This week’s postings@JfJfP.com


February 19, 2017
Sarah Benton

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This last week, February 13th-19th, 2017, the journeys of PM Netanyahu to the UK and the USA and the connected issue of ‘the 2-state solution’ have been the dominant questions for MidEast commentary.

This also means, we say ruefully, that Pres. Trump is again unavoidable. In what Daoud Kuttab describes as the ‘love fest’ between Netanyahu and Trump we got a better insight into what the Israeli prime minister wants – and it’s not progress in reaching a 2-state solution.

He appears to be building an anti-Iran alliance with Arab states and he wants to know how this will go down in the US :
Bibi hopes to lead Israeli-Arab-US alliance against Iran

It was a tour to gain support for himself against his enemies – Iran, Palestine, Breaking the Silence and other NGOs. He got no luck with the NGOs; unlike Israel where justice minister Ayelet Shaked got a ‘transparency’ (anti-NGO bill) passed –
NGOs to declare themselves foreign agents
the governments of the USA and UK would find it harder to squash the NGOs. It is the failings of Israeli democracy which have caused NGOs to flourish there.

In a sly twist, Peter Beinart suggests Iran does not really trouble Netanyahu. Rather, he talks up the danger so he can present himself to the West as their indispensable man in the region:
Iran, Israel and fake fears

At the joint Trump-Netanyahu press conference the two men startled the commentariat by, on that day at least, renouncing the 2-state solution. Trump said “I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like”.
Trump drops 2-state insistence

This bombshell occasioned much shocked media comment. Without this alibi for inertia what would the ‘international community’ say or do? There Is No Alternative:
No Plan B for Palestinian state

As for Bibi, he floated the proposal that Arab states might take over the resolution of the conflict (they won’t) and he told Trump that resolution of the conflict is not possible until Palestinians – who recognised Israel as a state in 1993 – recognise the country as ‘the Jewish state’. As almost one and a half million Arabs live in Israel, and want to stay there –
Most Israeli Arabs don’t want to live in Palestine –

no Palestinian leader can meet his demand without abandoning the right of Palestinian Israelis to stay where they are. Anyway the demand that Palestinians must re-recognise Israel, this time as ‘the Jewish state’ is so obviously flaky that few take it seriously as a real obstacle to peace:
Bibi to Trump: Palestinians won’t say the magic words to me

The POTUS did not include Palestine among the seven bad countries whose residents should not be allowed into the US. Most of the 30-50,000 direct Palestinian refugees reside in neighbouring refugee camps. Robert Cohen wonders why they do not attract any sympathy or effort to secure a better way of life for them. This is a responsibility the UK should accept given its role in creating the refugees in the first place:
Palestinian refugees as pariahs

If the British state and army bear some responsibility for turning Palestinians into refugees, the Israeli state bears responsibility for treating them as less than fully human. It is Israel’s form of state-imposed, state-policed apartheid done, like S. African apartheid, for the purpose of creating an artificial dominant class of Jews. Mike Cushman :
The Zionist drive for separation

By naming the Israeli state as, in effect a ‘racist endeavour’, Mr Cushman [JfJfP signatory and a founder of Free Speech on Israel] would be guilty of antisemitism under the guidelines of the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). The British Prime Minister announced that her government would accept this definition of antisemitism. There is nothing wrong with that definition. There is a problem with the guidelines/ explanation: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour”. However, it has also been endorsed by the London Assembly, obviously opposed to antisemitism, less obviously ill-informed about the fierce debates about Israel’s role in prompting (unacceptable) hostility to ‘the Jewish state’:
London Assembly votes for IHRA antisemitism definition

There are Israeli teenage girls who would agree. With courage and eloquence they are refusing military service because they refuse to be complicit in oppressing Palestinians:
‘Shining stars’ show a way to reject Occupation

What is a ‘right to self-determination’ and who can claim it? If the ‘self’ is ‘the Jewish people’ Zionists think they have the answer. And the rest have no more rights than their fellow citizens. Daniel Sieradski remonstrates with his fellow American Jews for their silence and passivity about Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians. In that silence, there is nothing to stop the shuffle into apartheid:
Do you want a Jewish ethno-state?

The Trump team clearly underestimated how much many Americans oppose the US unconditional support for a racist state. The Senate hearing for David Friedman’s appointment as ambassador to Israel was frequently disrupted by supporters of Palestinians (whose right to self-determination is not acknowledged by Friedman):
Pro-Palestinians disrupt Friedman hearing

A defiant NGO, one of the targets of the ‘transparency act’, is B’Tselem, the Israeli NGO with a solid record of fact-finding. Its latest report states, with figures, that more Palestinian homes were demolished in 2016 by Israeli authorities than ever before. If this were happening to any other people (Palestinians as pariahs) there would be uproar. But Israel is ‘our’ vital ally:
People clearance by home wreckage

In 1950 no-one would have believed that the left could dwindle into an extinct force in Israel. In the face of the dominant paradigm of security and loyalty none of the more leftish Israeli parties has found a way of presenting a progressive, non-racist alternative to Likud.

A surprising number of those who were part of the Israeli left has jumped ship and found the settlers’ pressure groups provide them with a better sense of purpose and reality, a significant factor in the new dominance of the settlers’ right wing:
Where Israel’s dominant new right came from

‘Friends of Israel’ are nurtured by the Israeli embassy as we have learned from Al Jazeera. A group of health professionals have produced a document on Labour Friends of Israel, accusing LFI, inter alia, of not knowing the facts about the oppression of Palestinians:
Labour Friends of Israel

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