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.

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.