John Chuckman

COMMENT ON TRUMP’S BIZARRE PEACE PLAN FOR THE MIDDLE EAST

Jerusalem to be Israel’s “undivided” capital, but East Jerusalem is somehow also to be Palestine’s capital, an arrangement which sounds a bit like the Palestinians renting some retail store space in an Israeli Jerusalem shopping mall.

 

Trump’s foolish approach to foreign affairs is repeated in every major initiative he undertakes – North Korea, Iran, China, Venezuela, Syria or Iraq – and it is no less again in his “plan” for Israel and Palestine.

Trump glibly calls the plan “a two-state solution” and “a win-win.”

But how can something be a “two-state solution” when one of the “states” has not even been consulted?

Diplomacy always requires a thorough understanding of both sides in a conflict, listening to each of them about concerns and trying to discover a formula which works for both of them, but this is not what Trump has done. Not at all. Not even a pretense.

We have the plan’s formal announcement made with Trump in the smiling company of the leader of just one of the two ”states,” the one already holding all the power because it occupies the other.

We have the leader of the other “state,” the one being occupied, rejecting a plan he has had no role in creating right after it was announced. Rejecting it entirely.

Indeed, President Abbas said the Palestinians are ready to negotiate with Israel, but only under the auspices of the “Quartet,” a set of international mediators which includes Russia, the United States, the United Nations and the European Union.

The Palestinians will not negotiate in future with only the United States acting as mediator.

Abbas said the only way toward peace is to create a Palestinian state with borders from 1967 – that is, from before Israel’s conquest and occupation in a war – a consistent and fair demand made countless times in the past by many, including a few Israelis genuinely interested in peace, although there are not a great number of those because Israelis generally recognize that they are in control of the situation, and Trump only offers even more control. Israel’s decades of history have produced a national politics located almost exclusively on the Right.

If you look at maps of what Trump is proposing, what you see, unmistakably, is formalized apartheid. See the opening map here: https://mondoweiss.net/2020/01/the-deal-of-the-century-is-apartheid/

The other “state,” the one now occupied, almost resembles an island chain, an archipelago, locked inside the boundaries of the primary “state.”

Every important power applicable to the island-chain “state” is held by the surrounding “state.”

The primary “state” actually gets to expand its territory at the expense of the island-chain ”state.”

The surrounding “state” gets to annex the Jordan Valley and many illegal Jewish communities inside the island-chain “state,” acts effectively fragmenting the island chain further still.

The surrounding “state” holds control of all borders, airspace, underground water, maritime authority, and even radio frequencies.

On the map, you see a geography superficially resembling some North American Indigenous reservations, undoubtedly a model some Americans working on the proposal had in mind.

The North American system of Indigenous reservations very roughly works, although only with many injustices suffered and outbreaks of violence over the years. It works at all largely because of the immense disparities in population size between island-chain and mainland populations.

But the Palestinians have just as large a population – perhaps now even somewhat larger owing to higher birth rates – as the Jewish people of Israel.

Palestinians also have many rights recognized internationally, both by major international organizations and by a great many individual countries. They do not stand completely on their own.

But there is another difference in Trump’s proposal from the structure of North American Indigenous reservations, one you cannot see on a map, and one that is profoundly important.

Residents of North American Indigenous reservations are full citizens of the huge country – the United States or Canada, as the case may be – which surrounds them. Full citizens, and free to travel anywhere.

The Palestinians are not to be citizens of Israel and are to have no rights of any kind there. And the meaning of citizenship even in their own designated areas is to so be so curtailed as to be close to meaningless. They get to vote for a government, their own, which governs almost nothing, and they cannot even freely travel between the broken bits of their island chain.

It is especially in this key detail that Trump’s proposal far more exactly resembles the infamous Bantustans of apartheid South Africa than North American Indigenous reservations.

The one consolation people who are concerned about justice have here is the fact that it was not many years after South Africa vigorously pursued its Bantustan “solution” that the entire apartheid house of cards collapsed from outside pressure.

Israel works very hard at preventing such pressure from abroad developing with its lobbies pressuring legislators to curtail freedom of speech (trying to conflate criticism of the public acts of a well-armed state with the superstitious beliefs of anti-Semitism) and freedom of association (by seriously penalizing advocacy for, or membership in, free-choice boycott movements, the very things that brought an end to South Africa’s once powerful apartheid arrangements). That may work for a time, but it so fundamentally unfair that it cannot provide a lasting foundation for a new apartheid.

