Kushner’s Threat to Palestine: An Interview with Norman Finkelstein

by COLTER LOUWERSE

Photograph Source: Max Goldberg/Iowa State Daily from USA – CC BY 2.0

Norman Finkelstein is a leading authority on the Israel-Palestine conflict. While most observers have proclaimed Jared Kushner’s ongoing ‘peace’ initiative to be dead in the water, Norman warns that it may pose a serious threat to the Palestinians. In part 1 of this interview, I spoke with him about what we can expect from the Kushner initiative going forward.

What is the end goal of the Kushner-led ‘peace’ process?

The Trump administration hasn’t demonstrated focus or consistency at the diplomatic level. But I don’t agree with all the talk that the Kushner plan is “dead on arrival”.

The prime mover behind the Kushner plan is neither Israel nor the US. It’s Saudi Arabia. Saudi covets an open alliance with the Israelis and the US. It fears the Iran axis. It’s a feudal despotism largely impotent on its own; it needs others to pull its chestnuts out of the fire. Witness the Saudi debacles in Yemen and Syria. On a more immediate level, there’s the Khashoggi affair—MBS (Muhammad Bin Salman) is desperate to be rehabilitated in Washington. If Saudi enters into an open alliance with Israel, even liberal members of Congress will forgive his “indiscretions.” So the Saudis harbor strong motives to push through the Kushner plan. The one and only obstacle to an open alliance with Israel is the Palestine Question. If they can resolve it, or appear to resolve it, then it’s clear sailing.

What do the Israelis get out of it? They’ve already gotten from Trump recognition of Jerusalem and the Golan as belonging to Israel. The Kushner plan’s political component will almost certainly include recognition of what’s called the “major settlement blocs” as belonging to Israel. That’s about 10 percent of the West Bank on the “Israeli” side of the wall. For now, Israel doesn’t want the rest of the territory because it doesn’t want all those Arabs. It will be said by Trump supporters, correctly, that the whole elite establishment in the US—liberal to conservative, Democrat to Republican—has always supported Israeli annexation of the settlement blocs.

However, recognition won’t be a huge victory for Netanyahu because the Trump regime is too eccentric. It’s possible that if Trump is defeated in 2020, the Democratic president will resume the status quo ante and pretend the Trump years never happened. Then we’d be back to Jerusalem, the Golan, and the settlement blocs having the same status as in prior US administrations.

What would be a huge victory for Netanyahu would be an open alliance with Saudi Arabia. It would spell the official end of the Arab League. One of the core unifying elements of the Arab League was opposition to Israel. The Gulf states will realign with Israel, alongside Egypt and Jordan. Israel’s biggest diplomatic victories in the Arab world were Camp David, 1978 (Egypt’s defection from the “Arab Front”), and Oslo, 1993 (the PLO’s de facto collaboration with the US and Israel). A Saudi-Gulf open realignment would be Israel’s third big diplomatic victory.

What does the United States stand to gain from this?

The US motive has actually not been disguised. You have to pay attention to the language; they call it the “Deal of the Century”. Trump, Jared and Ivanka are business people. They don’t really care about politics per se, except as a vehicle for personal enrichment. They just want to cut deals. Jared sees the Gulf as chock full of real estate deals. It could become his playground literally for life as MBS, Saudi’s ruler for life, would be indebted to Jared for life.

The Palestinians don’t have many options. In the case of Gaza, the leadership has to show something for all the suffering in the Great March of Return. The Saudis will be able to offer them, alongside desperately needed funds, a partial lifting of the blockade. Israel would probably go along with it.

The Palestinian leadership has only ever cared about squirreling away money in their private bank accounts and paying the P.A.’s employees. It’s always been a corrupt patronage system. (The likes of pathetic Saeb Erekat also enjoy the pretenses and pageantry of power.) There was a very calculated policy by the US over the past couple of years to bankrupt the PA in order to soften it for the “Deal of the Century”. The Palestinian Authority is now broke, and desperate. Abbas is just bargaining as he says “No, No, No”; he wants to see how much money he can wring out of Washington and Riyadh. PLO hack Hanan Ashrawi says that the Palestinians can’t be bought for a “fistful of dollars.” True enough; they demand two fistfuls.

