Apartheid Made Official: Deal of the Century is a Ploy and Annexation is the New Reality

by Dr Ramzy Baroud

Israeli bulldozers work on a new Israeli settler road, in Nabi Elias village, in the occupied West Bank, on 6 February. Some 700 olive trees were uprooted from private Palestinian land to build the road. Ahmad Al-Bazz ActiveStills

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moving quickly to alter the political reality in Palestine, and facing little or no resistance.

On September 10, Netanyahu declared his intentions to annex swathes of Palestinian land adjacent to the Jordan River, an area that covers 2,400 square kilometers, or nearly a third of the Occupied West Bank. That region, which extends from Bisan in the north to Jericho in the south, is considered to be Palestine’s food basket, as it accounts for an estimated 60 percent of vegetables that are produced in the West Bank.

While Israel has already colonized nearly 88 percent of the entire Palestinian Ghoor (or Jordan Valley), dividing it between illegal agricultural settlements and military zones, it was always assumed that the militarily occupied region will be included within the border of a future Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s announcement has been linked to Israel’s general elections of September 17. The Israeli leader is desperate, as he is facing “unprecedented alliances” that are all closing in to unseat him from his political throne. But this cannot be all. Not even power-hungry Netanyahu would alter the political and territorial landscape of Israel and Palestine indefinitely in exchange for a few votes.

Indeed, talks of annexation have been afoot for years and have long preceded the September elections, or the previous ones in April.

A sense of euphoria has been felt among Israel’s rightwing officials since the advent of Donald Trump to the White House. The excitement was not directly linked to Trump but to his Middle East team, like-minded pro-Israel US officials whose support for Israel is predicated on more than personal interests, but religious and ideological beliefs as well.

White House senior adviser, Jared Kushner, selected his team very carefully: Jason Greenblatt as special envoy for Middle East peace, David Friedman as United States Ambassador to Israel, and layers of other second-tier officials whose mission was never aimed at resolving conflict or brokering peace, but supervising a process in which Israel finalizes its colonization of Palestine unhindered.

Kushner’s master stroke is epitomized in the way he presented his objectives as part of a political process, later named “Deal of the Century”.

In all fairness, Kushner’s team hardly labored, or even pretended to be, peacemakers, especially as they oversaw the US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territories. Indeed, none of these officials tried to hide their true motives. Just examine statements made by the just-resigned Greenblatt where he refused to name illegal Jewish settlements as such, but as “neighborhoods and cities”; and Friedman’s outright support for the annexation of parts of the Occupied West Bank, and much more.

The US political discourse seemed in complete alignment with that of Israel’s right-wing parties. When right-wing extremist politicians, the likes of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, began floating the idea of annexing most or all of the Occupied West Bank, they no longer sounded like marginal and opportunistic voices vying for attention. They were at the center of Israeli politics, knowing full well that Washington no longer had a problem with Israel’s unilateral action.

It could be argued, then, that Netanyahu was merely catching up, as the center of gravity within his right-wing coalition was slipping away to younger, more daring politicians. In fact, Israel, as a whole, was changing. With the Labor Party becoming almost entirely irrelevant, the Center’s political ideology moved further to the right, simply because supporting an independent Palestinian state in Israel has become a form of political suicide.

Therefore, Netanyahu’s call for the annexation of Palestinian land east of the Jordan River must not be understood in isolation and only within the limited context of the Israeli elections. Israel is now set to annex large parts of the West Bank that it deems strategic. This is most likely to include all illegal settlement blocks and the Jordan Valley as well.

In fact, Netanyahu said on September 11 that he was ready to annex the Jordan Valley region even before the election date, but was blocked by the Attorney General’s office. Netanyahu would not have taken such a decision if it represented a political risk or if it faced a pushback from Washington. It is, then, sadly, a matter of time.

