https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/editorial/two-states-one-state-in-the-end-trump-has-destroyed-the-palestinian-peace-process-1.775160

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/the-supreme-court-controversy-is-testing-the-raison-d-etre-of-trump-s-presidency-1.772806

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-21/boycott-israel-movement-deserves-free-speech-protection?srnd=opinion

Advocating boycotts isn’t hate speech. It’s free speech.

Campus fights about free speech and censorship tend to devolve into rage-filled deadlocks pitting “intolerance” against “political correctness,” resolving nothing. One topic, though, has produced a depressing consensus: that it’s acceptable to suppress speech advocating economic protests targeting Israel.

The pro-Palestinian movement promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions to protest Israeli occupation of the West Bank and control of Gaza is being systematically targeted by campus authorities and also by state governments and even Congress.

The administration of President Donald Trump, too, has demonstrated a remarkable double standard on this question.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared Monday that “freedom of speech and thought have come most under attack on the college campus,” and vowed that the Justice Department would protect this “valued right” from being “attacked or eroded.”

Yet almost simultaneously, the new head of civil rights for the Education Department, longtime pro-Israel activist Kenneth L. Marcus, reopened an old investigation into complaints by Jewish students at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The students had claimed that the university failed to protect them from harassment, and that they were discriminated against by being charged entrance fees to a public pro-Palestinian event in 2011. Those allegations were rejected by a 2014 investigation by the Education Department, which closed the case.

Marcus said he was reopening the issue based, in part, on the embrace by the Trump administration of a definition of anti-Semitism that includes “denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination” or holding Israel to a double standard.

The first effectively renders all non- and anti-Zionist perspectives “anti-Semitic” by definition, and the second could be applied to almost any strong criticism of Israeli policy or conduct.

Twenty-four state legislatures have adopted measures punishing advocacy and activism promoting boycotts of Israel, often foisting the same flawed definition of anti-Semitism on public schools and universities.

These efforts range from the sinister to the ridiculous; Dickinson, Texas tried to make victims of Hurricane Harvey pledge not to boycott Israel as a condition for receiving government relief aid.

Worse still, Congress is considering “Anti-Semitism Awareness” and “Israel Anti-Boycott” acts that would expand the effort to suppress and even criminalize criticism of Israel to the national level.

The “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” embraces the same language about “self-determination” and double standards that could easily be construed as barring all but the most mild criticisms of Israeli policies.

Like many of its state-level precursors, the “Anti-Boycott Act” aims at penalizing participation in, and even advocacy of, anti-Israel boycotts.

These laws not only conflate criticism of Israeli policies with discrimination against Jewish Americans, they also conflate Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories with Israel itself. The “Anti-Boycott Act” would apply uniformly to Israel and to “Israeli-controlled territories,” laying out criminal financial penalties for those who engage in boycotting Israel or its settlements in occupied territories.

Such measures, whether at the state or national level, are plainly unconstitutional and ultimately unenforceable. But they contribute to chilling strong criticism of Israel.

QuicktakeTwo-State Solution

The boycott, divestiture and sanctions movement itself is no friend of free speech. Many of its advocates promote academic and cultural boycotts of Israelis, and try to silence pro-Israel speech. Many of its most strident voices advocate a one-state agenda that imagines the Jewish state vanishing as the Palestinian population rises. But they’ve been singularly ineffective.

What has actually gained traction, particularly in Europe, are efforts to distinguish between Israel and the West Bank Jewish settlements, and to simultaneously promote engagement with Israel and disengagement with settlements.

Settlement activity is banned by international law as a human rights violation against the people whose territory is being taken away from them by an occupying army. The right not to be colonized is central to the system of human rights constructed since World War II.

That’s the real target of these state and national laws, not generalized boycotts of Israel, which are marginal and ineffective. Efforts to boycott Israel’s settlements and their products, on the other hand, are growing and potentially effective.

Both Israel and its supporters (to stigmatize all boycotts) and the strident BDS movement (to promote itself) conflate them as a single, unified campaign. And even when the call is precisely for a total boycott of all things Israeli, it’s inappropriate and unconstitutional for state and federal governments to try to suppress such advocacy.

Yet this issue is rarely raised in the raging debate about free speech, especially on campuses.

