https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/after-a-series-of-devastating-blows-the-legal-walls-are-closing-in-on-trump-1.763509

A recent series of devastating blows to Donald Trump’s presidency might not be enough to drive him from office but they could well limit him to a single term.

His longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty last week to eight criminal charges, including tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions.

Cohen says he paid two women who had affairs with Mr Trump for their silence, in violation of campaign finance laws, “in coordination with and at the direction of” Mr Trump and in order to influence the election, by depriving voters of this important information.

And as Cohen’s lawyer asks, how can that be a crime for him but not for Mr Trump?

Were Mr Trump not the president, prosecutors could well be preparing to indict him too. But the Justice Department has a longstanding position that no sitting president can be indicted (although he could be prosecuted after leaving office or after being removed through an impeachment process).

The White House defence is a bizarre and circular syllogism: because he hasn’t been indicted, the president hasn’t done anything wrong. But, they insist, a sitting president can never be indicted. The obvious and absurd conclusion, by default, is that no sitting president can ever do anything wrong.

Mr Trump has been more forthright, employing the language and logic of gangsters to describe those, like Cohen, who are cooperating with the authorities as “rats” while praising as “brave” those who refuse to give any information to the police, such as his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted of numerous serious offences this week.

He has raged against the process of “flipping” – the willingness of prosecutors to make deals with criminals in exchange for testimony against their co-conspirators – saying it “almost ought to be illegal”.

All of this has been heard previously but only from mafia dons like John Gotti, not the president of the United States.

What has already been irrefutably established is starting to look very much like the tip of a vast iceberg.

There are suggestions of similar pay-offs to many more women, as former key Trump aide Steve Bannon said in Michael Wolff’s bestseller last year, Fire and Fury.

The way Mr Trump repaid Cohen the hush money to the women almost certainly violated major tax as well as campaign finance laws.

None of this involves a possible conspiracy concerning Russian interference in the presidential election nor obstruction of justice, the main subjects of Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation. Or another topic Mr Bannon suggested was also central to Mr Mueller’s probe, money laundering.

The sense that things are about to get far worse in fairly short order was strongly reinforced when several key Trump associates, including David Pecker, publisher of the pro-Trump National Enquirer, and the Trump Organisation’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, both received immunity in the Cohen case.

That means they no longer have the option of remaining silent by invoking the fifth amendment and will have to tell everything they know.

Cohen’s lawyer suggests he, too, has additional sensitive information he is willing to share and, despite Mr Trump’s tirades, he has not yet made a formal deal based on “flipping” on the president. Manafort, too, might have much to bargain with the authorities, given that he faces a heavy sentence soon for his convictions and has another trial pending on additional criminal charges.

Finally, White House counsel Don McGahn has given Mr Mueller 30 hours of testimony which Mr Trump and his lawyers apparently know virtually nothing about.

Mr Trump is certainly showing signs of major stress. His incensed tweets raging against Mr Mueller, the FBI, the Justice Department and attorney general Jeff Sessions have become incessant.

He has already fired numerous key figures investigating him and he seems to be preparing for another round of sackings.

But if he fires Mr Mueller or impedes his investigation, it will be almost universally regarded as a self-protecting abuse of power.

In spite of being directly accused, in sworn court testimony by his own attorney, no less, of major crimes, Mr Trump is immune from prosecution as president and clearly the Republican Congress isn’t interested in impeaching him.

Still, as things stand, the resolution to this crisis will have to be political rather than legal. The midterm elections will thus be decisive.

A Democratic majority in the House of Representatives could cripple Mr Trump’s presidency with investigations, impeach him and force a trial in the Senate, and make the case for major criminal charges against him once he leaves office.

And even if there aren’t sufficient Republican votes in the Senate for the super-majority required to convict and remove him from office, it is becoming very hard to imagine Mr Trump winning a second term with all this – and surely more to come – hanging over his head.