None of what I’ve suggested is set in stone. Consider the precursors–Carter and Clinton. Carter’s tenacity and grasp of micro-detail during the Camp David talks in 1978 was terrifying. It was said of Clinton that he knew every street in Jerusalem by the end of the 2000 (abortive) negotiations. To seal a deal does require that kind of laser-like focus.

Is Trump or anyone around him capable of that focus? At some level Saudi-US dollars can’t on their own set all the pieces in place. You need people who are equipped to do the tough negotiating.

That’s the level where things might not fall into place. But at the level of generality, all this talk about “it’s dead” and “Kushner is an idiot”– well, he is an idiot but it’s beside the point because if you look at the balance of political forces and the converging political agendas of the main players, it’s possible.

If the Trump administration is successful will the international consensus on the two-state settlement erode?

It will erode: once the dollars start rolling in, the Palestinians will do whatever suits their bankrollers. But at some point a new generation will undoubtedly emerge that demands the dignity of equality before the law.

The two-state settlement will then be over. If there is a resolution along the Trump-Saudi-Israeli lines, at least one generation will have to pass before a new leadership arises with a new vision, which will probably be one state. I won’t be around to see it. John Brown didn’t live to see the abolition of slavery. I will have been one link in the chain, one rung on Jacob’s Ladder.

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What can we expect to come out of the State of Palestine’s case against Israel at the ICC?

The ICC is a very corrupt place. The former chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has been steeped in personal (sexual assault), political, and financial corruption. The iniquity of the current chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, reaches back to her judicial role during the Gambian military junta. Of late, she has been fighting tooth and nail not to investigate Israeli criminality.

My guess is, initially, she feared being Goldstoned.^[1] She knew the Mossad would track down the 10,000 skeletons in her closet and she would end up like Richard Goldstone. So she had a strong personal motive to quash the complaints lodged against Israel in the ICC.

Then, an institutional motive emerged as US Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Advisor Bolton publicly declared that if the ICC investigated the US or Israel, the Trump administration would destroy the ICC. They were very blunt about it. And they’ve already set about it. When Bensouda attempted to launch a preliminary examination of US crimes in Afghanistan, she was immediately stripped of her US visa. Every ICC member has a t-shirt that says, “I LOVE NEW YORK”. The US message was clear: “Investigate Israel and you’ll never see Times Square again.” It worked like a charm. The pre-trial chamber overruled Bensouda and dropped the case.

On the other hand, a civil war has erupted in the ICC. There are forces within it that have been pushing back as they demand that Bensouda investigate Israeli crimes.

There are two referrals before the ICC now. One relates to the “Flotilla Incident” (Mavi Marmara) in 2010, and the second is the State of Palestine complaint relating mostly to the illegal Israeli settlements, Operation Protective Edge (2014) and the Great March of Return (ongoing). Bensouda has spent the past six years trying to bury the Mavi Marmara case. She keeps declaring the case closed but forces in the ICC keep replying “No, you have to investigate Israel.”

The stakes are very high. If Bensouda closes both complaints without even launching an investigation, its transparent that she’s completely corrupt. But if she indicts on any complaint, the US will set about destroying the ICC. The book I’ve written demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that Bensouda has been whitewashing Israel. It poses two choices to Bensouda: indict Israel or step down. There is no third option.

But even if the ICC chooses to indict there is no chance that any Israeli general is ever going to stand trial.

Absolutely.

So, many would say, What’s the point?

It’s like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advisory opinion in 2004, which declared the wall Israel has been building in the West Bank illegal. It’s another weapon in the arsenal of the Palestinians in the battle for public opinion. It would place on the public record that the two leading judicial bodies in the world, the ICJ and ICC, have both found Israel guilty of egregious international crimes. This is a powerful weapon to persuade public opinion if and when a Palestinian mass movement emerges that is truly committed to fighting the occupation.

Notes

1. After a UN Fact-Finding Mission led by the esteemed South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded that the goal of Israel’s 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead had been to “punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population” in Gaza, Israel responded with a torrent of personal attacks until Goldstone (but not his coauthors) recanted the report, effectively destroying his career. ↑

Colter Louwerse PhD is a researcher in Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

Did the Saudi hackers who trapped Khashoggi target Jeff Bezos for nude photos?

