Brian Browne
GET caught stealing a loaf a bread, you suffer the indignity and punishment of a petty thief; in some unenlightened jurisdictions, you might well lose your freedom or your some worthwhile part of a limb. Pinch your neighbor’s spouse and you will be labelled a scoundrel. Steal a corporation, an invention or a bundle of money, you are hailed as a genius. Steal the land of another people, your bust shall be given a place of prominence in the hall of national heroes. Small indiscretions are harshly treated. Large transgressions are painted heroic. For this reason, amoral sociopaths lead many nations. America and Israel occupy top slots that list of nations.
President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu co-hosted a White House gathering last week to unveil their version of a Middle East Peace Plan. This was quite the misnomer. The scam did not cover the Middle East; but it did seek a protective moat around Israel and those Arab lands Israel has forcibly occupied. Nor does the intervention call forth peace any more than a cannonade whispers of peace. Nor is it rightfully deemed a plan. It is but the first phase and most humble requests of a wish list drawn by Netanyahu and his confederates in Tel Aviv. Thus the plan is actually more ominous than its already outlandish contents because behind these current provision lie in wait demands even more unjust and egregious.
This plan cannot be considered even handed since it was crafted by one hand only – Netanyahu — though it bears the name of Trump. Palestinians had no input. They were not asked to draft anything nor were they given prior notice or a chance to review the plan. It was presented as a fait accompli to them much the same way a sharecropper or tenant farmer is presented a contract by an overbearing landlord. In this present instance, the sting sinks even deeper. Part of the sharecropper’s ordeal is that the landlord, at least, owns the real estate. In today’s case, the Palestinians are reduced to being squatters on their own land. The universal tenets and respect for property rights are being violated on wholesale basis.
A common law theorem states that possession is 9/10ths of the law. That axiom has been supplanted. Possession of a deadly gun and a strong arm is now 11/10ths of the law. The weak owner of desirable land will soon be known as the former owner of that land.
Thus, the plan was never meant for the Palestinians to read or revise. That does not mean they were not meant to digest the thing. However, this objective was to be accomplished through the more literal means of cramming it down their throat.
In his public statement announcing the plan, Trump generously asserted his plan was intended to give the Palestinians a fair shake. Upon outlining the peace, he proceeded to thoroughly shake down the Palestinians. He mentioned the plan affirmed his prior support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He added that Palestinians could have their capital in “eastern” Jerusalem. In saying eastern but not East Jerusalem Trump had not committed a harmless error of semantics; the seemingly innocuous deviation is loaded with meaning. Trump was being disingenuous in a manner so subtle that he could have only learned it from Netanyahu.
In the parlance of the region, East Jerusalem is, in fact, one side of the holy city. Eastern Jerusalem carries an entirely different meaning. It connotes some indeterminate site in the suburbs east of the city itself. As important as Jerusalem is to Israeli nationalism, it is also important to Palestinians. Trump’s cunning formulation seems to cut the city is half; in reality it gives the whole place to Netanyahu. Trump used this phraseology to deceive uninformed public opinion that he was being fair when, in fact, he was denigrating Palestinian aspirations to the point of insult. Israel has no greater historic claim on Jerusalem than the Palestinians. To resort to a questionable interpretation of the Old Testament or Torah to claim Israel has a superior and exclusive right to the city is to base delicate critical foreign policy decisions on emotional, absolutist considerations immune to nuance, adjustment or compromise. This is not the way to resolve competing stakes where both sides actually can assert some element of justice to support their cause. This is a vehicle for perpetual conflict.
Trump and Netanyahu said their offer gave the Palestinians the state they crave. The map they presented showed otherwise. The peace plan would forever give Israel the land they now occupy through prior war and through creating settlements by the forced removal of individual Palestinians and their families from the homes and lands they owned. The state the Palestinians are now offered does not resemble the territory of any nation you had ever seen. It resembles the holes of a dart board. The proposed state is a motley collection of separate communities or enclaves divided by an ever increasing number of Jewish settlements. In some instances, these enclaves are connected only by tunnels, not even surface roads.
Moreover, this Palestinian unit is shorn of the fundamental aspects of sovereignty. They will be forbidden an army or security force. Israel will control its borders and dominate foreign and economic policy. The best farmland is being transferred; Palestinians will be asked to plow rocks and harvest dust. Access to sufficient water is being further denied. The Palestinians will be reduced to praying for rain just to whet their mouths and their decrepit farm implements. The best areas for housing will be reserved only for Israelis. The Palestinians will be forced to dwell even deeper inside the poverty of their poverty.
In sum, the Palestinian entity will be nothing but the modern day version of the reservations the U.S. government used to obscure and decimate Native Americans. This is simply a Bantustan minus the Bantus.
Trump calls this the last chance for the Palestinians to claim a small corner of the map which they might call Palestine. Trump’s words carried not the aura of friendly advice. They sound more like a threat. In essence, the deal requires that the Palestinians be content with American uncertain promises of future economic assistance, knowing that the land will be swiped from them in any event. So they better take the illusory offer of a pittance before that sliver is withdrawn as well.
