John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY F. MICHAEL MALOOF IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Trump’s Neocons Have Always Hated Arms Control Agreements, INF Is No Different

“Pompeo trying to put the upcoming death of INF on Russia when it’s transparent this has been on the neocon agenda for a long time”

 

It is true that the Neocons have always disliked arms agreements.

After all, and people tend to forget or overlook this fact, one of the basic tenets of the Neocons has been that the United States should use its military muscle to get what it wants in the world.

That openly brutal concept violated traditional, official American attitudes about its military, which the country has long pretended is about defense, hence the name Department of Defense.

Of course, given all the wars and interventions since WWII, that official view has always been pretty much empty words. There is absolutely nothing defensive about any of what America’s military has done for about seven decades.

And when it wasn’t done with the military, it was done with the CIA. Eisenhower – an avuncular, much-beloved figure – gave the CIA, which had just been created shortly before his term, pretty much free rein under the Dulles brothers, that Cold War team of Secretary of State and CIA Director. “Ike” was able to be the friendly face of America while they conducted the dirty work of empire without burdening him with too many details. That’s how the CIA grew into the arrogant and formidable organization Kennedy confronted after 1960.

But still, the pretence has been maintained. Now, the Neocons have been effectively saying for some years, forget the pretence. And Washington’s power establishment has listened closely since dropping the pretence appears to serve an urgent need to re-enforce its position and will upon the globe.

Washington’s power establishment recognizes that America’s relative place in the world has been slipping for decades as postwar competitors arose and succeeded, and that, if it didn’t do something about it, it would lose the immensely privileged position it has occupied since WWII.

After all, it’s mighty nice having well-rewarded and prestigious jobs in Washington, complete with a sense of people tripping over themselves to get your attention or seek some favor. These are jobs that basically involve telling other people what to do – from openly directing small states you regard as plantation properties serving American corporations to throwing your weight around in international organizations, making sure that the ninety-five percent of humanity who are not Americans do not get the idea that they somehow are entitled to influence, as through the UN.

“But like any Trump tactic to get attention, an initial bombastic approach such as the shocking announcement of treaty withdrawal is designed to control events and seek leverage in getting the changes he seeks.”

That is an accurate assessment by the author.

When results don’t quickly fall out of his initial explosion, he is left perplexed about what to do because he is not knowledgeable and not even particularly intelligent, nor is he patient or methodical. He has a very limited repertoire, we might say.

The Neocon gang fills the void, always ready to suggest what’s next. They are ideologues with clear, if rather malevolent, ideas of what they want, and they are unified with a fairly well-ordered supporting establishment.

That pattern of Trump’s psychology likely at least in part explain how the Neocons have gained so much influence in his administration in so short a time.

Other more individualistic advisors and appointees during meetings would tend to put an unwelcome burden back onto a perplexed Trump to make a decision from their various advice and observations. We see hints at this when he tweets, as he has a number of times, that this or that former advisor or cabinet member is stupid, the bright and able Rex Tillerson being only the most recent recipient of such an accolade.

Of course, there are also the political financial arrangements with Sheldon Adelson and other very wealthy individuals, arrangements with which he hopes to support his 2020 run for re-election. Adelson and some others to whom Trump looks are quite focused on Israel.

And, not to be dismissed, is some influence from his (much doted upon, for reasons unknown since her talents remain rather elusive) daughter and her husband, whose family is well-connected in Israel.

Much of what the United States has been through in the so-called “War on Terror”- more accurately called the Neocon Wars – represents little more than a kind of intense Israelization of American foreign policy. After all, Israel has spent seventy years enforcing its presence and belligerently expanding it at the expense of neighbors. It is what they know how to do.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER

 

“Trump’s Open Defiance of Washington’s Russophobia Is a Revolutionary Act”

 

This analysis is flawed.

Yes, it is good that Trump is meeting Putin and, yes, that fact flies in the face of many Washington establishment figures.

But please examine the overall record of this man, Trump.

It is loaded with contradictions and downright stupidities.

You cannot count on anything when dealing with someone like that. He is out-of-touch and uninformed on a great many matters. He often is caught making up his own version of something while he speaks or is being interviewed. He listens to almost no one, and he has little patience for most people trying to tell him anything.

