the days prior to November 1995, when Israeli Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv. Paradoxically, since these leaders hail from the same right-wing camp and were close to each other, the anger and sense of betrayal are even stronger.

What is the point here? Even the long-serving U.S. ‘peace process’ negotiator, Dennis Ross, writes that at this point, “direct talks on the permanent status issues will go nowhere—the politics on each side, the real gaps on the substance, and the disbelief of their publics guarantee nothing would be achieved”. In other words, talks between Palestinians and Israel are pointless. The Israeli polity effectively is self-locked into entropy. There is no political way out from this very tight corner. Ross suggests that Biden should cynically ‘park’ the Palestinian issue, treating it as a PR exercise, without investing into it much political capital.

The strategic shift Rightwards in Israeli politics – which marks a tectonic change – is understood in Washington to have foreclosed on the two-state solution – and on the one-state solution, too, as a one-state solution is clearly incompatible with Religious Zionism’s ‘post-modern’ shift, and contradicts too, the very essence of Religious Zionism. And so we have Grid lock.

Ross’s comments reflect another entropy – that which is arising within the U.S. For while U.S. state apparatus is locked onto the old mantras of ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ and Hamas is the ‘threat’, and Congressional élites remain lock-solid, America is experiencing its own tectonic shift. Two surprising polls were released recently: Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP) commissioned the Barna Group to survey evangelical Christians about their views on Israel/Palestine.

The poll suggests support for Israel has dropped considerably: only 33.6% of young evangelicals (between the ages of 18 and 29) said they support Israel; 24.3% said they support Palestine; 42.2% said they support neither side in the conflict. Compare this survey to one carried out in 2018 – then a staggering 69% of young evangelicals said they supported Israel.

And it is the same story amongst young Americans more generally: A recent Harvard-Harris poll of registered voters asked: “Who is more responsible for the violence in the Mideast – Israel or Hamas?”. It produced the following results: (18-34 year olds): Israel: 60%, Hamas: 40%; (35-49 year olds): Israel: 51% Hamas: 49%. (Note that the poll specified Hamas, rather than Palestinians – and Hamas is labelled terrorist in U.S. mainstream media, which makes the outcome even more significant)

The Democrats are already freezing solid, committed to old mantra – whilst young progressives, such as AOC, are snapping at Biden’s heels, asking about Palestinian rights. Western politicians can ‘talk the talk’ of two-states, but it is ‘empty talk’. They have no idea what to do next, and Israel’s success in weaponising ‘anti-Semitism’ (Corbyn being its prize scalp) effectively has Europe self-paralysed with fear for their careers.

What happened last month, in wake of Hamas’ defence of Jerusalem, has done two highly significant things:

It succeeded in mobilising the 1948 Palestinians (citizens of Israel) to resistance alongside their fellow Gazan and West Bank Palestinians. And it set the trap by which any provocation on the al-Aqsa compound, or any further Jerusalem ethnic clearances, could trigger a multi-front war. The Hizbullah leader, Seyed Nasrallah, spelled this out explicitly.

It is on this last point that there is denial all around. Israel’s ‘military edge’ has gone. It is the axis of Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, Iraq, Iran and AnsarAllah (the Houthis), rather, which now has the military – and political/strategic – edge. The strategic balance is inverted: Israel’s control of airspace is unrestricted – over Gaza only. Deeply buried and dispersed smart cruise missiles surround Israel, and radar blocking drone swarms, together with EWS, have altered the military calculus.

The reason the Israeli crisis is graver than many suppose is that no one wants to admit that Israel effectively has wasted its window to any political solution – chasing hegemony and its ‘victory narrative’. It has succumbed to Netanyahu’s narrative of ‘mission accomplished’ – the Palestinian issue supposedly made irrelevant – only to find the window of politics closed shut, at the same time that Israel’s military situation has reversed itself, decisively. The old certainty of Israeli military domination ultimately securing Palestinian acquiescence now looks decidedly frayed.

So fatigued and numbed by their own rhetoric have Israeli and western leaders become, that they will not think or say that Israel has run out of options. And so western policy continues on auto-pilot. Inevitably there will be further Right-wing provocations at al-Aqsa. The IDF will default to its policy of ‘mowing the Gaza lawn’ – only one or other of these times (maybe quite soon), Israel will find itself in a multi-front war.

Are they certain America will spend its blood to extract Israel from its self-made quagmire? Are they convinced Gulf States will be there too, shoulder-to-shoulder?

Israel is undergoing a change of management, with reliably hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu being replaced by extreme nationalist Naftali Bennett. Bennett has at intervals favored the disenfranchisement of non-Jewish Israeli citizens and the ethnic cleansing of all non-Jews from historic Palestine, killing them if necessary. He opposes the creation of any Palestinian state and routinely describes Palestinian protesters as terrorists while stating his belief that they should be shot on sight. He has also boasted of his shooting Palestinians during his military service, saying at one point “I already killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there is absolutely no problem with that.” He was heavily involved in “Operation Grapes of Wrath” in Lebanon in the 1980s, where his commando unit killed numerous civilians, and takes pleasure in recounting his participation in Israel’s war crimes.