Trump actually believes this plan might work because he thinks everything can be reduced to money. Thus, he dangles this promise of an undetermined amount of future aid to silence the Palestinians over the theft the rest of the document inflicts. For all his bluster about American national pride, he seems woefully ignorant about the constituent elements of nationalism. He looks upon the matter as simply another real estate deal, though larger than most. As such, the object is for the side with the greater leverage to sculpt a deal to its utmost advantage. This entails the acquisition of the most land for the smallest price. Here, he sees himself as assuming the role of Netanyahu’s realtor. However, a nation’s ties to its land are not fungible with money. They cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. If such a reduction was valid, many of mankind’s wars would have been replaced by the timely passage of a bank draft. If a people are willing to die for their land, they are likely to object to cheaply sell it.
Netanyahu suffers illusions but his are different than Trump’s. He knows this deal virtually means death for any Palestinian leader venal or dumb enough to take a second whiff of its scent. This is how Netanyahu orchestrated things to be. He doesn’t want Palestinian acceptance of the half-baked deal. That would tie his hands. He prays the other side rejects this unfair arrangement. This would free him to root them almost entirely from the rest of the land he craves instead of just partially ousting them as this plan would do. Netanyahu reasons there is no reason to compromise for 3/4ths a loath this evening when you can seize the whole loaf, the wheat field and bakery by dawn tomorrow. The Israeli PM also is looking over his shoulder at the approach of criminal justice. He hopes that fashioning this deal will seal his re-election and his place in history such that he will be immunized from the application of the law. If he loses office, then he might find himself in a small, uncomfortable confinement not dissimilar to the prison he seeks for the Palestinians.
By endorsing the land grab, Trump has upended US policy and international law. America has long tolerated the illegal settlements and land occupation while maintaining lip service to neutral policy and established law. If America had told Israel to stop, it would have stopped. Instead America privately winked and nodded, encouraging Israeli consumption of another people’s land. In a way, Trump has been more honest than his predecessors by unveiling the dishonesty the American government had mastered in private. He openly broke with stated policy; in doing so, he also breaches several covenants of international law prohibiting the forced conquest of another people’s land even though his own nation had authored some of these laws via UN resolutions. It seems that He believes that making America great means rendering it an outlaw nation.
None of this would have been possible without the rather curious phenomenon of American conservative Christian support for Netanyahu’s Zionism. This group believes they are even bigger winners than Israel for they see this plan as accelerating the advent of the End of Days. Their uncharitably harsh view of the end of times gives God a bad name.
They see themselves as dispensing God’s will by oppressing another people. They believe they will speed the second coming of the Prince of Peace by literally sacrificing the lives and well-being of several hundred thousand hapless people some of whom also happen to be Christian. Somehow this scenario they so crave does not seem to fit the ways and teachings of the Jesus found any Bible I have ever read. Their Jesus is an ill-tempered, warrior-like deity who cares not about people. For this deity, people are but a means to an end. Strangely, their Jesus sounds a lot like them. Seems that they have refashioned Jesus to resemble them instead of refashioning themselves to follow after him. As such, what they do is more in the spirit of Caesar than of Jesus. The Christian right has drunken of the intoxicant of unthinking self-indulgence. They read their own preferences into the Bible instead of reading its passages for what they mean.
Their biased interpretation leads them astray. In marching the Palestinians toward hell on earth they may be doing themselves an even more grievous turn. By supporting Israel no matter the wrong it does, they believe Jesus will soon return to earth to take them to Heaven and condemn the rest of the world, including the Israelis, to the under-region. One would have to be of a blanched and warped view of the Divine to believe he would task his children to perform such Machiavellian deceit in order to save their very souls. This is lunatic thinking.
They proceed blindly through the demon gates singing hymns and lifting up prayers asking for cruelty unto others. They belief that clutching their Bible, but not understanding it, will secure them from hell. However, if justice actually exists, their mean and cold-hearted interpretation of the good book may prove to be their one-way ticket to that place of woe eternal. May God help them for they well know what they do but know not what it means.
In the end, Donald and Bibi stood before the world as two gangsters in the place where two statesmen should have been. They grinned and smiled the smiles of those who believe they have succeeded in pulling off a great larceny without being detected. Each of these men believes he is the smartest person on earth while, at the same time, knowing this wild claim to be untrue. Thus, they are a strange, conflicted mixture of bravado and cowardice, of cunning and foolishness, of evil and greater evil.
One is the most dangerous person on the planet. The other is the second most dangerous. I leave to the individual reader to determine for yourself which one you rank over the other to be tagged with this most awful superlative. These men seek to make a travesty of the world. The peace plan they espouse heralds greater confrontation. They think themselves so shrewd that they can deceive reality. They see themselves as victorious because they possess superior power and muscle. In the short-term, they may well be right. No one can challenge them directly for the moment. But things are less certain in the long-run. What they have done is to increase the odds of violence and fighting. This they can control and win but only for a time. Yet, they have made no provision nor given any thought to what might happen should times change. At some point, the strong man weakens or a marriage of convenience becomes inconvenient. The swift cannot dodge the rain nor the strong, exerting all his strength, repel the wind. The devices of men crumble.
Peace without a modicum of justice is but war in hibernation.
2348060340825 sms only
Leave a Reply