Mr Trump has been the exception to endless political rules and survived innumerable scandals that would have ended any other career. But the walls of legality finally now seem to be closing in on him.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/israel-could-have-a-spate-of-calm-gaza-might-get-some-relief-but-for-how-long-1.761259

Egypt wins big and a range of bad actors benefit as Abbas is dealt another serious blow

After coming to the brink of outright conflict last week, Israel and Hamas are reportedly finalising yet another comprehensive ceasefire.However, there is every reason to be sceptical about how long it will last or far it can go.

The terms are strikingly similar to deals following the Israeli-Hamas conflicts in 2014 and 2012. Both sides will agree to an immediate ceasefire. There will be some reopening of crossings and an expansion of fishing zones off the Gaza coast. Various forms of humanitarian aid may be allowed. Prisoners, captured soldiers and remains, particularly of Israelis held by Hamas, will be released or exchanged.

Ultimately, there is a supposed commitment to the rebuilding of Gaza’s infrastructure and even the opening of an Israeli-controlled or monitored sea corridor from the Gaza port to Cyprus.

The ceasefire is likely to be immediate and, for a time, effective.

The issues of the crossings, fishing zones and humanitarian aid will probably depend on the return of Israeli prisoners and remains held in Gaza.

As for the rest, including infrastructure reconstruction and new sea or even air routes into Gaza, it’s hard to imagine that the agreement will function well enough to allow for much of that.

This agreement will be highly significant because it would represent a real turning point in the Israeli attitude towards Gaza and a major accomplishment for Egyptian diplomacy.

For almost two years, the Egyptians have been strongly pushing an initiative to address the growing humanitarian and political crisis in Gaza.

Last summer, Cairo spearheaded a plan for aid and reconstruction in Gaza and an opening of the territory to the outside world, based on the reintroduction of the Palestinian Authority to the area, with the PA controlling crossings and most key ministries in the Gaza government.

Hamas and Fatah signed a reconciliation agreement that would have allowed for that in theory and Israel and the United States agreed to let it go forward.

However, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas believed he was being lured into a dangerous political trap. He feared the PA would be left with the responsibility of governing Gaza without sufficient authority and funding while Hamas would retain its weapons and therefore the ability to conduct an independent foreign and defence policy.

In other words, the PA would assume all the painful responsibilities without sufficient resources or support while Hamas would retain the key rights of government in Gaza.

He was also deeply concerned a reconciliation agreement would open the door for Hamas to return politically to the West Bank and begin to agitate for control of Palestinian politics there, as well as Gaza.

So as the implementation of the agreement progressed, Mr Abbas began demanding that Hamas fully disarm, saying that he would not agree to a “Hezbollah scenario” in Gaza.

Hamas wouldn’t hear of this and the whole thing came to a grinding halt.

The key was that Israel switched its position, backing away from the Egyptian plan and supporting Mr Abbas’s demands on Hamas.

Ever since, while all parties have agreed that an initiative for aid and reconstruction in Gaza was imperative, no one else wanted to implement anything that would unduly strengthen Hamas. Yet no formula could be found to reassure Mr Abbas sufficiently.

In recent weeks, amid mounting tensions, a spiralling death toll and increasing mutual attacks between Gaza and Israel accelerated, Israel changed its mind once again.

Egyptian officials and the UN special envoy Nickolay Mladenov warned Israel that it faced a stark choice: reach some kind of arrangement with Hamas that bypasses Mr Abbas, thereby strengthening the Islamist group, or continue the downward spiral towards another imminent conflict.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relented. Two weeks ago, he quietly went to Egypt and agreed to this familiar formula.

Israel is now likely to get a period of quiet. Gaza should get a degree of relief. How far it will go remains to be seen, given how tenuous and unrealised earlier, virtually identical, agreements have proven.

Yet this is potentially a serious blow to Mr Abbas and a considerable victory for Hamas as well as a significant achievement for Egypt.

The Islamists will again claim that “resistance” has won the day and that only direct pressure on Israel, particularly violence and, above all, rocket attacks, get Israeli attention.