All of which means that there will be no respite from the brutal Netanyahu reign of terror which has been prevailing on the West Bank, in Gaza and also in Jerusalem itself. If anything, the pressure on Arabs forcing them to leave will intensify. Evidence that the recently negotiated cease fire was little more than a pause in the plan to mitigate international pressure before continuing to make the former Palestine Palestinian free is already available. Israeli police and army units have been arresting hundreds of Arabs, many of whom are Israeli citizens, not because they have broken any of the “rules” imposed by the Netanyahu government, but as a preventive measure to have them identified, allowing them to be safely locked away when the next round of fighting begins. Eighteen hundred arrests have been reported since unrest began in April, but the figure is probably much higher than that. An estimated 25% of those who are detained are children and 85% of those children arrested report that they were physically abused.  Also, at least 26 Palestinians have been killed while resisting. It has been claimed that the police, embarrassed by being ridiculed by protesting Palestinians, are “settling scores” and “closing accounts,” frequently using savage beatings during arrests and as collective punishment to break the Arab resistance.

Israeli police have also been active at and around the al-Aqsa mosque, where they have been denying Muslims access to the holy site while promoting sightseeing visits by Israeli Jews. This is a clear violation of the rules established for access to the mosque and it sends a strong signal to Palestinians that there is more to come and the intention is clearly that they will eventually be removed by whatever means necessary from Greater Israel.

The Director for the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (ADALAH) Hassan Jabareen observed recently how the violence over the past month was deliberately provoked by Israel both to shore up Netanyahu’s electoral prospects while “the massive arrest campaign announced by Israeli police…is a militarized war against Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is a war against Palestinian demonstrators, political activists, and minors, employing massive Israeli police forces to raid the homes of Palestinian citizens.”

The Israelis, who clearly have a sense of humor, called the first phase of the mass arrests “Operation Law and Order.” The raids themselves have been carried out inside Israel itself and on the West Bank. Those Palestinians who are citizens of Israel have what has frequently been described as “second class rights” in the country’s judicial system. Although Israel claims its Arab citizens—roughly 20% of the nation’s population—have equality under the law, even the pro-Israel US State Department has repeatedly accused Israel of practicing “institutional and societal discrimination” toward its Arab citizens.

As a consequence, Palestinians who are arrested are indicted, charged and in some cases detained indefinitely under existing state of emergency and anti-terror legislation. A common charge is “incitement” which requires little or nothing in the way of evidence. Many of the arrested Palestinians have in fact been released after payment of exorbitant bails, averaging about $1,000. One Palestinian activist reportedly paying $7,400 to be set free.

It should be noted that the armed Jewish settlers who rioted in the lead up to last month’s fighting, destroying Palestinian homes and other property, have not been identified and detained by Israeli authorities. Activist Remi Kanazi notes how “Apartheid inside Israel is when Jewish Israeli mobs chant ‘Death to Arabs’ and brutalize Palestinians in their neighborhoods, while the cops do nothing, only for those same cops to conduct mass arrests of Palestinian citizens two weeks later.”

Outside of Israel proper, other Palestinians, who are citizens of the Palestinian Authority or who have United Nations documentation, have no rights at all under Israeli law and are being detained at will and, in many cases, indefinitely, without any access to legal counsel or to family members. Most of them were not doing anything illegal, even by Israeli standards, when they were arrested. They were guilty of being Palestinian.

In one example of how the process works, well-known Palestinian activist Iyad Burnat, who had previously been arrested at age 17 and imprisoned for two years for having thrown stones at Israeli soldiers has been targeted. He lives in Bil’in on the West Bank and has had his two sons abducted from their home in recent night invasions by Israeli security forces. Abdul Khaliq, 21 years old, was taken away on May 17^th and Mohammed, 19 years old, was abducted on May 24^th. They are being held in the Almasqubia detention center in Jerusalem and have been denied any contact either with their parents or legal counsel. The Israeli authorities have provided no explanation of why they were arrested in the first place.

In another recent example of the brutality of the Israeli police, al-Jazeera reports in detail how thirteen-year-old Mohammed Saadi was kidnapped, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with a gun to his head by five policemen working undercover in his hometown of Umm al-Fahem. Saadi was among thousands who gathered for a funeral procession held for Mohammed Kiwan, a 17-year-old boy who had been shot and killed by Israeli police a week earlier.

Activists among the Palestinians observe that the Israeli repression has proven counter-productive. Most Palestinians now understand that the Israelis intend to exterminate them. One observer notes that “The fear barrier has been broken. Israeli forces are up against a people who no longer have anything to lose. The young men in Jerusalem don’t see they have a future to look forward to, due to socioeconomic factors that is either the result of or exacerbated by the occupation policies towards them. These people are defending their right to exist, their homes and their homeland, and had it not been for their resistance, Jewish settlers would have taken control of many places in Jerusalem.”

Clearly, the Joe Biden administration will do nothing even if the Israeli government were to arrest and torture 100,000 Arabs, but there is growing sentiment even in Congress and the Zionist controlled media that “what is wrong is wrong.” Congresswoman Betty McCollum’s has twice introduced a bill, which is languishing in congressional committee, that calls on the United States to block aid to Israel that can be perceived as being used to arrest, beat and imprison children. Her legislation the Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act​ H.R. 2407 amends a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act known as the “Leahy Law” to prohibit funding for the military detention of children in any country, including Israel.

McCollum argues that an estimated 10,000 Palestinian children have been detained by Israeli security forces and prosecuted in the Israeli military court system since 2000. These children between the ages of 11 and 15 have sometimes been tortured using chokeholds, beatings, and coercive interrogation. As of September 2020 there were an estimated 157 children still detained in Israeli prisons, a number that has certainly gone up dramatically given the current crackdown by the police and army. Even though Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will surely block any attempt to let the McCollum bill see light of day one can at least honor the Congresswoman for what she is attempting to do and hope that some day the United States government will finally act honorably and help deliver liberty and justice for the long suffering Palestinians.