He is a total living, breathing America-Firster. Actually, I believe Trump is a Donald Trump-Firster, always and in all things, and America really only comes into the picture because it provides the stage for his hammy and often-blundering acting performance. He is in many ways a rather sick and isolated man.

But he does have a fairly powerful political base, which feeds on the raw meat of xenophobia and fear of migrants and Islamophobia and love of walls, and he uses that base to push back in Washington. He has to push, even his own party, because most of its establishment truly dislike Trump. He’s treated like an unwelcome dinner-party guest who somehow got a genuine invitation by mistake.

With Trump, there’s no substance of which to get hold, just a lot of noise and a massive ego. He betrays friends, insults allies as well as enemies, and is totally for himself and is highly protective of his hermetically-sealed mindset about the world and its people.

This trip for Trump serves another purpose, too, having nothing to do with geo-politics. He is effectively telling the Washington establishment off about Russia because he fears some of the efforts underway by the Special Prosecutor are leading to serious trouble.

Whether the material the Special Prosecutor is gathering from past Trump associates – and several are cooperating – is damning enough ultimately to remove him from office is, in the end, up to the court of public opinion.

Evidence in any legal case of any nature can be interpreted in different ways. And we often end up with either convictions or exonerations which don’t reflect the underlying hard facts.

Humans are fallible and the legal systems they create are fallible. Often, the truth, the kind of truth you would believe if you actually sorted through all the evidence carefully and without partiality, gets tossed into the garbage.

We’ve seen it happen many times – from the phony case made against Lee Oswald in the Kennedy assassination or the manufactured investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800 to the phony “not guilty” verdict in the O J Simpson murder case. Truth simply does not prevail in an atmosphere thick with interests and influence.

Trump has reason to fear because there’s no denying it, Washington is just totally in the grasp of the Russia-Fear-and-Loathing Crowd. Not just the Democratic Party, but the security services, the Pentagon, and some of the most powerful lobbies, such as the one for Israel.

Yes, Russia maintains pretty good relations with Israel – one of Putin’s great strengths is maintaining good relations with many differing interests – but Israel’s rulers’ deepest feelings are undoubtedly that Russia is intrinsically a barrier.

You see, Israel and its lobby in Washington very much like a hyper-aggressive United States, the kind of United States which has rampaged through the Middle East. They see that kind of United States as a guarantee of Israel’s future. Israel’s position in the Middle East is inherently weak and always has been, but its de facto role as an American colony in the region gives it strength it wouldn’t have on its own as a truly independent nation state, something it emphatically is not.

And no group is more influential in Washington than the Israel Lobby, owing to the sheer fact that it represents so many very successful and influential American businessmen, including those who own or manage all of the high-end national press and broadcasting. Trump has bent over backward trying to please them with stuff like the illegal recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel and his total ignoring of Israel’s murderous activity against the people of Gaza, who want nothing but their rights.

He also has his big plan brewing for an “historic final settlement” between Israel and the Palestinians, which is in the hands of his son-in-law, a good friend of Netanyahu, and, by all accounts leaking out, is so biased against Palestinian interests, it is sure to fail, however that does not mean that the effort won’t please members of the Lobby.

The CIA and Pentagon tend to be on side with the Israel Lobby because they see Israel as a strategic asset in the Middle East, and they just basically loathe the only country on earth, Russia, which is capable of destroying the United States. The Democrats are “on side” because they are political opponents of Trump and because they are loyal servants of American imperial interests and because they have pretty much all been politically bought-and-paid-for over many years by the Israel Lobby. But then, so has the Republican Party whose biggest big-shots do not really like Trump.

I do not see any powerful interest group in Washington right now which wants or demands better relations with Russia. It’s a good cause that completely lacks a base of support, because nothing in Washington is decided on the basis of merit. Matters are decided by politics and by imperial geo-politics.

Those groups – Democrats, Republicans, CIA, Pentagon, and powerful lobbies – are all married to the concept of America re-asserting itself in the world through a new kind of multi-faceted and hybrid aggression on almost every front.