Moreover, an agreement could bring the threat of Qatar’s re-entry in the Palestinian equation in a significant way. With Mr Abbas and the PA being bypassed, only Doha is ready, willing and able to pay Hamas salaries, subsidise its fuel needs and bankroll the Hamas side of the equation.

Along with its recent $15 billion mini-bailout of Turkey, the agreement represents the return of Qatar to a much more prominent regional role since the Arab quartet’s boycott began last summer.

Hamas is calling this a “hudna”, which means, among other things, a pause. That’s all this is likely to be.

Hopefully the long-suffering people of Gaza can find some much-needed relief. And an agreement is certainly better than another conflict.

But nothing has been resolved and many bad actors, not least Hamas, are being strengthened in the process.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-17/palestinians-can-t-keep-living-under-israeli-apartheid

Israeli Jews won’t change that reality by ignoring it.

In a tiny West Bank village not long ago, a teenage girl slapped a heavily armed soldier outside her home. The prevailing sense among 7 million Jews was that she was a violent renegade, a kind of apprentice terrorist. But almost 7 million Palestinians saw her act as effectively, or at least relatively, nonviolent. They viewed her as fully justified and, indeed, heroic.

This clash of completely irreconcilable perceptions reveals the fundamental realities between Israel and the Palestinians. This week, Israel released Ahed Tamimi, a 17-year-old Palestinian, after she had served eight months for “assaulting” an Israeli soldier. Her 15-year-old cousin was allegedly shot in the head with a rubber bullet by Israeli occupation forces during a demonstration, after which there was a confrontation with the soldiers outside her home. That’s when the slap occurred.

Why would a teenager slap a soldier? Why would she be lionized and vilified internationally for doing so? Because her people and the Jewish population of Israel do not operate on equal ground. One side has every reason to try to change that, but many on the other side are content to ignore the disparity.

If the 20th century taught us anything, it is that people cannot long abide living in a condition in which they have no power, no agency and no self-determination. This is why the European colonial project broke down so completely. It’s why segregation in the American South could not survive. It’s why apartheid in South Africa simply collapsed.

In the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, variously known as Eretz Yisrael, historical Palestine or mandatory Palestine, two peoples live in equal numbers. However, one group in it has all the power.

A small group of Palestinians are Israeli citizens, making up a manageable minority of about 20 percent. They face lots of official and unofficial discrimination, but they have many of the basic rights of citizens.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinians, however, are not citizens of Israel or any other country. They do not have any say in the government that effectively rules them, or any influence on the laws, regulations, bureaucracy or courts that determine their fate. They cannot travel more than a few miles in any direction without the permission of a hostile occupying army.

They have no vote. They have no passport. They have, simply, no meaningful rights.

In a world of citizens, Palestinians are the only remaining large group of stateless people. This is particularly striking because most of them are not refugees and are living in their own towns and villages.

Young Palestinians like Tamimi have never known another reality. They have grown up in an environment where they know that another people control their lives completely and that they are utterly powerless. Their parents have no real authority. Their fathers are routinely subject to all manner of arbitrary humiliations in front of them.

Some try to rationalize these realities. They blame the Palestinians themselves, the Arabs or others. And yet this fundamental reality of basic empowerment for Jews versus near-total disempowerment for Palestinians is still the essence of lived reality. This is the basis of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. That no one can deny.

No people disempowered to this extent will ever be able to accept that status. Nor should they be expected to.

Yet, increasingly, many Jewish Israelis and Americans are beginning to assume that Palestinians can and should remain effectively powerless for the indefinite future. Not because they have any substantive rebuttal to anything I’ve said about the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians. But simply because they see it as convenient for Israel.

Practically speaking, there are only two ways for Palestinians to gain any structural authority over their lives. They could have an independent state. Or they could become full and equal citizens of Israel or some other entity.

There is no third path to basic human rights. The alternative to those options is the formalization of Israeli apartheid. Yet this is what many are now openly promoting.

The Wall Street Journal this week responded to Tamimi’s release by printing a sort of Rosetta Stone for this perspective. In it, Daniel J. Arbess, an American investor, presumes to offer her “advice.”