As a long-standing critic of one-state rhetoric and strident BDS advocacy, my own campus lectures have been repeatedly disrupted by anti-Israel protesters in recent years. And anti-Semitism is alarmingly extant among my fellow Arabs, and is the purest poison for the Palestinian cause.

Yet calls to boycott Israel in general are usually not anti-Semitic as much as they are quixotic, confused and misguided. What we need is more engagement, not more alienation.

I’m disturbed that campus, state and national authorities are using their power to punish boycott-advocacy as hate-speech, in the process chilling many other valid criticisms of Israel.

People who really care about free speech, on campuses and elsewhere, should be prepared to defend it even for ideas they don’t like. There can’t be an exception to free speech for strong criticism and even boycotts of Israel.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/palestinians-should-counter-a-us-assault-on-their-rights-by-strengthening-their-institutions-and-civic-society-1.770399

Suddenly confronted with this spectre of isolation, Palestinians and their friends must recognise the folly of having abandoned the programme of institution-building pioneered and led by former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad

Even for a people accustomed to difficult circumstances, the Palestinians are suddenly confronting an extraordinary, unexpected and devastating assault on their national rights, prospects and even identity. How they and their friends respond will determine how much long-term damage they sustain or avoid.

Washington has long been a biased but indispensable third party between Israel and the Palestinians. And there still aren’t any viable alternatives.

However, even those highly suspicious of the Trump administration’s intentions have been shocked by the vicious political war it has declared on a huge range of Palestinian concerns.

Donald Trump demolished the negotiating framework established by the 1993 Declaration of Principles by recognising Jerusalem, without any qualifications, as Israel’s capital. He keeps reiterating he’s trying to take the issue “off the table” so “we don’t have to talk about it anymore”.

His administration has eliminated all US funding for Palestinian-related institutions, except the Palestinian Security Forces, which maintain law and order in parts of the West Bank, to Israel’s enormous benefit.

However, Palestinian hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem have been stripped of funding. So has the UN agency, UNRWA, that provides humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees. And the administration is trying to eradicate that agency altogether and eliminate Palestinian refugees from existence by stripping them of their official refugee status altogether.

Finally last week, the Trump administration shuttered the de facto Palestinian embassy in Washington.

All this, they say, is supposed to encourage Palestinian co-operation with a forthcoming Trump team “peace proposal”.

The message to Palestinians is unmistakable: you have no options other than to capitulate to whatever we propose.

Don’t think you can go back to the old negotiations. We just cancelled them.

Don’t imagine existing agreements mean anything. We just cancelled them too. And don’t try to turn to multilateral institutions like the International Criminal Court. We’re declaring war on them as well.

And don’t even hope you can just keep what you have now and wait us out. That’s all off the table as well and we’re taking as much as we can away from you in advance.

Plus, we’re not giving anything back to you unless you agree to our terms, which we will tell you about sometime soon – maybe.

It’s beyond infuriating. But Palestinians should resist the temptation to overreact.

That’s probably what Jared Kushner and his accomplices want, although he ridiculously insists this bizarre rampage will yield “a much higher chance of actually achieving a real peace”.

Angry gestures won’t accomplish anything. This unwarranted assault demands a serious and intelligent reply.

Suddenly confronted with this spectre of isolation, Palestinians and their friends must recognise the folly of having essentially abandoned the programme of institution-building pioneered and led by former Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad.

Rolling up their sleeves and developing Palestinian national institutions, with or without US support and Israeli permission, should be the main response. Whatever the future holds, Palestinians can’t accomplish much without functional national institutions and a vibrant civil society.

Palestinians should also prepare for the post-Trump era in US politics, which could be rapidly approaching. Even some of Mr Trump’s own officials are working on that.

Palestinians should paint these horrifying developments as a core part of a spate of aberrations by a reckless and foolish administration. They should clearly convey their eagerness to work with the next administration, of whatever party, to rapidly and constructively undo the damage.

To all audiences, Palestinians leaders should squarely blame Mr Trump and his clique and not Washington in general.

The Democratic Party is well-positioned to benefit from the aftermath of the current fiasco. Palestinians have a crucial opportunity to develop closer ties to increasingly receptive Democrats, and not just from the far left, by emphasising the need to resume the quest for an agreement with Israel that ends the conflict and the occupation.

If an opportunity somehow opens with Mr Trump or other Republicans, of course they should take it. But that’s very hard to imagine and an intensive dialogue with Democrats makes more sense now.

As always, Palestinians need help and should get it.