Suspiciously absent in all of this are the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Arab League, the European Union and, of course, the United Nations and its many outlets and courts. Aside from a few shy statements – like that of the spokesperson of the UN, Stéphane Dujarric, decrying that “unilateral actions are not helpful in the peace process” – Israeli leaders are facing little or no hindrance whatsoever as they finalize their complete colonization of all Palestinian land.

Unable to stage any kind of meaningful resistance against Israel, the Palestinian leadership is so pathetically insisting on utilizing old terminologies. The official Palestinian response to Netanyahu’s annexation pledge, as communicated by Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, came only to underscore the PA’s political bankruptcy.

“Netanyahu is the chief destroyer of the peace process,” Shtayyeh said, warning that annexing parts of the West Bank would have negative consequences.

For his part, the PA leader Mahmoud Abbas resorted, once more, to empty threats. Abbas said in a statement, “All agreements and their resulting obligations would end if the Israeli side annexes the Jordan Valley, the northern Dead Sea, and any part of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.”

Neither Abbas nor Shtayyeh seem troubled by the fact that a “peace process” does not exist, and that Israel has already violated all agreements.

While the PA is desperately hanging on to any reason to justify its continued existence, Netanyahu, with the full support of Washington, is moving forward in annexing the West Bank, thus making apartheid an official and undisputed reality.

The Palestinian leadership must understand that the nature of the conflict is now changing. Conventional methods and empty statements will not slow down the Israeli push for annexation nor Tel Aviv’s determination to expand its apartheid to all of Palestine. If Palestinians continue to ignore this reality altogether, Israel will continue to single-handedly shape the destiny of Palestine and its people.

Ramzy Baroud  is a journalist, author and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His last book is ‘The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story’, and his forthcoming book is ‘These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons’. Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Zaim University in Istanbul.

Trump’s Middle East Communications Theater

Jared Kushner (Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro via Flickr)

by Sam Bahour

One of the key architects of President Trump’s Middle East peace efforts, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, has embarked on a frontal assault in one of the key Middle East battlefields, media communications. For someone who prides himself on being able to create a “business plan for the region,” Kushner is looking more like an undergraduate student in Business 101 class than someone seriously assembling a plan that can advance peace.

The McClatchyDC news agency recently broke a story that few other Western media outlets have found worthy to cover. Armed with U.S. citizens’ tax dollars and a stillborn economic plan, Kushner is deploying a data operation to sway Arab media on Middle East peace to make the U.S. case.

McClatchyDC journalist Michael Wilner wrote, “At Jared Kushner’s direction, U.S. government agencies have combined data tools and human expertise for the first time to officially rank Arab media outlets over their coverage of the Middle East peace process.”

In what seems like another ill-fated attempt to address the failure of his efforts to date, the latest being his Peace to Prosperity economic workshop in Bahrain, Kushner and company seem willing to go to any extreme to force-feed the Trump administration’s attempt to impose a surrender agreement on Palestinians rather than address the core issues head-on.

The report continued: “Three senior administration officials said the purpose of Kushner’s project is to connect with local populations as effectively as possible – to better understand “what’s driving the street” across the Arab world, so that he and his team can target their communications with greater precision.”

First, why should the “Arab Street” trust anyone from the “DC Swamp?” Second, is Kushner doing a market survey to find out what Arab “customers” want or is his interest merely in how to sell them “junk products” they’ve already created, such as blindly supporting an extremist Israel right-wing political program that is moving the entire region toward another round of violence, not to mention moving Israel closer to its own demise?

One senior U.S. administration official said, “we spent so much time putting together a political plan, and putting together an economic plan, that we wanted to spend the same amount of time understanding the regional media environment…”

Hmm, “understanding the … environment.” It seems not to dawn on any “senior” official to take a deep look at what has shaped the “environment” over the past seven decades. The violent creation of the State of Israel, the violent dispossession of Palestinians, 52 years of a violent U.S.-Israeli military occupation, over 600,000 illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the violent Israeli siege of two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and structural and institutional discrimination inside the State of Israel—the list is long.