It seems to me it would be so much easier for Israel to make a genuine effort at peace with its neighbors, something it has truly never done. All those millions of Palestinians are not going anywhere despite years of dreams and schemes in Israel to see them get up and leave.

ADDITIONAL IMPORTANT NOTE

The iffy provision for East Jerusalem becoming Palestine’s capital applies only “when the Palestinians have taken adequate steps towards becoming self-governing.”

The patronizing qualifier reflects Jared Kushner’s words last year about the Palestinians not being ready for self-government.

The words are certainly in keeping with a sense of Trump’s “plan” having nothing to do with peace. It is about establishing virtually perpetual apartheid.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT ADDITIONAL NOTE

Well, the mystery of how you can have both an undivided Israeli Jerusalem and a possible future Palestinian capital is solved.

Although Trump speaks of “East Jerusalem,” he is, as in so many matters, simply wrong. What the plan actually promises Palestinians as their capital, provided they earn it, is a place called Abu Dis. It is not part of East Jerusalem, and it is now separated from the Old City by an eight-meter high wall. An illegal one, of course. The place is a suburban village. So, my opening sarcasm about renting space for a capital in a mall may be no exaggeration.

This might represent the plan’s most gratuitous insult because Jerusalem is just as important, sacred, and historic to Palestinians as it is to Israelis, and in fact they have lived there many centuries longer than contemporary Israelis.

But it is hard to think of what could be a greater insult than telling millions of people they are not ready to govern themselves and must earn the right to do so. People who have had a society in the region for centuries before a re-creation of Israel was imposed on them.

If you spoke that way in America about any large group of people – say an ethnic group dominating a city or state – you would be regarded as bigoted and arrogant (as well as wind up in court). Those words, bigoted and arrogant, exactly describe the people promoting Trump’s plan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Israel plays this prisoner-release game every time the U.S. manages to push it, once again, into negotiations. I’m amazed people don’t yawn en masse at the announcements.

Each time they play the game, mainline news media give Israel endless positive coverage, as though something significant or hopeful were happening.

But Israel holds many thousands of Palestinians in prisons, including some very young people and people guilty of no crime, so the release of a couple of dozen is virtually meaningless.

And since these particular prisoners are ones convicted of crimes but nearing the end of long sentences, a slightly early release is truly meaningless: it is what happens in the prison system of every Western nation.

The amount of publicity garnered by this paltry act – day after day in all the big-name papers – couldn’t be bought for a billion dollars.

So why do we hear endlessly about nothing as though it were something?

It is only one more stark proof of the inordinate influence of Israel and its apologists have over our sources of information.

These “peace talks” will go nowhere, just as countless others in the past have gone nowhere.

Why is that?

The obvious harsh truth is that Israel does not want, and never has wanted, peace as anyone outside Israel understands it.

Israel wants more land, minus its undesirable Arabic people, and it has had a long, slow process of ethnic-cleansing going on for decades. Just look at the announcement of still more settlements in the West Bank and the ugly manipulations underway in East Jerusalem to separate people from property they’ve owned for centuries. None of it anything less than legalized theft of the property of others who are forced to live under Israeli rule with absolutely no rights.

There is a fundamental truth to human history, and that is that tyranny and abuse ultimately fail. They succeed for a while – the Soviet Union had a run of ninety years – but it is impossible to maintain such a repressive regime indefinitely.

Here is Israel going through the motions yet again of negotiating, only this time it negotiates with an unelected Palestinian, Abbas, the U.S. has propped up in office because of his compliant nature, one moreover who does not even pretend to rule the Palestinians of Gaza.

Peace will come only when the U.S. gets tough with Israel and stops subsidizing and protecting its brutality, and I suspect that will never happen.

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Note that a new law has been proposed in Israel. This law would allow Israel to seize the property of all “non-resident” Palestinians who own land in East Jerusalem (Arabic in population for centuries), Palestinians who happen to have their primary residence in the West Bank or Gaza.

It is the equivalent of the state of Florida proposing a law to seize all the condos and vacation properties of people who live in the other forty-nine states. It is actually worse than that because Israel as illegal occupier has no right in international law to legislate such matters over the heads of Palestinians.

Apart from the bitter irony of such a law – after all, Jews are supposed to have left what was Israel two thousand years ago, and you cannot get more “absentee” than that – it is extremely difficult to understand how property-worshipping Americans can stomach such rigged legislation.