Donald Trump, who was elected President of the United States in 2016, may have won due to voters attracted by his pledge to end many of the “stupid” wars that the American military was involved in worldwide. In the event, however, he ended no wars in spite of several attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria, and almost started new conflicts with cruise missile attacks and the assassination of an Iranian general. Trump was consistently outmaneuvered by his “experts” on the National Security Council and at the Pentagon, who insisted that it was too early to disengage from the Middle East and Central Asia, that America’s own national security would be threatened.

Trump did not have either the experience or the grit necessary to override his generals and national security team, so he deferred to their judgement. And as has been well documented he was under constant pressure to do Israel’s bidding in the region, which mandated a continued substantial US military presence to protect the Jewish state and to provide cover for the regular attacks staged by the Israelis against several of their neighbors. Motivated by the substantial political donations coming from multi-billionaires like casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, Trump conceded more to Israel than any previous president, recognizing Jerusalem as the country’s capital as well as Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights while also giving the green light to settlement expansion and eventual incorporation of all of the occupied West Bank into Greater Israel.

President Joe Biden has already indicated that he will if anything out-do Trump when it comes to favoring America’s persistent “ally” and “best friend” in the Middle East. Biden, who has declared himself to be a “Zionist,” is responding to the same lobbying and media power that Israel’s friends are able to assert over any US national government. In addition, his own Democratic Party in Congress is also the home of most of the federal government’s genuine Zionists, namely the numerous mostly Jewish legislators who have long dedicated themselves to advancing Israeli interests. Finally, Biden has chosen to surround himself with large numbers of Jewish appointed officials as his foreign policy and national security team, many of whom have close and enduring personal ties to Israel, to include service in the Israeli Army.

The new Secretary of Defense, former Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin has recently returned from a trip to Israel, where he confirmed one’s worst fears about the direction the Biden Administration is moving in. It was a first visit to Israel by a Biden Administration cabinet member. Austin met with his counterpart Benny Gantz and also with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both of whom warned him that Israel considered renewal of any nuclear arms limitation agreement with Iran to be a threat, only delaying development of a weapon. As Bibi expressed it, “Iran has never given up its quest for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them. I will never allow Iran to obtain the nuclear capability to carry out its genocidal goal of eliminating Israel.”

Austin responded by the usual two-step avoiding Israel’s expressed concerns, which might be considered a threat of an Israeli veto on Biden’s attempt to revert to the original 2015 JCPOA multilateral pact. He said that the Biden administration would continue to guarantee Israel’s “qualitative military edge” as an element in America’s “strong commitment to Israel and the Israeli people,” adding that “our bilateral relationship with Israel in particular is central to regional stability and security in the Middle East. During our meeting I reaffirmed to Minister Gantz our commitment to Israel is enduring and it is ironclad.”

Wrong answer general. The foreign policy of any country should be based on actual interests, not on political donations and effective lobbying, still less on what one reads in the Zionist mainstream media in the US. Netanyahu has stated that the Iran agreement is “fatally flawed” and has said recently that “History has taught us that deals like this, with extremist regimes like this, are worth nothing.” Israel, which uniquely has a secret nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, is one of the world’s leading violators of attempts to limit nuclear proliferation. It is also destabilizing to the entire Middle East region, an apartheid state – not a democracy – and its government is widely regarded as right-wing extremist. That Netanyahu should feel somehow empowered to talk down to the Iranians, and to the US, remains a mystery.

Beyond what goes on between Washington and Jerusalem, the real center of power, the Israel Lobby, consists of a large number of separate organizations that act collectively to advance Israeli interests. There is considerable corruption in the process, with cooperative congressmen being rewarded while those who resist are targeted for replacement. Much of the legwork on subverting Capitol Hill and the White House is done by foundations, which often pretend to be educational to obtain tax exempt status. “Experts” from the various pro-Israel groups are then seeded into the decision-making process of the federal government, serving as gatekeepers to prevent consideration of any legislation that might be objected to by Netanyahu.

One of the most active lobbying groups is the so-called Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) which is in fact closely tied to and takes direction from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. FDD is particularly focused on going to war with Iran and whenever there are discussions on Iran policy on Capitol Hill one can be sure that an FDD expert will be present and active.

And if you really want to know why America’s foreign policy has been so self-destructive, it has recently been learned that FDD was actually able to insert one of its employees into the National Security Council under Donald Trump. According to a report on Bloomberg, Richard Goldberg, an outspoken anti-Iran hawk and former associate of John Bolton, is leaving the council and would be returning “to [the Foundation for Defense of Democracies], which continued to pay his salary during his time on the National Security Council.”

The NSC exists to provide the president with the best possible intelligence and analysis available for dealing with problem areas, something that Goldberg, due to his conflict of interest, would have been unlikely to provide, particularly as he was still on the FDD payroll and was also being given generous travel expenses while working for the government. Whether he was also being paid by the NSC, which is referred to as “double dipping,” is not known. In any event, there is something very wrong about the appointment of a paid partisan who seeks war with a particular country to a vital national security position where objectivity is an imperative. Ned Price, former special assistant to President Obama on national security, commented “…we now know a White House point person on Iran policy was receiving a salary from and remained employed by an organization that has put forward some of the most extreme and dangerous pro-regime change policies.”