Dismissing this brutal reality as a “so-called occupation,” he effectively offers her and other young Palestinians a deal: They can enjoy some measure of integration “into Israel’s thriving economy and culture of innovation” with “self-determination” for “local communities” (whatever that means).

Here’s the catch: The “Jewish character of the state” will be guaranteed under “any demographic circumstances.” So even if Palestinians become a majority, as they probably soon will, they will still somehow have to live in a “Jewish state.” Arbess clarifies that a central feature of any such arrangement will be sustaining “Jewish control of immigration and other policies of national identity and security.” Again, apparently under any demographic conditions.

Arbess isn’t hiding his demand for perpetual, guaranteed, Jewish supremacy in all of the land, with or without a Jewish majority. In effect, Palestinians can get some secondary economic benefits and localized political crumbs if they surrender any hope for dignity or self-determination.

This sounds a lot like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s notorious, and preposterous, vision of “economic peace” with Palestinians receiving a “state minus.” In effect, of course, it means Palestinians will agree to live as “humans minus.”

There are disturbing signs from the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, Jared Kushner, and the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, that the Trump administration shares such a vision, and that any administration “peace plan” will, in effect, embody it as well.

But “economic peace” is an absurdity because this is a political conflict, not a squabble over money. Even disputes about land hide what lies, very obviously, directly underneath: power.

It’s no good saying Jews should know what it means to live without power, and under someone else’s whims and control. People don’t work like that; suffering is rarely ennobling. As ever, the powerful do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

But the same dynamics of fundamental human psychology mean that Palestinians, alone among all the peoples of the earth, will not uniquely agree to live in a formalized, fundamental, structural condition of radical disempowerment.

Would Arbess, Netanyahu or the others ever agree to that for themselves or their families? Would they ever dream of asking Jewish Israelis to? To ask the question is to answer it — possibly with a slap.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/rashida-tlaib-s-real-victory-is-that-she-ran-her-campaign-as-a-muslim-palestinian-woman-and-won-1.758875

Perversely, Trump’s vitriol might have helped her win the Michigan primary by opening the door to opposing narratives

The victory of Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic Party primary for Michigan’s 13th congressional district is being widely hailed as historic. But its real significance is largely misunderstood.

In November, Ms Tlaib will not face a Republican opponent because her district is so heavily Democratic that the GOP hasn’t bothered to put up a candidate. That means she is almost certain to become the first Muslim American woman member of Congress.

That’s very important. But the bigger breakthrough is more complex and, in many ways, much more unlikely.

Ms Tlaib won’t be the first Arab-American in the House of Representatives. At least a score of Arab-Americans, many of them women, proceeded her.

She won’t be the first Palestinian-American either. Justin Amash already represents a conservative Michigan district. There have even been at least two Palestinian Americans in the Senate: John Sununu and his son, also called John Sununu, both represented New Hampshire in the Senate.

She’s not going to be the first Muslim American in the House either. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana are already serving.

She will indeed be the first Muslim woman in Congress but that’s not really the central point either.

The historic significance of Ms Tlaib’s extraordinary victory is that she will be the Arab-American member of Congress fully produced by and completely representing her community.

For all her predecessors in Congress, whether they are Arab-American or Muslim, these identities were, at most, incidental to their political identity and success. Some played them down. Others embraced them quietly. But none have highlighted and even campaigned on their identity, as Ms Tlaib has so proudly done.

The same applies to Mr Ellison and Mr Carson, the Muslim lawmakers. Both are African-American converts to Islam. Neither have particularly Islamic names and it’s very likely that they are largely regarded by their constituents as trustworthy politicians who, probably incidentally, happen to be Muslims. Neither shied away from their religious affiliation but they didn’t campaign on it either.

Ms Tlaib is truly a product of not merely the Arab-American community. Far more significantly, the lawyer, the eldest of 14 children born to Palestinian immigrants, is the first fully fledged member of the Arab-American activist cadre to break so deeply into the political mainstream.

She has worked with a number of significant Arab-American organisations in Michigan and nationally.