Of course, the American mainline press carries virtually no mention of the proposal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANDED FROM A POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY EINAT WILF AND NOAH SLEPKOV IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

This piece is a set of words strung together almost without meaning and certainly without logic. Its only intention is to plant certain suggestions in readers’ minds, one of the key purposes of any propaganda. According to the authors, John Baird, Canada’s current foreign minister, was not guilty of provocation in blundering into East Jerusalem as a guest of Israeli politicians, rather he was being “brave” in the cause of peace.

Brave? John Baird?

Baird has always been a coward because only a coward acts aggressively towards the weak, as he does regularly in both domestic politics and in trips abroad, and certainly the Palestinians are weak, living at the mercy of Israel’s brutal and dishonest behavior.

The leaders of Israel do not want what any normal person calls peace. Their behaviors over decades make that abundantly clear to all but biased observers.

Israel has always followed the policy advocated by early Zionists called “the iron wall” in its attitude towards the Palestinians.

How much better would have been a policy of generosity towards its neighbors, but no, generosity in Israel’s attitude has never received the slightest consideration. The one prime minister who came just a little closer to altering the county’s brutal policies was assassinated, as it happened by an Israeli.

Israel holds all the cards – armaments, economic power, American influence, and absolute rule over millions of people – but it has never made a truly honest effort for genuine peace. Words, words, and more words combined with arrogant and impossible preconditions set even for discussions.

What we see is a garrison state, armed to the teeth, threatening its neighbors constantly, ready at the smallest provocation to kill thousands, and we see that state rule over 4.5 million conquered people with a heavy-handed system of apartheid, a system recognized as apartheid by every sensible and decent observer in the world from Nelson Mandela and Bishop Tutu to Jimmy Carter.

And, week by week, Israel slowly steals the land on which those 4.5 million people live, stealing it through all kinds of cynical and dishonest laws – an ongoing, slow-motion practice of ethnic-cleansing in every sense of the term.

What other state could accurately claim as its national symbol a D-9 armored bulldozer used to destroy the homes of others and sometimes simply to crush opponents?

Canada’s arrogant and ill-informed foreign minister, John Baird – and Canadians all know that he is arrogant and ill-informed owing to his everyday behavior at home – steps in to validate Israel’s ghastly behavior in East Jerusalem, never once saying anything about human or democratic rights.

And why does John Baird choose to behave in this obtuse fashion?

Because he is a creature of the Harper government which has as its goal, by its leader’s own admission, the elimination of the Liberal Party in Canada, a party which was always been even-handed in the Middle East, reflecting the attitude of a majority of Canadians.

Harper’s strategy includes having ended state support for political parties, using every disagreeable parliamentary dodge he can think of, being an enemy of transparency in government, suppressing the voices of experts in the civil service, and actively seeking a new and substantial flow of private financing, as it happens, from apologists for Israel eager to fund a turn in Canada’s historic and fair-minded policies.

In the United States, this pattern of funding is now an integral part of its foreign affairs. In just one example – and there are countless examples – the unpleasant Newt Gingrich received the best part of $20 million from just one wealthy American heavily involved in Israel’s affairs to run his presidential bid.

The price for that money? Newt’s peppering his speeches with ignorant assertions like “There’s no such thing as a Palestinian.” In another notorious example, Dick Armey, former House Majority Leader, once openly suggested that Israel just go ahead and run all the Palestinians out of the occupied territories – surely the kind of assertion that does not come naturally from an ultra-conservative economics major for whom property rights are virtually religious dogma.

And just so, John Baird’s bull-in-a-china-shop behavior in East Jerusalem and at the UN or Peter Kent’s sudden outbursts, almost like someone given to speaking in tongues, about Canada defending Israel or Harper’s regular speeches claiming credit as a warrior against (virtually non-existent) anti-Semitism and deliberately conflating legitimate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

In the normal world, we know peace in any violent disagreement is often only obtained by outside intervention and patient talks and mutual respect, but somehow when it comes to Israel, this common understanding just disappears. Israel is never pressured to treat its neighbors with respect, and it is never pressured to talk to them without arrogant preconditions. Never.

No one dares say a word about the decades of abusing 4.5 million people, of Israel’s endless torture and assassinations. Nor do the “brave” John Bairds of this world raise their voices when Israel kills 400 children as it did in its invasion of Gaza or when it commits piracy on the high seas or when it murders a Canadian officer serving as a UN observer or when it drops a million hideous cluster bombs on civilians as it did in Lebanon. No condemnation over the theft of farms and homes is ever heard. Not a word about endless illegal arrests and the imprisonment of thousands. Nor a word about the seizure of taxes and foreign aid moneys from their rightful owners.