So Biden, like presidents before him, is caught in the trap between an extremist-dominated Israel itself and its demonic prime minister on one side and the all-powerful domestic Israel Lobby on the other. Unfortunately, one cannot expect the United States to get out from under the Israeli thumb no matter whom is elected president.

The state of Israel encourages persecution of Palestinians by undertaking or condoning obliteration of homes and agricultural facilities. It is recorded that so far this year 689 Palestinian structures, properties and animal shelters have been bulldozed and destroyed by Israelis, and on November 5 the European Union issued a statement noting that in the previous week Israeli forces demolished more than 70 structures, including residential, livelihood and sanitation facilities, belonging to 11 Palestinian families. The EU is concerned that 52 Palestinian schools are also under threat of demolition, including one in the central West Bank co-funded by the EU and “calls for protection of children, including ensuring their right to education in a safe and secure school environment.”

There is no chance that Israel will ever approve of education for Palestinian children. The Israeli state wants to eradicate all traces of Palestinians from the lands seized by Israel over many years, and if this includes demolishing schools, then so be it. The EU rightly declares that “Education is a basic human right that should be protected and maintained” and “reiterates its call on Israel to halt all such demolitions, including of EU-funded structures, in particular in light of the humanitarian impact of the current coronavirus pandemic.”

But so far as eradicating Palestinians is concerned, the coronavirus pandemic is indeed a boon and a blessing for Israel, because it has created a dreadful crisis. The UN Children’s Fund warns that “The protracted protection crisis in the State of Palestine, which has been exacerbated by the coronavirus disease pandemic, has continued to impact children. More than 2.2 million people need humanitarian aid and over 1 million children living in the Gaza Strip have difficulty accessing essential services.”

But Israel’s reaction to the Palestinians’ humanitarian crisis is to carry on destroying their fields, their farms, their fruit trees, their animals, their living-shacks and their schools.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is a dedicated agency that does as much as it can to alleviate suffering around this horrible world, but it can’t do anything about the misery of the Palestinian people other than record the facts about their persecution. All that its Coordinator for occupied Palestinian territory, Yvonne Helle, could do in November after “Israeli authorities demolished homes and other structures and destroyed belongings in the Palestinian community of Humsa Al Bqai’a” was to issue a statement to “remind all parties that the extensive destruction of property and the forcible transfer of protected people in an occupied territory are grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention. While assuring that the humanitarian community stands ready to support all those who have been displaced or otherwise affected, I strongly reiterate our call to Israel to immediately halt unlawful demolitions.” And Israel, as usual, paid not the slightest attention, but revved up the bulldozers for the next round of destruction of Palestinian homes.

And Israel paid no attention to the five (non-binding) UN General Assembly Resolutions of 2 December, “one of which cited the illegality of annexing any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Further, the Assembly approved the resolution on “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” and “called for the full respect for international law. It also called for the promotion of human security, the de-escalation of the situation [in Palestine], the exercise of restraint and the establishment of a stable environment conducive to the pursuit of peace.”

Global support was overwhelming, with 145 nations favouring “peaceful settlement” of the situation in occupied Palestine. The seven countries voting against this call for peace were the United States, Israel, Australia and Canada plus the nonentities of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and Nauru which have to jump to Washington’s bidding lest they lose financial support. It is most regrettable that Australia and Canada have joined the pro-Israel, anti-Palestine lobby whose leader is the U.S. which under Trump has spent the past four years fostering Israel’s campaign to eradicate the Palestinians.

The New York Times summed up Washington’s attitude by headlining that “For Netanyahu and Israel, Trump’s Gifts Kept on Coming”, and this was no exaggeration. First of all it was pointed out that on November 20 the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard became free to go to Israel after serving his well-deserved prison term for betraying some of America’s deepest secrets. He wasn’t even spying for principle; he spied for money. As Encyclopaedia Britannica records, “Pollard claimed to have been motivated by ‘sectarianism’, though Israeli agents had agreed to pay him $30,000 each year for a period of 10 years and had already paid him more than $45,000.” He is loathsome and contemptible, and his release was warmly welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu who declared “We are waiting for you, even during the time of the coronavirus, with open arms, and you will receive the genuine embrace of the Israeli people . . . I truly want to congratulate you that your nightmare is over and you can return home, to Israel. It will truly be a big moment, a big moment for us all.”

The spy-welcoming Netanyahu is the prime minister who is so energetically supported by Washington, to the extent that “the Trump administration cut all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides aid to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East.” Trump also stopped the U.S. Agency for International Development providing $200 million to support other efforts to help the Palestinian people. The financial punishment he imposed included cancellation of $25 million for Palestinian hospitals and $10 million for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence efforts.

The message is clear, in that Israel could get away with anything, so far as Trump Washington was concerned. He and his adherents have been unfailingly anti-Palestinian, and Israel could therefore persecute Palestinians without the slightest fear of international justice being applied. Secretary of State Pompeo paid a valedictory visit to Israel at the end of November and, as reported in the NYT, “announced that the United States would henceforth view the international boycott-Israel movement as anti-Semitic. He stopped on the occupied West Bank, becoming the most senior American official to visit one of Israel’s settlements, which much of the world considers a violation of international law.”

So what will the Biden administration do? Will he continue Trump’s support of Israel’s determination to eradicate the Palestinian people?

