This week’s postings@JfJfP.com

Circumstances dictate that yet again the postings are a medley of Trump-related facts and truths this week, November 21st-27th. He has been consistent in saying he will sort out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that he will bomb the shit out of ISIL and blow up ‘everything’. Many in Arab states fear his intentions but also see him as representing genuine American desires to control the region and get the oil:
MidEast sees Trump as The Real American

So he’ll get the oil at the same time as demonstrating “We love Israel. We will fight for Israel 100 percent, 1,000 percent. It will be there forever“. Who knows what his policy will be.  It appears that the task of sorting out the Middle East has fallen to his son-in-law Jared Kushner. This young Orthodox Jew is credited with bringing order and shape to Trump’s campaign. He doesn’t have any known opinions so that might help:
Jared’s job: curb the flights of fancy

Despite the Jewish (by disputed conversion) daughter and her born-Orthodox husband and their shared extolling of Israel, most American Jews do not see Trump as their torch-bearer. His train of white supremacists makes that impossible. This has been shocking for American Jews. They talk of ‘the catastrophe’ and the revelation that they may face prejudice from white supremacists as:
Our Great Awakening

Palestinians in the US and at home don’t share the shock. They are used to the rule of white supremacists who love Israel:
No surprise to Palestinians that white supremacists love Israel

Badly played Mr Kushner because hostility to Trump’s anti-Muslim, pro-Israel rhetoric has, momentarily at least, united the normally fractious liberal-left and Palestinians says Sam Bahour:
Thank you Mr Trump for your gift of unity

Trump’s proposed ‘Muslim registry’ is a factor in the coming together of Muslims, Jews, progressives:
American Jews denounce ‘Muslim registry’

The power of Trump, Bannon, Kushner does not come primarily from closeness to an office of state but from the shaping of the aggrieved identity of abandoned white men. The ‘alt-right’ – true alternative right wing as opposed to the compromised right wing of the Republican establishment – appears to give a voice to those men. Led by Richard Spencer that implied identity is racist and nationalist. Trump is merely a step on the alt-right’s path to freeing natural white supremacy from the bonds of political correctness:
Awakening white men

We learn from Adam Gabbatt, who endured a day at an alt-right conference, that far from being a crowd of angry white, working class men, the actual activists are young and educated – but still white and male. They cannot bear what they see as the loss of their supremacy:
We’re the future not the old left-behind

Another reason why Jews had hitherto felt safe in America is the fact that many Jews provided high-value services – real estate, consultancy, media skills, financial skills etc – to the powerful. The shock that this will not necessarily protect them if white supremacy (are Jews white?) becomes the dominant culture:
Face it – proximity to power is not protective

Palestinians  however have to wrestle with the same old, same old. Forest fires were breaking out all over Israel – there has been a long drought – last week. This is not something we would normally give space to. But it’s Israel and of course each flame signified Palestinian terrorism. Netanyahu has added pyro-terrorism to the charge sheet of Palestinian crimes:
Fire crisis blamed on Palestinians

However, Yossie Verter amongst others points out that Israel has squandered money on the best machines for waging war against whatever form ‘existential threats’ take while neglecting the known, actual threat of fire in an arid land:
Enflaming the conflict

Meanwhile the long-running sore of poor political leadership and fragmentation is addressed by eight Palestinian intellectuals in a discussion of ‘after Abbas’. Welding Palestinians into a confident liberation movement which will assert its independence from Israel is the theme that they all share:
Palestine’s choices

Rejecting violence has always been the first choice of Palestinian official and civil society leaders. Issa Amro from Hebron is the founder of Youth Against Settlements and he is determined to resist the occupation non-violently, giving him the sobriquet of ‘the Palestinian Gandhi’. Israeli police arrested him, again, and his trial has just opened:
Issa Amro charged with ‘hurting a soldier’s dignity’

And, from August 2015:
Resolute non-violence

Back to the dismal hunt for antisemites in the UK. An Israeli-British student Eran Kahane (Cohen) is standing for the post of President of the Union of Jewish Students on a clear platform of supporting BDS. To the right, eg Jewish Chronicle, that must mean he’s an antisemite despite being a Semite. Evidence is found in his production at York university of Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children which obviously – you don’t have to have seen it – is antisemitic. The response from the university’s Jewish society is revealing and pathetic:
BDS supporter stands as president of students’ Jewish union

Last, but hopefully not least for long, is the movement for Palestinian women which may be an elite venture or could be a more popular initiative – the #womenseriously multi-nation movement for women to have a major voice in devising and implementing peace strategies:
Palestinian women put serious peace on the table