Ms Tlaib takes over from 89-year-old John Conyers, who held the seat for more than five decades before stepping down in December after a spate of sexual harassment allegations from several female staffers, which he denied.

She fought her own battle against sexual harassment in 2012 when she accused Imad Hamad, the Michigan director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, of hounding her 13 years earlier. In an open letter to ADC’s headquarters in Washington, Ms Tlaib came out publicly as a victim of Mr Hamad. Despite not getting the support of the board of directors, more women came forward and Mr Hamad retired the same year.

Until now all the Arab-Americans in Congress have been Christians, which is significant. All the Muslim Americans previously have been African-Americans, which is also telling.

Those of us who have followed the political fortunes of the Arab-American community have understood that it was no accident that while there were Arabs and Muslims in Congress, there weren’t any Muslim Arab-Americans.

That’s partly because the Arab-American community used to be much more heavily Christian and Christian parts of the community were more assimilated and well-established. Much the same applies to African-American Muslims.

But it’s also partly because in the post-9/11 environment, one could more or less get away with being an Arab or a Muslim, but not both.

That’s the real glass ceiling Ms Tlaib has shattered. Of course it’s significant that she’s going to be the first Muslim woman in Congress. But that’s not the biggest breakthrough.

Indeed, Ms Tlaib ran, openly and proudly, on a trifecta of politically stigmatised and marginalised identities: Arab, Palestinian and Muslim. That she did so as a woman and won is all the more remarkable.

Obviously it’s no accident she’s been elected in Michigan, home of the largest Arab-American community in the United States and that, by taking Mr Conyers seat, she will be representing much of Detroit.

But it’s also perversely predictable that she has been elected in the Donald Trump era. American politics tends to swing wildly between polar opposites. The cool, aloof and cerebral African-American law professor Barack Obama has given way to the raging, glandular, white nationalist reality TV star Mr Trump.

Mr Trump’s domination of American politics is counter-intuitively opening the door for many advances that might otherwise be impossible, including Ms Tlaib’s stunning victory. His vitriol is mainstreaming certain ideas and identities in an equal and opposite reaction.

It’s very American that with the travel ban in place affecting Muslim-majority countries, a Palestinian-American Muslim woman will have a seat in the next Congress.

She represents everything the current president opposes: she’s a democratic socialist in favour of universal healthcare, a Palestinian, a Muslim and the daughter of immigrants from a place very unlike Norway.

Indeed, Ms Tlaib’s campaign for Congress essentially began when she was arrested for heckling Mr Trump in 2016. No wonder she won.

Gaza is back in flames, and U.S. policy is a big reason why.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-10/kushner-s-assault-on-mideast-peace

With Hamas and Israel on the brink of yet another war, Gaza is boiling over, as all intelligent observers have predicted for months.

Along with another wave of senseless, pointless death and destruction, this latest round of violence is a perfect apotheosis of the atrocious policies from Jared Kushner and the Donald Trump administration on all matters involving Israel and the Palestinians.

It’s hard to remember now, with hundreds of Hamas rockets fired at Southern Israel and hundreds of Israeli air strikes in Gaza, but the administration’s peace efforts began with great fanfare. Trump talked confidently about “the deal of the century” and said there’s “no reason whatsoever” there’s no peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

To signal the depth of his commitment, he appointed his son-in-law, Kushner, to spearhead the efforts, and made Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas one of his first guests to his White House. In April and May of 2017, Palestinian leaders were positively giddy at the prospect of having their issue suddenly resurrected by this least likely of benefactors.

They were, as many of us warned at the time, profoundly mistaken.

They quickly got the idea, as Trump dropped all references to a two-state solution, ratcheted down U.S. opposition to Israeli settlement activity, and eliminated any mention of the word “occupation.”

And then came the bombshell. Trump recognized Jerusalem, without qualification, as Israel’s capital, and moved the U.S. Embassy there. Kushner reportedly supported all these decisions.

The administration kidded itself that the Palestinians would just get over it or that Arab countries like Saudi Arabia would somehow be willing or able to force Palestinians to take part in negotiations under completely unacceptable terms.