Although he may not be as vicious and pitiless as Trump, he is no friend of the Palestinians, and it is significant that Biden’s victory was greeted with a Netanyahu tweet saying “Joe, we’ve had a long & warm personal relationship for nearly 40 years, and I know you as a great friend of Israel. I look forward to working with both of you to further strengthen the special alliance between the U.S. and Israel.”

There is no hope ahead for Palestinians.

In Israel, the virus has enabled that master political magician Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pull off yet another spectacular escape as improbable as any in a James Bond or Star Wars movie to remain in power indefinitely.

After matching him in three successive national elections, Blue and White opposition leader, former Army Chief of Staff retired Lieutenant General Benny Gantz finally blinked: Because of the coronavirus pandemic crisis, he agreed to enter into a coalition with Netanyahu leading it for the first 18 months.

This is more than enough time for Netanyahu, a master political infighter and intriguer to splinter Blue and White into fragments. Indeed, Gantz has already done the biggest part of the job for him.

His own top allies in the new party, former Finance Minister Yair Lapid and former Defense Minister and Army Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon both firmly opposed any agreement to compromise with Netanyahu refused to go along with it. Currently, even Gantz and Netanyahu have not yet finalized their agreement, but Netanyahu has seized the initiative from him. His record in power over the past decade suggests he will not release it easily.

Netanyahu can at least boast that his lockdown has kept Israel relatively isolated from the pandemic. That is not the case in Iran, which boasts close trade and energy ties with China and where the virus has been raging ferociously.

That of course, is also the case in the United States. Extremist US hawks have been gloating – hopefully – that the crisis in Iran might discredit and topple the government there. That seems very unlikely at the moment.

What remains possible is that if the virus does significantly “decapitate” the current leadership in Tehran, more extreme and unpredictable rather than more moderate figures may take over more ready to act on provocations from Washington rather than play them down.

In Saudi Arabia, the virus may also have unpredictable “cushion shot” – surprise ricochet – effects.

Saudi Arabia’s elite King Feisal Specialist Hospital, which treats members of the kingdom’s royal family, is said to be on “high alert” as senior members of the Al Saud clan become infected with COVID-19. As many as 150 royals in the kingdom are now believed to have contracted the virus, according to a report in the New York Times.

The highest royal to be infected so far is Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdulaziz al Saud the governor of the capital Riyadh who is in his 70s and therefore at increased risk. Worse yet, at the time of writing, he is said to be in intensive care.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz, aged 84 is believed to have taken refuge on an island palace near the city of Jeddah on the Red Sea along with Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman on the same coast with his ministers. But these moves , if extended, may isolate them dangerously from the national centers of power.

Bin Salman was already in an uncharacteristic subdued mood before the pandemic hit as his oil price war on Russia and the United States backfired disastrously. Since then, he has been busy mending bridges with Moscow and appears close to completing a deal on reducing oil production with the Kremlin.

However, the prolonged slump in global oil prices will certainly continue and may intensify. Russia is in a sound position to ride out such a longer-term wave: Saudi Arabia is not.

If on top of all this, Bin Salman himself should contract the coronavirus, he has made so many enemies across society from royal to business circles with his reckless, warmongering and spendthrift policies that any sign of personal vulnerability could launch an attempt to drive him from power. He has almost certainly survived at least one assassination attempt already.

Only last month, Bin Salman ordered the arrest of two senior members of the royal family – Prince Ahmed bin Abdulaziz, the younger brother of King Salman, and Mohammed bin Nayef, his first cousin and the king’s nephew.

Like Netanyahu, Bin Salman has good reason for caution rather than dangerous adventures as both men struggle to maintain their increasingly precarious bases of power. That should point to a quieter, more peaceful region, at least in the short term.

But as I learned a long time ago in my native North Belfast, no time is more dangerous than when things get too quiet in a dangerous neighborhood.

The latest election, the third in less than a year, saw Benjamin Netanyahu surge past Benny Gantz, his slightly more moderate rightwing challenger. But otherwise it accomplished nothing since it still left Netanyahu’s coalition with just 58 seats, three shy of a majority. This was a slight improvement over the last election, which left him six short, but a step back from the election last April when he was able to assemble a hair-thin 61-seat majority – but which, in any event, fell apart after just a few weeks.

So Netanyahu is back where he started. No matter how many times Israelis go to the polls, they find that that a stable ruling majority is still out of reach.

Why? The problem, basically, is one of politics and demography. A growing portion of the population is either anti-Zionist, non-Zionist, or indifferent to the entire concept. Zionist parties must therefore battle for control of a Zionist hard core that is constantly shrinking in hopes of assembling a governing majority. The more the numbers turn against them, the more difficult the task becomes, which is why paralysis and incoherence are increasingly the norm.

This is especially the case the more politicians quarrel over what Zionism even means. Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s bellicose former minister of defense, shows how mind-bending the problem has become. His party, Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is Our Home”), saw its representation shrink from eight to seven seats in the latest round. But since he’s also far to the right, it should still be enough to put Netanyahu over the edge – if, that is, he agreed to join his coalition.

But he won’t. The reason is that Yisrael Beiteinu represents a million or so ex-Soviets who immigrated after 1989 only to fall victim to a curious contradiction in Israeli religious law. For purposes of immigration, Israel uses the old Nazi definition of a Jew as anyone with one or more Jewish grandparents. As strange as this may sound, Israel’s founders figured that anyone Jewish enough to suffer under Nazi oppression should be Jewish enough to find refuge in the Jewish state – and so the Nazi standard became law. But for purposes of family law and other domestic affairs, they adopted a different standard, that of the orthodox rabbinate, which holds that the only Jews who qualify are those born of a Jewish mother or who convert under orthodox supervision.