Of course, there is never a word about the Six Day War so many decades ago, the very event which put all those people at Israel’s mercy, a war which Israel cynically started knowing it could win, aiming ultimately to create what is known as Greater Israel. Nor was a word said about Israel’s attacking a well-marked American intelligence ship, of which they had been advised in advance, during that war to silence signals informing Washington that Israel was turning around its armor to seize all of what it controls today. And there was not a word about the mass murder of hundreds of Egyptian prisoners in the Sinai to expedite that turnaround.

Does anyone in his right mind believe peace is obtained the way Israel has claimed to pursue it? Only if your definition of peace is Israel’s taking all the additional land it covets without any of the people who own it and live there, which is pretty much what the concept of Greater Israel involves. I suppose that is a kind of peace, the kind of peace brutal American soldiers achieved in My Lai, Vietnam, or in Fallujah, Iraq.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

Netanyahu is beyond reaching by criticism or speeches, being one of the worst in a long series of prime ministers ready to do almost anything to achieve Israel’s unspoken goal: getting rid of all Palestinians and taking all their homes and farms.

There can be no defense of such unethical and brutal behavior, although a large number of Israel’s apologists keep trying. After all, the United States went to war when the Serbs were doing much the same kinds of things.

I fear Israel is going to confront the world with a true crisis in the next decade or so, as it drives out the 1.5 million people from Gaza and the several million from the West Bank, and it would do this with no compensation for taking people’s property or disrupting their lives.

The blockade of Gaza is nothing but a brutal attempt to drive the people out under the pretense that Israel can’t live with “terrorists.” Gaza has always been a nightmare for Israel’s leaders: 1.5 million refugees huddled in a small enclave inside Israel’s claimed territory.

There is little hope to preventing a disaster it seems to me simply because the United States is the only force on earth that can demand reason from Israel, and the lobby for Israel has the members of Congress caught in a web of sophisticated campaign-financing techniques and the threat of unpleasant, noisy opposition at each election.

When President Truman was pondering the question of whether the United States should immediately recognize the state of Israel then emerging from a wave of terror by outfits like Stern and Irgun, frightening Palestinians into a mass exodus from their homes, he is said to have remarked that the lobbying efforts coming at him were like nothing he had ever experienced, overwhelming.

And he faced an election as an underdog candidate, so campaign funds were critical, and that’s how Israel gained recognition.

And nothing has changed: Obama just signed an agreement for $30 billion in American assistance over ten years, yet Israel is neither a poor country nor is it seriously under threat from anyone. That’s more aid than anyone anywhere receives, even people in far greater need. That is only possible under the influence of an extremely tough lobby at home.

So despite well justified criticism from America’s administration as the Vice-president recovers from the grotesque public insult of Israel’s announcing new settlements in East Jerusalem to coincide with his trip, it is almost impossible America will start enforcing fairness on Israel.

And so a truly ugly world crisis seems unavoidable not too far in the future.

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“Mr Chuckman knows, Gaza is under the control of Hamas, a fundamentalist organization openly dedicated to anti-Semitic principles and to the destruction of Israel. Its goal is simply to cast out the infidels and impose Sharia law over all of Palestine.”

Just more of the countless repetitions of mindless, going-in-circles arguments.

First, Hamas is not a terrorist organization, except by Israeli declaration. Its history was overwhelmingly as a humanitarian organization.

It was actually secretly supported earlier by Israel’s secret service, in an effort to create competition for Fatah, so it cannot have been viewed as much of a threat.

When Hamas became a political party, it ran a clean election and was honestly elected. Most of its senior leaders are professional-type people, not terrorists. Hamas for the Palestinians represented the hope for clean government after the endless corruption of Fatah.

Anyway, no matter what you might imagine Hamas to be, one is supposed to talk to one’s opponents for peace. Just because I have neighbors with whom I don’t agree doesn’t give me the right to attack them, attempt to starve them out, imprison them, or murder them, but Israel claims this insane right.

Israel has never ever talked with a legitimate government. As we all know from history – Nixon and China for example – often extreme foes are better able to make peace.

Anyway, all Israel did for years was treat Arafat as though he were a clod of dirt, and many suspect Israel finally assassinated him with poison, something they’ve done many times to others.

If you want peace, you talk, you compromise, and you do not even need American assistance to do so.

If you don’t want peace – indeed, if you want to make those with whom you disagree disappear and you want to seize their property – you do just as Israel does year after year.

It truly is that simple.