The Arab world can’t afford to sit idly by. Mr Trump’s radical diplomatic and political disruption on Palestine is potentially extremely dangerous to even the most stable governments.

Arab states should and have opposed these reprehensible steps on principle and in defence of international law and binding agreements, as well as Palestinian rights.

However, Arab governments – especially those with close relations with Washington – need to also guard against the potential political blowback from this mindless anti-Palestinian campaign.

And as long as the Palestinian issue remains unresolved and, worse, is exacerbated in this gratuitous manner, the main beneficiaries are Iran and Hezbollah, Palestinian radicals like Hamas and terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.

The Arabs need a resolution to this highly destabilising conflict, which is an endless source of strength for all extremists.

Arab countries, therefore, should urgently work with Palestinians to make up for the funding losses and make that funding contingent on institutional and governance development in Palestine. And those that have strong relations with the United States and dealings with Israel should use that influence to oppose and reverse this reckless, incendiary and unprovoked assault on an entire people.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-10/trump-and-bolton-just-slammed-the-door-on-mideast-peace?srnd=opinion

The big winners: Hamas, Iran and war criminals

In the latest hammer blow to any hopes that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians can be revived, the Donald Trump administration has announced it will shutter the de facto Palestinian embassy in the U.S.

In a speech criticizing the International Criminal Court, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said the Washington mission of the Palestine Liberation Organization will be closed because of Palestinian calls for the ICC to investigate Israel’s conduct in the occupied Palestinian territories.

This is the latest in a series of aggressive moves designed to foreclose all Palestinian options other than whatever might be in a forthcoming “peace proposal” to be presented by Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser on Middle East affairs, Jared Kushner.

Kushner and his team have vowed think outside the box, and to come up with a new formula “based on realities.” In other words, they are ditching the existing framework for peace talks, which is based on the permanent status issues — borders, settlements, security, refugees and Jerusalem — that were mutually agreed back in 1993 and supposed to be resolved only through negotiations and not any unilateral action.

Through all the tensions and turmoil of the past 15 years, that framework somehow survived.

But soon after taking office, Trump signaled he was moving on, especially by refusing to reiterate the long-standing U.S. commitment to a two-state outcome. Instead, Trump has said he would accept any formula the two parties agree to, a position previously embraced only by Iran.

When Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel last December and repeatedly insisted the issue is now “off the table,” the existing framework for talks disintegrated. Since then, the administration has waged a relentless war on both Palestinian interests and existing understandings in the negotiating process. Kushner has pressed to redefine almost all the Palestinian refugees out of existence and effectively remove that issue from the table as well.

The White House also cut all U.S. funding for the United Nations agency that delivers humanitarian assistance the 5 million Palestinian refugees, and seems determined to eliminate the organization entirely.

Most recently, the Trump administration has slashed and frozen U.S. funding for humanitarian and educational projects in the occupied West Bank and for Palestinian hospitals in occupied East Jerusalem.

Trump has reportedly said that the purpose of these cuts is to further pressure Palestinians to make a deal with Israel. “I told them, we’re not paying you until we make a deal. If we don’t make a deal, we’re not paying,” he told a group of Jewish leaders, according to Haaretz.

All this supposed pressure, though, is taking place in a diplomatic vacuum. When demanding Palestinians return to talks with Israel, the obvious retort is, “What talks?” It’s not just that the Trump administration has systematically dismantled the existing framework for negotiations; it hasn’t put anything else in its place.

The White House’s real purpose here isn’t to pressure the Palestinians to concede to any existing process or demands. Rather, it is to foreclose all their other plausible options — including international forums such as the ICC or the UN — before the administration rolls out a proposal that falls far short of the minimal Palestinian expectation of an independent state.

Indeed, Kushner has strongly signaled that Palestinians can primarily look forward to economic inducements and benefits rather than political freedom and national independence.

The administration acts as if Palestinians didn’t have domestic politics of their own, and can be coerced into total submission. But this relentless pressure isn’t going to make Palestinians more willing or able to accept outrageous demands from Kushner and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

To the contrary, it’s certain to render it politically impossible for Palestinian leaders to rejoin a U.S.-brokered process or make any concessions, at least during the Trump era. With a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem opened and the PLO mission in Washington closed, and all that this grim symmetry so bluntly signifies, such moves would be widely viewed as craven capitulation. Palestinian moderates will be undermined and even humiliated, and extremists on the left and right will be emboldened and empowered.