Some forty percent of Lieberman’s followers do not meet the rabbinic standard, which means that they are effectively reduced to second-class citizenship in terms of marriage, employment, and a host of other issues as well. But makes the issue especially explosive is the military draft, which affects ex-Soviets but not orthodox males who devote themselves full-time to religious studies. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, struck the deal back in 1948 when just a few hundred yeshiva students in Jerusalem were affected. Since then, however, the orthodox sector has expanded to twelve percent of the population, more than a million people in all. Soviet immigrants and their children must their lives at risk to protect orthodox Israelis who don’t even regard them as Jewish.

Lieberman has made it clear that he will not enter any government that allows such exemptions to continue. But it’s a demand that Netanyahu cannot possibly accommodate since he is dependent on the support of the religious parties for support. The impasse promises to continue without end.

But what makes it even more perplexing is that while Lieberman’s semi-Jewish supporters are pro-Zionist, orthodox Jews are not. To contrary, they believe that God exiled the Jews to punish them for their disobedience. Hence, he doesn’t want them returning to the Holy Land until he shows his forgiveness by sending a messiah to lead them back. By seeking to “hurry the messiah,” Zionism is therefore a deeply heretical movement that promotes an ingathering of the Jews in violation of God’s direct command. Jewish Zionists thus battle Palestinian anti-Zionists in the Occupied Territories in behalf of Jewish anti-Zionists in Jerusalem.

Add to this the 23 percent of Israeli society that is non-Jewish, and the anti-Zionist portion of the population rises to 35 percent. Toss in a few thousand supporters of the leftist Meretz Party who are heartily sick of the entire Zionist enterprise, and the number rises to 36 or 37. Finally, if you include the 4.4 million Palestionians who live in Gaza and the West Bank, then the anti-Zionist component of Greater Israel, which is to say the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, rises to 76 percent, far too great for anything resembling democratic Zionist stability.

So the only thing that three Israeli elections in less than a year prove is that the country is at a crossroads. It can continue to be democratic or Zionist but not both. Netanyahu will undoubtedly try to scare an increasingly perplexed population into line by sending fanatical Jewish settlers into the West Bank to cut down olive trees, smash windows, or otherwise behave like Nazi stormtroopers. If a few Palestinians respond with violence, then so much the better since he’ll be able to make use of the resultant furor to extend his grip on power for a few months or more. But the more isolated Zionism becomes, the more difficult the task will grow.

Netanyahu may seem like a strong and clever politician, but his back is against the wall. He may think he can ignore reality, but reality will eventually have its revenge.

My Spotify workout playlist is a time warp. Growing up in a blue-collar neighborhood of New York City in the 1990s and early 2000s, listening to popular East Coast hip-hop was practically required. So on a recent morning in which I had planned to write a column about Israel/Palestine, I jammed out to Jay-Z & Beyonce’s famous power-couple-jam, “’03 Bonnie and Clyde.” The song revolves around a former street dude and his loyal girlfriend, ready to face off against the world like the title’s outlaw couple.

Ironically, this got me thinking about the U.S. and Israel, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu. Because, if we’re honest with ourselves, the ditty could just as easily describe the still-fresh political romance of “B and D,” as well as the 70-year relationship between the U.S. and Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has recently, and probably accurately from his perspective, called Donald Trump “the best friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Netanyahu has proven himself all too willing to exchange political loyalty for gifts, and perhaps no one has offered him more than the 45th president of the United States. These include, but are not limited to: moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel’s sovereignty over the contested Golan Heights region (after which Bibi cutely named a Golan ghost town settlement for The Donald), and reversing 50-plus years of U.S. policy by declaring that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not in violation of international law. In light of these giveaways, the terms of the administration’s newest “peace” deal for the Holy Land should come as no surprise.

In characteristically bashful style, Trump has dubbed his Israel-Palestine plan the “Deal of the Century.” But even a cursory reading of the lengthy proposal, and an elementary understanding of the contested region’s history, reveal that it’s nothing more than a “raw deal” that effectively erases the Palestinian people. “Scam,” “Betrayal,” “Deceit,” or “Shame of the Century” would all be more accurate descriptions.

Trump, ever the corrupt real estate tycoon, seems to believe he can buy off Palestine’s unconditional surrender with a few modest subsidies for a rump statelet. It’s Extortion 101, and yet another example of Trump’s toxic negotiating style. Alliances are meaningless, and everything is transactional.

That the deal’s terms were negotiated by Jared Kushner, the president’s 39-year-old son-in-law and a billionaire with no expertise in diplomacy or the Arab world, makes it all the more cynical and insulting.

Trump’s plan has absolutely zero chance of bringing peace to a blood-soaked land, and given that this is the latest in a long line of increasingly bad deals from the “international community” (read: Israeli leaders and their American allies), it’d be hard to blame Palestinians for taking up arms. Why not rise in a third intifada? Tell me, what do they really have to lose if the only alternative is Trump’s take-it-or-leave-it threat? Even if armed Palestinian resistance has been historically counterproductive, violent reaction would be hard to dismiss. If I were a young, hopeless, underemployed Palestinian, I know I might respond to Trump’s plan by grabbing the nearest AK-47.