They are not satisfied to accept the relative economic decline underway for “the indispensable nation” as states who were not competitors in the past become competitors. They want to push and bully their way into as many advantages in the world as they possibly can. It really is a Mafia-like business model for the country. And that is just what has been happening, with or without Trump, for some years now. Obama, for example, worked full-time towards the goal although you never heard him make speeches about it.

There’s only Trump in Washington saying America needs better relations with Russia – and, of course, he is right, but being right in Washington won’t get you so much as a cup of coffee. There is also the fact, not appreciated by many people abroad, that, in terms of the American Constitution, the President just isn’t all that powerful inside the United States. His only unquestioned power comes in time of war when he is Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. In other matters, it is a constant struggle with other elements of a divided government, one divided by its very design in the American Constitution.

Putin understands this all clearly, I’m sure, and I believe he is using Trump to drive a wedge into the heart of the powerful and dominant anti-Russia coalition in Washington. I don’t think he necessarily sees Trump as Russia’s friend – and, let’s be honest, with an erratic man like Trump, what kind of dependable friendship does he offer to anybody? – but Putin very much sees Trump as a tool to use in a very dark and dangerous game being played inside the United States. This is the way high-level power-politics is played, and Putin is a master at it.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN INVESTMENTWATCH

 

“Manchester Bomber Was Product of West’s Libya/Syria Intervention”

 

All of what we call “international terror” or “Muslim extremist terror” is nothing but blowback from America’s Neocon Wars and outrageous actions in the Middle East.

The only exceptions to that statement involve the gangs of mercenary thugs the U.S. and its allies have supported in places like Syria and Libya.

Such gangs – variously named ISIS or Al-Nusra and still others – are no different to the gangs and armies of mercenaries which have been used in countless imperial wars before, except they don’t wear uniforms and they make big noises about matters other than the real purpose of their filthy work.

It is all a big theatrical production, courtesy of support and funding and supplies from the United States, Israel, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and with support from willing helpers like Britain and France.

For example, were ISIS (aka, Daesh) really what it has claimed to be, a fanatical Muslim terror group, clearly it would attack Israel and Israeli interests, but it never does. Never.

Or it would attack the fat princes running Saudi Arabia, princes who in their private lives are well-known for ignoring the strictures of the very conservative Islam they claim to follow. It is only the poor people of Saudi Arabia who are left with those strict rules. And, of course, since now for years since 9/11, the Saudis have worked secretly hand-in-glove with the Israelis, this fact would make them doubly a target.

But again, Saudi Arabia and its horrible elites are never targets for such supposed radical fundamentalist terrorists.

The poor people of Syria, though, people governed by a fairly reasonable government, are targets. With at least a third of a million having been killed and countless injured and made homeless.

And so were the poor people of Libya targets, people previously governed by a man who gave them everything from free education to good water and peace and are now reduced to bloody chaos.

Every once in a while, some of the victims of, or sympathizers against, all of this paid state terror do manage to carry out an attack in revenge for what has been done to them or their families or homes. Such exactly is the nature of the attacks in Paris and this Manchester attack.

They are classic terror operations, but they are not the acts of mindless fanatics. They are works of revenge in response to immense injuries having been inflicted by Western authorities.

Britain and France both have long worked with the United States in actually assisting the paid mercenary “terrorists” working to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria. They supply weapons, they fly missions to destroy Syrian infrastructure, and they give special forces support – all while pretending to fight terror.

And do they really believe, while they fool much of their own populations with dishonesty and propaganda through the ever-accommodating corporate press, that no one else notices what they are doing?

In addition to fifteen years of horror in the Neocon Wars, burning and bombing their way through the Middle East, killing at least two million people, we have the terrible suppurating wound of Palestine and Israel’s terrible treatment of millions, always defended and protected by the United States and by those same governments in Britain and France.

How anyone believes that you can do what Israel and the United States have done without ugly consequences is beyond me. You can only oppress and abuse millions for so long without consequences. That is just human nature.

Of course, the Neocon Wars themselves largely relate to Israel. The United States has been trying to literally re-create the Middle East so that it might come to resemble some American suburban place for Israel’s benefit. Ozzie and Harriet’s charming suburb of the 1950s, or a contemporary American gated community complete with golf courses, so that migrants from America and Europe can pretend they have done nothing wrong to millions they oppress.