Kushner and his team have no background in diplomacy or Middle East issues, except being ardent supporters of Israel, but did spend “10 months of educating themselves on the complexities” of the issues. “We don’t want a history lesson,” Kushner said last summer. “We’ve read enough books”

Team Trump didn’t seem to realize until it was too late that there was no way for Palestinians to return to negotiations with Jerusalem, as the president put it, “taken off the table.”

Kushner persisted in talking up his vague plan even though was by then no way to release it without doing enormous harm. Moreover, there’s every indication he’s really talking about “economic peace,” the absurd idea that Palestinians will basically drop their quest to end the occupation and establish their own state if they are given enough money.

Early this year, when it became clear that Palestinians weren’t going to roll over and that Abbas wouldn’t and couldn’t get involved in negotiations under these circumstances, Kushner and company turned their attention to Gaza as “Plan B.”

That made a certain degree of sense. No matter how grotesquely the Trump administration has sabotaged its own stated intentions, and delivered the greatest blows to peace since the Oslo process began, the one thing everyone could agree on was the need for urgent humanitarian relief in Gaza.

Israeli officials bluntly predicted Gaza was a ticking time bomb of human misery. Egypt has been urgently seeking a way forward since last summer. Even Hamas is desperate for a solution.

The problem is that nobody wants to bring in aid in a way that rewards and bolsters Hamas. The obvious answer is to strengthen and return the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. But Abbas won’t agree to take responsibility for Gaza unless Hamas gives up its weapons. And Hamas won’t do that.

Egypt tried to cut this Gordian knot for months last year by bringing the PA back into Gaza but got nowhere. This year, another effort has been led by the United Nations’ special envoy, Nickolay Mladenov. But he’s encountered the same conundrum. You can get around Hamas, but only through the PA. Yet Abbas regards the whole thing as a trap.

The answer would be to reward and reassure him that the international community has his back and won’t let him be suckered into a political disaster in which he accepts all the responsibility for Gaza with none of the necessary resources and with Hamas retaining all the military power, complete with its own foreign and defense policy.

That’s where Kushner again looms as a major problem. He and his team have issued a series of articles and interviews blaming everything on Hamas. Nothing they’re saying isn’t true. But to listen to them, you’d never know there was an Israeli occupation or blockade, or any of the other key factors that have so strongly contributed to the misery in Gaza, the divisions among Palestinians, and every other element of the present disaster.

Not content with that, Trump administration officials have trashed and denounced the PA leadership as well, further alienating Palestinians of every description. They’ve torched every bridge to Palestine with extreme precision.

The administration has also slashed U.S. aid to the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, who make up at least 70 percent of the Gaza population, adding another catastrophe on top of the ongoing disaster.

And just to put the cherry on top of this hot fudge sundae of howlers, it’s been revealed that of late Kushner has been secretly pushing for “an honest and sincere effort to disrupt” UN efforts and pressing Jordan to strip the 2 million Palestinians living in there of refugee status so that they can no longer receive any UN humanitarian support.

His goal is obvious: to take the refugee issue, like Jerusalem, off the table once and for all, leaving the Palestinians with less leverage than ever, softening them up to accept his version of economic peace without political freedom or human rights.

While Kushner has been busy plotting against refugees, the situation in Gaza has steadily deteriorated. More than 100 largely unarmed Palestinians were shot by Israeli forces at the border. Gazans floated kites and balloons loaded with incendiaries over the Israeli border. Israeli soldiers were ambushed. It all led inexorably to this latest exchange of rocket and air attacks.

Sure, Jared Kushner didn’t create this mess. So, how can I lay it at his feet?

Because the only country that’s been in a real position to make any difference is the U.S. and, under his watch, more harm has been done to the prospects for peace and stability than in the previous two decades of blunders, bias and neglect from Washington.

In his emails about the UN relief agency, Kushner mused, “Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things.” He’s done that brilliantly, smashing both U.S. credibility and any hope for lasting peace into as many shards of glass as a window in southern Israel or an apartment in Gaza City.