With each U.S. move, there is less chance that any Palestinians will be ready, willing or able to take a serious look at anything Kushner proposes and try to find in it something they can work with. And the administration is fast running out of anything left that it can inflict on, or take away from, the Palestinians to pressure them further, short of bombing Ramallah.

Bolton’s announcement isn’t just a nifty Rosh Hashanah gift for Netanyahu. It’s also a huge victory for a rogue’s gallery of bad actors.

One of the biggest winners in all of this is Hamas. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has based his whole term in office around achieving a negotiated agreement with Israel in a U.S.-led process, now looks like the biggest dupe in the Middle East.

Hamas’s leaders will be as incorrect as ever when they insist that Palestinians can achieve their rights only through armed struggle, but after the past year and a half of Trumpian diplomacy, such sophistry and radicalism is going to be a lot more appealing and much harder to refute.

Iran, too, will be utterly delighted to see the U.S.-led process finally crumbling, especially since it is Washington itself, supposedly to be the guarantor of the process, that is suddenly the gleeful executioner.

Another obvious big winner from Bolton’s announcement is everyone who has been indicted by the ICC, including Sudanese President Omar Bashir, and anyone who ever feared such an indictment.

During the presidential campaign, Trump vowed to be “neutral” between Israel and the Palestinians. And after the Jerusalem recognition and embassy move, he promised that it would be the Palestinians’ turn to “get something very good” from Washington. But all his administration has done is to shower Israel with carrots and flail the Palestinians with sticks.

This may be good politics within the Republican right wing. But it’s disastrous diplomacy.

Many critics of Washington have wanted to break the U.S. stranglehold on the peace process, which will someday have to resume. They can relax. Trump, Bolton and Kushner have done their work for them.

It’s hard to imagine how a future administration could repair all the damage that’s being done by the application of what Jeffrey Goldberg identified as Trump and Bolton’s “We’re America, bitch” attitude. Or by this White House’s disdain for international law and a rules-based order to the delicate and crucial work of peacemaking. It is even harder to imagine that the result of this diplomatic malpractice won’t be another explosion of Middle East violence.

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/donald-trump-has-shrugged-off-many-cataclysms-but-the-past-fortnight-could-prove-a-turning-point-1.768152

The legal disasters and disclosures of the last few weeks could influence swing voters in the midterm elections

A fortnight ago, Donald Trump was battered by the criminal convictions of his former personal attorney Michael Cohen and former campaign manager Paul Manafort. Last week his administration was rocked yet again, this time by Bob Woodward’s new book Fear and an anonymous New York Times commentary by someone identified only as a “senior official in the Trump administration”.

The legal woes continue with another guilty plea, this time by his former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who admitted lying to the FBI about meeting Russian operatives during the presidential campaign. Mr Trump mocked his 14-day jail sentence but it’s another Russia-related scalp in investigator Robert Mueller’s bulging collection.

The Woodward book repeats many themes of Michael Wolff’s bestselling Fire and Fury but is a more credible portrayal of the Trump administration as a dysfunctional madhouse. The biggest difference is that Woodward is among the most accomplished and credible American journalists.

The New York Times article, however, suggests many of Mr Trump’s own staff consider him “amoral”, “reckless”, “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective” and are conducting a co-ordinated “internal resistance” designed to sabotage and thwart his worst impulses, blunders and rampages.

Yet the article’s logic is internally inconsistent.

It argues that the author and others are right to work for the administration because some Trump policies are good and because they are serving as a surreptitious and unofficial check on an unfit president and are saving the world from his most unprincipled caprices and foolishness.

However, the article’s publication obviously greatly complicates the effectiveness of any such programme of internal disruption and secret supervision. Its main practical impact will be to make Mr Trump all the more paranoid, vengeful and vigilant against precisely such a subtle, extra-constitutional and troubling campaign of insubordination.

Publishing such an article therefore significantly undercuts and obstructs the purported intentions of the author.

Plainly, therefore, there’s something else going on. And it’s not hard to see what.

This disingenuous, self-serving and even mendacious commentary answers a question I have been publicly asking since Mr Trump’s inauguration: how will the Republican Party in general, and Mr Trump’s allies and subordinates in particular, explain their actions when the fever breaks and the nightmarish qualities of the Trump era become as widely recognised and disparaged as, for example, the McCarthyism of the early 1950s has long been?