It is a horrible set of policies and acts absolutely no different in nature and quality to the works of tyrants of the 1930s or of places like Apartheid South Africa. Only the numbers of lives destroyed are less. Ethnic-cleansing, mass terror, mass killing, treating millions like cattle – that, with no exaggeration, represents the work of the United States and Israel for fifteen years.

I have never understood how rights-loving average Americans can view with indifference a bloody spectacle where even the ownership of a home or farm is not secure and where millions are penned-up as though in prison and, now, where millions are sent running in terror from cities being bombed to become despised refugees.

 

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

Has anyone ever asked why Israel automatically is expected to receive still more subsidy after the United States settles an important matter, nuclear proliferation, to all of the world’s benefit?

Israel and the United States even hold talks, as this article announces, about how much and when?

It is rather ridiculous, sort of any excuse at all for some more subsidies.

But then this is a country whose entire existence depends on subsidies of every kind. In a very real sense, it has no independent existence except as a gigantic recipient.

You might view Israel as a kind of geo-political black hole absorbing streams of resources from the West.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

Imagine my surprise to learn that most people in the world don’t accept extrajudicial murder by governments?

And one has to say, the murdering agency here is not just any government, but a government which blubbers and drones day and night about human rights and democracy and freedom. America’s Secretary of State, just for one, has become practically a recording device playing slogans on loudspeakers as the murders go on.

It wasn’t that many years ago that the world was appalled to learn that juntas in some South American countries made thousands “disappear” by rounding them up, drugging them, and throwing their bodies out of planes over the ocean.

What America is doing – and it is doing it in half a dozen places, including Yemen and Somalia – is indistinguishable from the juntas “disappearing” citizens they didn’t like.

The word “terrorist” in this context is meaningless, serving only as an Orwellian excuse to murder those with whom you disagree and to intimidate others by the example.

It is a measure of the sheer arrogance and corruption of power that the government of the United States assumes it has a right to act in this fashion.

Of course, in this, America closely copies the brutal and unethical practices of Israel, a country which cheers them on as at a big sports event. And Israel is such an example of success, isn’t it?

None of the world’s so-called rogue states – places like North Korea or Burma – are known for this level of lawless savagery.

It is estimated recently that American drone-missile strikes, just in Pakistan, have killed 3,000 people in a few years.

The Pentagon says that “only 20%” of the dead were civilians, and that that is an acceptable level of performance.

600 civilians – over and above the 2400 targets, themselves, each and every one, legally innocent – murdered is acceptable?

But, of course, numbers on deaths coming from the Pentagon always have a large element of hazy fantasy. They murdered 3 million souls in Vietnam, and you never heard a word from them on the extent of that holocaust. All for nothing but an insane Ahab-like compulsion to kill communists.

A million or so people were killed in Iraq, America’s compulsion having changed to Muslims, but no mention of numbers there either.

You cannot have a government of laws unless you are yourself willing yourself to obey them.

When we choose not to be governed by laws, it is the powerful and psychotic who inherit the earth.
__________________________________________

“Iran embarks on $1b. cyber-warfare programTehran has embarked on an ambitious plan to boost its defensive cyber-warfare capabilities and is investing $1 billion in developing new technology and hiring new computer experts…”

Idiot, the most dangerous examples of cyber warfare we’ve ever seen are the Stuxnet and Flame pieces of malware.

It is even possible that Stuxnet – which escaped its intended target of Iran to spread – caused part of the nuclear plant horror in Japan by making controls unusable.

We know from analysis that these two pieces of malware were developed by the same people.

The United States and Israel are the authors.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Latest U.S. drone operation in Pakistan should be judged a success”

Surely, the words of an ethical and moral bankrupt.

A target or targets – uncharged and untried – is assassinated by a buzz-cut thug at a computer console.

In the process, a host of others, all innocents for certain, are murdered, and the cretin writing this editorial says it should be judged a success.

Have you lost all sense of values?

If we all nod and accept this absolutely criminal behavior by a great power, we will lose all claims to a free society which has laws and is organized to honor human rights.

If you do not live by the rule of the law, you are not a whit better than the junta generals who used to kidnap people off the streets of South America and fly them out over the ocean to throw out their drugged bodies.