Wouldn’t it have been more useful to survey to learn the regional opinions and beliefs of the population? Seems not, since the only aim here is to sell, not learn.

The senior U.S. administration official also said that “a lot of the outlets that have been anti-America or anti-Israel in the past just haven’t had outreach or access to the U.S. government.”

Is this U.S. administration totally blind to the recent history of the region? Do Iraqis not know that the U.S. and its allies mutilated their country—without reason I may add? Did the Lebanese not know that U.S. warships were bombing them in Israel’s 1982 Lebanon War? Are Palestinians living under military occupation unaware that U.S. F-16s and F-35s are sold to Israel to bomb Palestinians into submission?

Maybe, just maybe, the region has had one dose too many of U.S. “outreach” and, as a result, Arab media is not willing to buy U.S. lies anymore.

The McClatchyDC report noted that Kushner “commissioned the project in August 2018, shortly after he and his policy team completed drafting the core political elements of their plan for Israelis and Palestinians.” Again, what salesman tries to sell investors on a project before first analyzing the needs/wants of the key players? Kushner not only put the cart before the horse, he ignored the horse altogether.

Kushner’s efforts are divided into two categories. One product assesses the public consumption of news in each country in the region and the second type of report “examines specific media outlets, assessing the neutrality of each organization in how it portrays U.S. policy, rating its influence and listing its ownership, based on analyses from two government agencies examining publicly available material.” This would be too funny if lives were not at stake. What determines “neutrality” in Jared’s eyes? What Kushner actually means is “How pro-Israel are Mideast media outlets?”

It was reported that Kushner’s team discovered that “cell phone penetration among Palestinians is so high that a majority now get their news on mobile devices while waiting in line to go through an Israeli checkpoint.” I wonder, did the report also note how Israel prohibits Palestinians from having access to full-spectrum Internet services? Did it note that the West Bank was only permitted to have access to 3G services last year and Gaza still awaits Israeli approval?

McClatchyDC reported that “A major focus is understanding how media in the Middle East is characterizing the administration’s diplomatic efforts.” Kushner and company would be well-advised to be more concerned with “why” they do so and not the “how.”

Ned Price, former National Security Council spokesperson in the Obama administration, told McClatchyDC, “I am much less concerned with their ability to communicate than I am about the substance of their communications.”

Bingo, someone gets it!

Even Dennis Ross, a veteran Middle East envoy who served former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, concurred, arguing that strategic communications can only go so far. “In some ways it misses the point, because if the substance of what they’re representing is completely unacceptable, it doesn’t matter how they target media,” Ross said. “Maybe that’s what they should’ve done in 2017—now you’re trying to reverse attitudes. And that’s an uphill climb. Strategic communications doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

The bottom line is simple and doesn’t require wasting more U.S. taxpayers’ funds on trying to tame Arab media into accepting the unacceptable. It’s past time that this U.S. administration wake up and smell Israel’s 52-year military occupation. Then and only then will strategic communications work—namely, communicating to their strategic ally Israel that it should exit the State of Palestine, once and for all.

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American business consultant from Ramallah/Al-Bireh in the West Bank. He is chair of the board of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy(AVPE) and serves as a policy adviser to Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network and is co-editor of “Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians” (1994). He blogs atePalestine.com.

Why Bahrain was Chosen as Venue of Palestine’s Sellout?

By: Kayhan Int’l 

The Persian Gulf island state of Bahrain, ruled by the repressive Aal-e Khalifa minority regime of pirate origin, is making world headlines these days – both in the so-called mainstream media of an increasingly isolated US, and the independent media of the free world – mainly because of two gatherings.