How will they try to save their credibility and political viability when it won’t be possible to argue convincingly that they didn’t know what they were doing, or know how obviously inexcusable parts of the agenda are, or how unfit the president they serve is?

The op-ed suggested it will mostly be variants of “without us, it would’ve been much worse”. Republicans will argue that, despite being Trump associates, they weren’t culpable but were actually heroic and patriotic. They did the gruesome but essential dirty work of rolling up their sleeves, climbing into the pen and saving us all from far worse. And they’ll blame the voters for forcing them to do it.

This approach also gives them, as the article demonstrates, flexibility to defend their role in whatever actions are deemed legitimate iterations of the Republican agenda and disavow responsibility for aspects of the Trump legacy that come to be widely regarded as indefensible.

But why now?

Mr Trump does not appear, at first glance, to be particularly weaker politically than in the past. Since the Republican primaries, he has relied on approximately 30 per cent of the voting public to support him no matter what. Opinion polls show his iron grip on their allegiance – in what can only be described as a cult of personality – is as strong as ever.

Moreover, what most of the public wants is a strong economy. What they don’t want is an avoidable war.

Mr Trump inherited a very strong economy from Barack Obama and has delivered several short-term and possibly ill-advised adrenaline shots to it, such as the massive corporate tax cuts. And there is ongoing major war.

He should be beloved. Yet he remains deeply unpopular by much of the voting public and the endless scandals and damaging revelations may be slowly but steadily eroding support among the swing voters he needs to assemble a winning coalition.

Mr Trump has shrugged off many cataclysms that would have destroyed most ordinary political careers. But the legal disasters and stunning disclosures of the past fortnight could well prove an irretrievable turning point for many swing voters.

In another potentially ominous development, last week Mr Obama returned to the political stage, with a blistering speech attacking his successor. He illustrated how Democrats could adopt populist rhetoric of their own but stressed hope and inclusion to contrast with Mr Trump’s “American carnage” and scapegoating rhetoric.

Mr Obama also cited the anonymous article, saying that “people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders” are “not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 per cent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House and then saying: ‘Don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 per cent.’”

The author of the commentary in question is obviously positioning him or herself for the post-Trump era, making the case that, even if and when most Americans come to view Mr Trump as an unfit and even dangerous president, they should regard service in his administration as not merely excusable but laudable.

It hasn’t gone well. Trump supporters denounced the author as a “gutless traitor”. Most Trump critics condemned the writer as a craven enabler. Most, on all sides, agreed this “coward” should own up and resign.

Maybe the moment was premature or the anonymity fatally undermined the argument.

But in the foreseeable future, the president’s current allies and subordinates are going to have to either concoct a better rationalisation for their actions or they’re going to have to hope this kind of gambit plays far better with a name attached.

Even though the anonymous article was so widely panned, it was still very damaging for Mr Trump. Republicans are clearly realising that, soon enough, they’ll have to try to defend their part in this unprecedented national fiasco.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-06/palestinians-vanish-in-trump-s-israel-friendly-mideast-peace-plan

Pretending that Palestinians hardly matter won’t make them go away.

A refugee is someone with little left to lose. He’s lost his home, his livelihood and his land. Often, she’s lost her country, too. That’s what’s happened to the approximately 5 million Palestinians registered as refugees by the United Nations.

Now the Trump administration is trying to rob the Palestinians of two of the few things most refugees do have: humanitarian assistance and their legal status as refugees.

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special adviser on the Middle East, Jared Kushner, is reportedly seeking to redefine almost all the Palestinian refugees out of existence, by claiming that only those who were personally displaced in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1947-48 and 1967 can be considered refugees even if the underlying conflict remains unresolved.

And the administration has canceled all future U.S. funding for the UN agency that cares for Palestinian refugees and is pushing for its elimination, while pressuring Jordan to strip the 2 million Palestinian refugees in its country of that status.

If the White House has its way, almost all the Palestinian refugees would no longer be classified as refugees and would lose the agency and funding that provides them basic levels of health, education and other essential services.

This is a cruel but logical next step in the process begun in December, when Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Other than reinforcing the support of his evangelical Christian political allies, the primary effect of that was to try, as Trump keeps insisting, to “take Jerusalem off the table” in negotiations. “We don’t have to talk about it anymore,” he recently insisted.