They “disappeared” thousands in that fashion, and it is certain that the horrible governments committing such crimes believed they were every bit as justified as America in getting rid of people working against their interests.

Now, the apologists for Israel’s brutal excesses always support this kind of thing, and indeed Israel is the very model for this behavior. The word “terroriist” is used like a magic word to make any inhuman act perfectly okay.

It is one thing for an irresponsible state like Israel to behave this unacceptable way, but it quite another for the world’s mightiest nation to be reduced to the same behavior.

We are only protected by rule of law from having the violent barbarians and psychopaths of the world governing. If you abandon rule of law, you have abandoned civilization.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

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

There simply is no doubt that this terrible set of events was “engineered” by the United States, and blame for the bloodshed belongs ultimately to Americans.

Much of what the press blithely calls “Arab Spring” started with Dick Cheney and the Neocons and the CIA, with Israel cheering while looking on, laying out an ambitious long-term program to disturb all the balance in the Middle East.

There was a huge budget appropriation created, hundreds of millions of dollars, at the time, and likely more secret funds provided.

Naturally, the aim was to disturb things in Israel’s favor, although, in many details as things have played through, it has not always gone that way.

The Syrian situation is especially flagrant with Israel and the U.S. having supplied arms to discontented groups – what country does not have these to one degree or another? – and Turkey agreeing to provide the same kind of safe refuge for rebels that parts of Pakistan supply to Afghan fighters.

The Russians are right to oppose this kind of massive covert effort to overturn the governments with which they are friendly.

The U.S. and Israel are total hypocrites here, yapping about democracy when they couldn’t care less about democracy so long as the next government is without Assad.

What kind of democracy do you see in Iraq? In Afghanistan? In Bahrain? In Yemen” In Saudi Arabia? Or in Libya, where American forces killed hundreds of people directly?

The United States itself is so full of dissidents, unhappy minorities, and far-out kooks, you could find hundreds of thousands, including Aryan Nation folks, Militia types, Millenialists, Separatists, down-at-the-heel minorities, and general discontents.

And if you were so inclined, you could secretly heavily arm these extremists and minorities and unbalanced types with guns and explosives and intelligence and fill them with propaganda.

I’m sure it wouldn’t be that difficult to get riots and revolts going in many places.

But all you have to do is look back to the black urban revolts of the 1960s and later to see what would happen. That’s when the National Guard shot hundreds in the streets, and no one said a word about democracy.

All such killing by governments is unacceptable, but it is even more unacceptable that far-away governments would cynically set such violence in motion and sit smiling contentedly, occasional interrupting their perverse pleasure with histrionic speeches about democracy and human rights.

Recall, please, the United States cynically killed maybe a million people in Iraq, and it had nothing to do with democracy. It gave the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s several billion dollars’ worth of arms to kill Russians. It killed tens of thousands itself in Afghanistan without a sign of democracy. It cynically caused some of the Kurds to revolt in Kissinger’s day, resulting in their mass slaughter. It kills in Pakistan, Yemen, Bahrain, and other places, and democracy has nothing to do with it. And it carried out a holocaust in Vietnam, with 3 million horribly killed, and democracy had nothing to do with it.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY DAVID BLAIR IN THE TELEGRAPH

An idiotic question.

Should Israel and the U.S. bomb a country which has attacked no one in its modern history?

A country, moreover, that every expert agency has declared is not working on an atomic weapon?

A country that is a member of international treaties and allows inspection of its sites?

Bombed by what surely rank as the most criminal and aggressive governments in the current world?

An America which has literally killed millions to no point since Vietnam?

An America which to this day is the only nation to have actually used nuclear weapons, twice, on civilians?

And bombed by Israel, a country whose leader has been characterized by two major Western presidents as a perpetual liar?

And Israel a country which week-in, week-out steals the property of others and conducts with regularity extrajudicial murders of people it does not like?

And a country which broke every rule and law there is to secretly obtain nuclear weapons?

A country which shared nuclear weapons technology with apartheid South Africa?

I believe when the question is phrased correctly, the answer is screamingly obvious.

That this kind of nonsense even appears in our papers – as it does with regularity – shows what a distorted world we live in.

The United States is God, and Israel serves as His blessed angel of vengeance.

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.

______________________

“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.