The most disturbing evidence that Trump and Netanyahu — and by extension the U.S. and Israeli governments — stand proudly against the world is this: The only other nations supporting this plan are dictatorial and/or monarchical Arab client states like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. These regimes, some of which have gunned down peaceful protesters by the droves and still behead women for “sorcery,” also just happen to be huge recipients of U.S. military aid, arms sales, training, and “protection” from Iran. Pretty nice company to keep for a republic that bills itself as the world’s “beacon of democracy,” huh?

What should really be dubbed the “Long Con of the Century” is finally nothing more than an ex cathedra endorsement of apartheid from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, it appears that the most radical, chauvinistic Zionists have achieved their long-standing dream, perhaps indefinitely.

History shows that apartheid states, brutal in practice and often lasting decades, are doomed to fail. South Africa’s, which endured from 1948-1994, eventually collapsed under the weight of international sanctions, disapprobation and internal indigenous resistance. It may take another generation, but Israeli apartheid won’t last forever either; it too will crumble under the weight of its own contradictions. How can a country be both “Jewish” and “democratic” while some 50% or more of its population live as second-class citizens or under military occupation?

We must also ask the question, “Why now?”. Why introduce a plan at this particular moment?  Plenty of media outlets have asserted that the proposal’s unveiling is little more than an attempt by Trump and Netanyahu to distract the public from their impeachment and criminal trial, respectively. I only caution that we don’t put too much stock in this theory as it pertains to Trump: This president was anything but scared rolling out this “peace plan,” and the president himself is made of John Gotti-grade teflon. Witness his disturbingly effective performance at the State of the Union address in which he made House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Democrats more broadly look like petulant children.

That his speech was riddled with lies, half-truths and obfuscations doesn’t seem to matter. Trump’s “ride or die” base (there’s Jay and Bey again), and about half of Americans, could care less. Add to that the perhaps 50% (or more) of Democrats, anti-Trumpers and nonvoters who are either reflexively loyal to Israel or simply don’t care about foreign policy, and this farcical peace plan is unlikely to face much in the way of a public challenge. Like the explosive Afghanistan Papers, the “Deal of the Century” will fade fast from the headlines.

For even a modestly informed follower of Palestinian affairs, the announcement of this prejudicial, inhumane ultimatum rates as more than a little disturbing. Add to this the violence that U.S. has waged against Arabs across the region, to which I contributed as a former water carrier for the empire, and I’m embarrassed to be an American.

Fittingly, it was President Trump who captured America’s view of the region in his State of the Union address. “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life,” he said, in a nod to his Evangelical base. “And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: All children — born and unborn — are made in the holy image of God.”

All children, that is, so long as they are not Palestinian.

truthdig.com

Neither Kushner nor Trump felt it was necessary to have invited Palestinians to the January 28, 2020 White House ceremony unveiling the “peace plan.” Only Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been criminally charged in Israel for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, was invited to the White House ceremony. Netanyahu is so close to the Kushner family that he once slept in Jared Kushner’s bed when visiting the Kushner family in New Jersey.

Also present at the White House ceremony was major Trump campaign donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, an individual whose hatred for the Palestinians knows no bounds. Another key player in Trump’s lavish giveaway of the West Bank to the Israelis is David Friedman, Trump’s one-time bankruptcy lawyer and his ambassador to Israel. Friedman is on record advocating Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, which he and other expansionists call “Judea and Samaria,” place names drawn from a set of Biblical books of Hebrew mythology and folklore. Yet Kushner referred to previous serious Middle East peace plans, including the 1991 Madrid Conference and 1993 Oslo Accords as “fairy tales” and “tired old ideas.” In fact, ancient texts justifying slavery, misogyny, and fratricide – otherwise known as the Old Testament – represents true fairy tales and tired old ideas having no place in the 21^st century.

Jared Kushner’s ex-federal convict father, Charles Kushner, has been a lifelong friend of Netanyahu and a key officer in Israel’s political influence machine in the United States. It was therefore not surprising that Jared Kushner’s plan advocates a Palestinian non-contiguous entity on the West Bank subservient to Israel and connected to the open-air ghetto of Gaza by an underground tunnel. It was Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist dogma to equate Jews to rats and mice. Apparently, some of those, like Kushner and Netanyahu, who bemoan the loss of members of their families during the Holocaust, would relegate the Palestinians to human rodents scurrying underground beneath the ground between Gaza and the West Bank “reservations” allotted to the Palestinians.

Israel would annex a third of Palestinian territory, including the entire Jordan River valley, cutting Palestinian enclaves off from a common border with Jordan. The Kushner plan also deprived the Palestinians of a capital city in East Jerusalem. Kushner proposes the Palestinian capital be located in some slums in an eastern suburb of Jerusalem.

The only Arab ambassadors to Washington who were present at Kushner’s West Bank annexation plan for Israel were those from Bahrain – a virtual Saudi Arabian puppet state, Oman – which is still trying to get its diplomatic footing after the death of its leader, Sultan Qabus bin Said, and the United Arab Emirates, which an increasingly doddering Trump referred to in his remarks as the “United Arab Air Mattress.”

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, in condemning Kushner’s contrivance, said it would establish an “apartheid” system and relegate Palestinians to the status of second-class citizens. The Kushner plan came as yet another slap in the face of the Palestinians and Arab countries. Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and moved the US embassy there from Tel Aviv. Trump then formally recognized Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights. Trump further poisoned the water by closing down and expelling the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington and halting all US assistance to the United Nations relief agency for Palestine, UNRWA.