One is "in Bahrain”, whose rulers desperately cling to the American apron for survival in vain, and the other is "on Bahrain”, whose long suppressed majority, inspired by the model of freedom presented by the Islamic Revolution, is aspiring to be masters of its own destiny – on the pattern of Iraq following fall of the Ba’th minority dictator, Saddam.
The one in the Bahraini capital Manama starts today under the deceptive theme ‘Economic Investment and Peace for Prosperity in Palestine’ as part of the so-called ‘Deal of the Century’ drafted by US President Donald Trump’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner for the grand sellout of the Palestinian people as permanent thralls to the usurper Zionist entity.
The other started last night in holy Qom, with scholars of various countries in attendance under auspices of Bahrain’s senior-most religious figure, Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qasim – in exile in Iran – and titled: "The Youth Resistance Movement & Commemoration of the Martyrs of Bahrain.”
At the Manama gathering attended mainly by reactionary and unrepresentative Arab regimes, the delegates are being entertained to Trump’s vision of the future for Gaza City, which looks like Tel Aviv: a bustling metropolis with casinos, bars, discos, and scintillating beaches for barely clad men and women, beckoning tourists from around the world, and of course, immune from any Israeli airstrikes for having traded national and Islamic values for the decadent culture of the West.
And Trump’s or more properly Jared the Jew’s vision doesn’t stop there. It draws an imaginary picture of a free to travel 5-billion-dollar highway and railway connecting Gaza with the West Bank of Jordan River, without the current Israeli roadblocks, and major international investors injecting billions of dollars of capital into the Palestinian economy (fifty billion dollars over a ten-year period), doubling GDP and removing all vestiges of poverty.
But wait, the Americans, the Zionists, and the oil-rich Persian Gulf potentates are not dangling this dazzling bait for nothing. They mean business and they want the Palestinians to part with Islam’s third holiest city, Bayt al-Moqaddas, including the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, which Israel will convert into a Jewish temple.
Moreover, there will be no more talk of any Palestinian state, neither the return of the Palestinian refugees from other countries to their ancestral homes, nor any mention of the term ‘Palestinian citizens’, who henceforth will be known as ‘Israeli Arabs’ having second class status to their Zionist overlords.
All it needs for implementation is the signature of the Palestinian Authority (PA), whose assent means legal sealing of the ‘Deal of the Century’ that will grant powers to the Zionist regime, with approval from the UN, the active involvement of the US, and the tacit support of the reactionary Arab regimes, to brutally crush Hamas, Islamic Jihad and all other Islamic/nationalist organizations refusing to sell their homeland.
For the moment Mahmoud Abbas has decided to boycott the Bahrain meeting, but is under intense pressure from both elements inside his PA for making money (which actually does not exist) and the Arab states, especially the Wahhabi cultish regime of Riyadh – the milk cow which slavishly serves the US and now its newfound Zionist cousins.
It is clear to anyone with an iota of intelligence that only a fool will fall for the ‘Conspiracy of the Century’. It means those pushing forward this deal, from Trump to his trumpeters among the Arabs, are living in a fool’s paradise. They haven’t reckoned the resolve of the Resistance Front, which is growing stronger by the day and is determined to liberate Palestine – against heavy odds and no matter the cost.
But the question is: Why, of all Arab states, Bahrain was chosen as the venue for this scandalous gathering?
The answer is obvious. A rootless regime, not even having any clan pretensions to continue its repressive rule, and depending for survival on the US 5th fleet, is the exact replica of Israel. The Aal-e Khalifa pirates who with British help seized Bahrain in early 19th century, is depopulating Bahrain of its original inhabitants and like the Jewish influx to Palestine from around the world, is settling people of all other countries in order to change the island state’s demography.
Thousands of Bahrainis are living in exile, while thousands linger in prisons, and so far 800 citizens have been stripped of their nationality.
The reign of terror in Bahrain makes the conference in holy Qom all the more important, and holds out high hopes of liberation – Insha Allah (God Willing) sooner than that of Palestine. 
It is only the iron resolve of the Youth Resistance Movement and the sacred blood of the martyrs that have the power to triumph over tyrants – as the Saudi clan will also soon find out to the perpetual dismay of the US and Britain.