Juan Cole

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan, breaks down the sordid web of ties between Saudi hackers, the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Jeff Bezos of Washington Post, in his article for the ‘Informed Current’, titled: “Did the Saudi Hackers who Trapped Khashoggi Target Jeff Bezos for Nude Photos?”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ security team has written in The Daily Beast that Saudi Arabian intelligence hacked his phone and passed to the National Enquirer intimate photos that the married Jeff Bezos had sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez. Although the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, has claimed that it received the material from Sanchez’s brother, this claim may be a cover story intended to deflect attention from the Saudi role (of which AMI may or may not have been aware. AMI reiterated its denials after the Daily Beast story appeared.

Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has often been critical of Trump, who in turn has viciously attacked the newspaper and its owner.

Saudi Heir Apparent Mohamed Bin Salman (the notorious MBS) established a strong relationship with Trump and his Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner in 2017, which had been prepared for by the de facto head of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammad Bin Zayed, who secretly flew into the US after the November election to meet with Trump officials.

It has been reported that MBS targeted expatriate Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in part because he had written critically about Trump at the Washington Post, where he was given a column after he fled the increasingly dictatorial regime in Riyadh.

Post columnist David Ignatius, considered close to the CIA, revealed that Khashoggi himself was hacked by a cyber espionage ring run from Riyadh by Saud al-Qahtan, one of MBS’ chief lieutenants. Al-Qahtan had assembled a suite of hacking tools from Italy, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Here’s another corner to the conspiracy: reports keep surfacing that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attempted to get Qatar to take a billion-dollar white elephant, 666 Fifth Avenue, off his hands. He and his father had purchased the building for way too much money, and were not able to get their money back. A balloon payment was coming due, and they were desperate to unload the property. They approached Qatar, but its investment fund knows a pig of an investment when it sees one.

So the claim is that Kushner conspired with MBS, who had his own reasons to be annoyed with Qatar, to frame Qatari Emir Tamim Bin Hamad for terrorism, mainly because of ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to put his country under blockade or even invade and take it over.

The June 5, 2017, attack on Qatar involved hacking into the state broadcasting facilities and altering the speech Tamim gave. It is also alleged that the Saudis hacked the smartphones of the emir and his circle.

Qatar, under siege and blockade, may have greenlighted an investment company in which it has an interest to lease the Kushner property.

With the Kushners mollified, Trump suddenly began tweeting positively about Qatar, after having branded it a font of terrorism when the blockade was launched. So Emir Tamim of Qatar was hacked to benefit Trump and his in-laws.

Then Khashoggi turned critical of Trump, and he was hacked by al-Qahtan’s team, and then the order went out to murder him.

Next the Saudi hackers went after Bezos, obtaining photos of him naked, and broke up his marriage, costing him half his fortune, because of the Washington Post’s criticism of Trump and possibly because it wouldn’t let Khashoggi’s murder go.

The Washington Post connection links Bezos and Khashoggi. The Saudi connection links Qatar and Kushner, though it cannot be assumed that he was involved in the Bezos gambit.

Unfortunately, Trump’s dirty tricks and influence-peddling abroad are reshaping the world – at least the parts of the globe under American influence.

Mohammed bin Salman knows his grip on power dependent on US: Askari

TEHRAN, Oct. 08 (MNA) –Professor Hossein Askari, an expert on Saudi Arabia who also teaches international business at the George Washington University, believes that “Mohammed bin Salman knows that his grip on power and his family’s rule has been and is totally dependent on the United States.”

Hossein Askari, who teaches at George Washington University, tells the Tehran Times that “He wants only one thing—to rule Saudi Arabia and he will do anything to guarantee this. Let me repeat, ANYTHING. MBS will do as he is told by Trump and Kushner.”

Following is the text of the interview:

In his latest statement on Saudi Arabia, Trump humiliated Saudi Arabia again, and said: If America does not exist, Saudi Arabia will disappear within a few days, and Saudi Arabia owes its stability and security to the United States. In fact, Trump has made such a statement in the direction of selling security to Saudi Arabia. Why this statement has been repeated at this time?