In laying the groundwork for a promised peace proposal, Kushner and company are demolishing the diplomatic, legal and logical basis for Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and trying to strip away the main issues Palestinians can use as leverage in talks with Israel.

Since 1993, the negotiations have been predicated on a set of mutually accepted issues to be resolved only by agreement and not prejudiced by any party: borders and settlements, security, refugees and Jerusalem.

Israel has repeatedly indicated discomfort with the last two.

In particular, it doesn’t want to compromise on Jerusalem, which it refers to as its “eternal and undivided capital.” Nonetheless, the rest of the world unanimously recognized East Jerusalem as a territory under foreign occupation after Israel seized it in the 1967 war, and has insisted that its future be determined through negotiations.

Trump has changed all that by unilaterally recognizing Israel’s claims on Jerusalem and not making any distinction between East and West.

And now, by pushing to redefine almost all the Palestinian refugees out of existence, Kushner is effectively seeking to eliminate the refugee issue as well. That would prevent Palestinians from using concessions on Jerusalem or refugees to gain reciprocal Israeli concessions on borders, settlements and other matters. Indeed, trying to take Jerusalem and refugees “off the table” effectively leaves Palestinians with little negotiating leverage beyond the fact of their own existence, removing from them even the power to say “no.”

This systematic weakening of their already poor hand appears to be aimed at forcing the Palestinians to accede to an onerous set of conditions that they’ve always considered unacceptable. The ultimate aim appears to be the removal from the equation of any truly independent, sovereign Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that the most Israel would allow Palestinians is an undefined “state minus” and a primarily “economic peace.” From the start of his presidency, Trump dropped any reference to the traditional U.S. goal of a “two-state solution.”

Now indications are emerging of what the administration endorses as an alternative. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas reportedly claimed that Trump offered him a peace deal based on one of the oldest and most discredited ideas in the peace-process playbook: the Israeli fantasy of a Palestinian “confederation” with Jordan.

This idea, best known as the “Jordanian option,” has been an Israeli ambition since the conquest of the occupied territories in 1967. Israelis long hoped they could get a better deal from Jordan than the Palestinians, retain the parts of the occupied territories they want to annex, and avoid the creation of a Palestinian state.

But there is no chance that Palestinians would consider this idea. Most would regard it as the final stage of stripping them of their human and national rights and aspirations, and consigning them to permanent second-class status.

The Jordanians, too, won’t consider it unless Palestinians first have their own independent state.

Egypt, ever fearful of Israeli efforts to suck Cairo back into responsibility for the impoverished and restive Gaza strip, will also probably try to ensure that this zombie notion never lifts a finger. And the Gulf countries have no interest in embracing an unworkable formula and trying to convince or coerce either Palestinians or Jordanians to entertain it.

Abbas is right that confederation is actually an interesting idea to add to the conversation about peace, but only if it involves Israel. The conflict, after all, is between the Palestinians and Israel, not Jordan.

A Palestinian-Israeli confederation could allow for a joint presence in the land while still letting both Israelis and Palestinians exercise self-determination and self-rule by sharing some responsibilities while retaining others individually.

If Israelis and Palestinians could make such an arrangement work, Jordan, too, might want to join it. That could actually help end a conflict, foster cooperation, and bring, rather than force, peoples together. But, in this case, it is the Israelis who won’t hear of it.

If Trump and Kushner really imagine that stripping Palestinians of their claims regarding Jerusalem and refugees will coerce them into abandoning any aspirations for independence and first-class citizenship, they’re in for a surprise.

But if they’re just trying to set up a pretext for castigating the Palestinians as the party that “said no to peace,” it’s a sound strategem.

The only question then would be, how much harm to long-term prospects for peace and short-term calm and stability has been done just to point the finger of blame at the weakest and most vulnerable party?

https://www.thenational.ae/opinion/comment/trump-s-attacks-on-the-media-are-copy-pasted-straight-from-the-authoritarian-playbook-1.765776

Trump’s attacks on the media are copy-pasted straight from the authoritarian playbook

With the November midterm elections looming, Donald Trump’s increasingly volatile conduct suggests an incongruous blend of rising self-confidence in his presidential authority, along with unmistakable signs of vulnerability and even panic.

His opponents, too, seem to oscillate between certainty in his eventual comeuppance either at the polls in November or at the hands of various investigators, versus the nagging suspicion that he is somehow politically indestructible, if not unstoppable.