Kushner’s hatred for the Palestinian people was on full display in an interview with CNN. He claimed that the Palestinians were “going to screw up another opportunity like they’ve screwed up every opportunity that they’ve ever had in their existence.” Borrowing a page from his father-in-law’s insult manual, Kushner said of Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat: “In my business, when someone tries to do business for 20 years [a reference to Erekat] and fails, he is replaced by someone else.” Kushner’s main “business” has been as an apartment slum lord, relegating his renters in Maryland, New Jersey, and New York to lives of malfunctioning heating and air conditioning systems, rodents and insects, usurious rent hikes, and broken appliances. Kushner, an Orthodox Jew and supporter of the Zionist Chabad Lubavitch movement, apparently has the same slumlord vision in store for the 4.68 million people of the West Bank and Gaza.

Kushner appended his sales pitch to the Palestinians by further insulting them. He said “his vision was 100 percent workable if only the Palestinian leadership would stop being so “hysterical and stupid.” Kushner also said that “Palestinians have never done anything right in their sad, pathetic lives.” Kushner’s statements are those of a Zionist Jewish racist, pure and simple. Unfortunately, few Jewish organizations have been willing to condemn such blatantly racist and xenophobic statements from Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner is an important cog in a neo-fascist political machine that relegates those of African, Arab, or other nonwhite European heritage to second-class “untermensch” – a favorite term of the Nazis – status.

In a response to Kushner’s “deal of the century” and insulting comments, Erekat tweeted: “If Mr. Kushner says PM Netanyahu is allowed to annex Jerusalem, settlements, Jordan Valley, Dead Sea, have security control west of the Jordan river, control Palestinian airspace, territorial waters, no [harbors], refugees off the table. What is [there] to negotiate?” Indeed, why even invite the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Hitler never invited the Czechoslovakians to the Munich peace conference eve though he and Benito Mussolini, with the acquiescence of the British and French were carving up Czechoslovakia for Hitler’s annexation. Kushner and the Israelis have learned well from the architects of the Holocaust.

In 1916, as World War I raged on, a British diplomat, Mark Sykes, met with his French counterpart from the Quai d’Orsay, Monsieur Picot, and signed an agreement to partition the Ottoman Empire once victory was achieved.

The heart of the Mideast – Palestine, Syria and Iraq – was divided between Britain and France. Italy and Russia were offered other Ottoman lands: southern Turkey was promised to Italy and Constantinople to Russia. All this was top secret but was later revealed by the Bolsheviks after their 1917 revolution.

We have not seen such an example of breathtaking cynicism and perfidy until this week when President Donald Trump unveiled his so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ as his final solution to the fate of the long-suffering Palestinians.

Standing next to Trump was Israel’s beaming Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who just got more land than his far-right, expansionist coalition had even dreamed of. It was not a coincidence that Trump had recently been accused of high crimes by the US House, while his buddy ‘Bibi’ had just been indicted for low crimes by Israel’s attorney general.

However, the real godfather in this historic theft was sitting almost unnoticed by media next to the presidential podium, looking very much the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. Billionaire gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife beamed as their ‘boys’, Trump and Bibi, proclaimed their newly configured Mideast.

Close by was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a friend of the Netanyahu clan. Kushner’s father, Charles, served 14 months in federal prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Such is the milieu from which real estate developer Trump emerged.

Under Trump’s ‘deal,’ Israel is to formally annex about 30% of the West Bank, the Arab area it conquered in the 1967 war. This will include all Jerusalem and an archipelago of Jewish settlements on the West Bank that were implanted to thwart any possible creation of a viable Palestinian state.

Israel will control all borders of the resulting Palestinian entity, a patchwork of feeble, isolated South-African apartheid Bantustans with no airports, no control over its airspace or maritime borders – and no interest in its increasingly important offshore energy resources. Israel gets most of the West Bank’s useful farmland and water resources. Palestinians are left with scrub, sand and some goats.

Palestinian’s claim of a right of return for their 5 million refugees scattered around Israel’s borders will be forever rejected. Israel’s right wing says there is no room for any Palestinians, though room was found in previous years for one million Russians, Jews and non-Jews. More are hoped for if Vladimir Putin gives the green light. All attempts by Palestine to seek remedies from the International Court of Justice will be quashed.

The rich oil Arabs of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia will be asked to buy off Palestinian refugees. They have stabbed the Palestinians in the back. Deeply fearful of Iran, these kleptomaniac Arab monarchies have thrown themselves at Trump’s feet and are kowtowing to Israel’s far right. Israel has achieved a brilliant victory by enlisting the oil Arabs on its side and presiding over the deep split in Palestinian ranks between the PLO and Hamas.

The Greater Israel crowd in the US has almost total control of America’s Senate. This is mainly thanks to Adelson’s donations of over $100 million to the Republicans and relentless support from pro-Israel media like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NBC and Hollywood.

Add to this the unquestioning support of 80% of Evangelicals who make up a quarter of Republican voters. This cult believes that Christ will return once modern Israel attains its Biblical borders, and then Earth can be destroyed by fire and brimstone. Israel has cleverly exploited these credulous rustics who form Trump’s key electoral base. Trump is increasingly being compared to the Bible’s King David of Israel. That’s a long way from Queens, New York.

As they ask in my native New York City, “Is it good for the Jews?”, the answer is a resounding no! The Trump-Bibi theft of ancestral Arab lands condemns Arabs and Jews to another five decades of violence and hatred. The Promised Land was not supposed to be like this.

ericmargolis.com