A: First of all, Trump likes to drive home the simple point that he is boss. So Saudi Arabia better understand that and do what Trump wants. Whatever that may be: buy more US arms, pump more oil to reduce oil prices, do whatever is needed in Yemen and Syria, cooperate as needed with Israel, and above all encourage the Al-Saud tribe and other wealthy Saudis to enrich the Trump family businesses. These are things that he wants but why did he say this especially at this time may be connected to the mid-term US elections. Saudi Arabia could very easily funnel money to the election effort through US corporations that are heavily involved in Saudi Arabia. Saudis cannot by law fund US election campaigns but they can easily pad a contract to a US company with the understanding that what has been padded goes to the Republican election effort. 

Mohammad bin Salman said in response: Working with Trump is enjoyable. Why did he take such a weak position and did not even criticize Trump?

A: This is obvious. MBS knows that his grip on power and his family’s rule has been and is totally dependent on the United States. He wants only one thing—to rule Saudi Arabia and he will do anything to guarantee this. Let me repeat, ANYTHING. MBS will do as he is told by Trump and Kushner. He will enrich the Trump-Kushner family businesses and he will do whatever it takes to keep the Republicans and Trump in office. 

But I am sure that he is nervous about the day that Trump is not in office. He has tried to cover that base by getting closer to Israel. He realizes that closeness to Israel will help him no matter who is President and who controls Congress. That is his insurance policy. There is no room for the Palestinians and other Arab causes in his universe. Possibly just lip service. His family’s rule, and predominantly his rule, is all that matters.

Saudi Arabia has been relying on the United States in terms of security for many years.  And this is the reason why Saudi foreign policy is under American influence. In view of this security outsourcing by Saudis, what will be the harmful effects on their security in the long run?

A: Well, as I have already said, there are uncertainties surrounding US policies. Presidents come and go. Control of Congress changes hands. But for the moment, support from Israel gives the Al-Sauds some support, but even that cannot be counted on forever. Saudi Arabia is doing exactly what it has historically accused Qatar of doing—namely, it is acting too big for its britches. It is antagonizing Iraq and especially Iran. This is something that Iranians will not soon forget. And the day of reckoning will come when circumstances change in the Middle East and in the United States and Saudi Arabia will find itself naked. A United States that can no longer afford foreign wars, an Israel and Iran that find a measure of accommodation, an Iran and Iraq that grow ever closer and a restless Saudi population who have not had political and human rights and have not benefitted from oil depletion. His so-called reforms are in large part to change the potential outcome that I have painted here but people are not blind. He and the rest of the ruling family cannot continue their iron fist rule and to live as they do in opulence and expect the average Saudi to look the other way.

Former President Barack Obama addressed countries like Saudi Arabia that your security threat is inside your own countries and not foreign threats. In fact, Obama's reference was to human security, which includes political development, individual liberties, and so on.  However, for these countries, the security of the ruling political system (state security) is in the top priority. What kind of security in these countries is in the top priority for the United States?

Let me first underscore what President Obama said. He is absolutely correct. Dictatorships sow the seeds of their own destruction. They exaggerate the foreign threat—now days terrorism is the favorite catch all heading—buy more arms to garner foreign support of arms exporting countries, arms to use not against foreigners who do nothing but on their own people. Oppressive rulers do not entertain orderly reforms towards democratic societies because they see what is at the end of the road—no more absolute power and their preferred access to oil revenues. So they resist meaningful reforms. But they fail to see what is at the end of this road of oppressive rule—turmoil, conflict and their eventual overthrow. They enjoy the here and now and push back on the future. 

Now let me turn to your question. Unfortunately, the United States does not have the long-term interest of these countries at heart. Let me explain why. US Administrations change every four years. And sometimes radically so, such as we have seen from Obama to Trump. Presidents invariably want to have stability in the region and help American businesses. So a US President wants to sell arms and anything else he can, access to oil at a reasonable price and have stability to keep things humming along. The long-term condition of the country and its people is of secondary concern. Sure, Presidents pay lip service to human and political rights, they have to. But they will not risk stability and US exports to achieve these noble goals. This is the reality. So security in these countries for the US means no turmoil, no regime change, no damaging publicity about human rights abuses, no danger to other US interests and preservation of US business interests.

Interview by: Javad Heirannia