This week the long-running war to shape the American national narrative, and even the nature of truth itself, sharply escalated.

The latest development is a dispute between Mr Trump and Bloomberg over comments he made during an interview apparently insulting Canada. When the comments were published, his instant reaction was to denounce the story as “dishonest reporting” and claim the comments were off-the-record – while simultaneously admitting he made them in the first place.

This pattern of acting and then immediately denying the action, while blaming others for any negative consequences – often referred to as gaslighting – is what we have come to expect of this US president.

Mr Trump intensified his efforts to establish himself as the only reliable authority for accurate representations of reality and to denigrate all traditional sources of information and interpretation as fundamentally dishonest and hopelessly biased.

His latest targets are Google and other tech firms. Mr Trump has repeatedly accused them, without any evidence, of trying to “silence” him and other right-wingers by deliberately skewing internet search results towards “liberal” news organisations and threatened them with government intervention.

This claim is almost certainly false, although the secrecy with which Google and its rivals veil their algorithmic processes makes conclusively demonstrating that impossible.

Mr Trump was apparently basing his claims on a right-wing blog post that classified virtually all legitimate journalism as “liberal” and treated a great deal of bizarre and conspiratorial nonsense as equivalent “conservative” sources.

Equating AP with Breitbart, CNN with Infowars and the New York Times with WorldNetDaily.com doesn’t reflect ideological balance. It abandons any distinction between factual, accurate and professional journalism with crude and often hateful propaganda.

Mr Trump long ago revealed his motivations for demonising the press when he told the veteran journalist Leslie Stahl that such attacks are intended to ensure that unflattering reports about him are dismissed by the public as “fake news”.

The same, no doubt, applies to search engines and other online sources.

It’s also a case of making aggressive offence the heart of any good defence. Since the 1970s, the American right has been continuously whining about “liberal bias” in the media, academia and all other mainstream sources of analysis and information.

If you’re consistently losing wars of ideas on their merits, a good fallback is to claim that the whole process is rigged from the outset.

So if Google tends to point people towards AP and CNN more readily than Breitbart or Infowars, rather than acknowledging an indisputable distinction in quality and accuracy, one can instead fulminate about ideological bias.

At best, tech companies will begin to actively skew their search results in a right-wing direction to avoid such criticism. At worst, Mr Trump’s followers can nurture yet another conspiratorial grievance.

Recent death threats against the Boston Globe informed by Mr Trump’s “enemies of the people” rhetoric demonstrates its chilling effectiveness.

And still Mr Trump and his minions rage against “fake news” and now “fake books” and insist reality is not what it seems.

When he first took office, Mr Trump’s then press secretary Sean Spicer insisted his inauguration audience was much bigger than Barack Obama’s, despite the opposite being plainly and demonstrably true. This obvious falsehood was then defended by another senior Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, as “alternative facts”.

That initiated their ongoing campaign against verifiable realities. In July, Mr Trump even demanded his followers believe him rather than their own perceptions since “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening”.

In mid-August, the logical conclusion was finally reached when Mr Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani flatly declared that “truth isn’t truth”. He insisted that “nowadays” facts are merely “in the eye of the beholder”.

This attack on the media and other alternative sources of information is copied and pasted directly from the authoritarian’s playbook. Any would-be caudillo must establish themselves with the general public as the ultimate authority on perception as well as power.

It smacks of Russian propaganda that conflates facts with opinion and renders all assertions equally valid to bolster outlandish lies.

In that sense, Mr Trump’s war against journalism and the truth reflects tremendous confidence and, it seems, alarmingly broad-ranging ambitions.

However, it also suggests a growing sense that while he remains beloved by his political base and those who see him as the tribal leader of white, Christian America, he might be losing control of the broader narrative.

Opinion polls show increasing support for the Robert Mueller investigation, new levels of disapproval of Mr Trump’s performance and even a mounting constituency for impeachment.

The guilty plea by his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who implicated him in serious campaign violations during the last election, suggest the president faces potentially daunting legal and political challenges.

Still, even if Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in November, Republicans in the Senate could protect Mr Trump from being removed from office if they remain united behind him.

Therefore his future depends entirely on shaping the perceptions of the public, especially core Republican voters, and successfully spinning whatever might come out from further reportage, Mr Mueller’s investigation, other criminal inquiries or House committee probes.

Control of the narrative is now everything.