In 20 days, the Twitter King will be seated in Harry Truman's chair. The buck will stop with him. Mr. Trump regularly Tweets the traditional code phrases that could be said to characterize the pacification of Native American people. America First and Peace Through Strength. (He doesn't mention the phrase collateral damage.) These phrases amount to the marching orders in Likudist Israel. The only way Netanyahu's right wing Israeli government will allow Palestinians even a remote semblance of self-rule and dignity is if they concede they have lost everything and, thus, have nothing left to lose by caving in to the Israeli juggernaut.
Mr. Trump has used similar rhetoric to try to convince poor, inner city African Americans to vote for him. Your inner cities are a disaster, he'd say. There's violence everywhere. You walk down the street and get shot. "What do you have to lose!?" What do you have to lose by throwing in the towel and kissing my pinkie ring? I'm only being partially satiric when I imagine his plan is to re-establish the Plantation System, using his charm to convince everyone it'll work this time. It'll be different. You'll see! Trust me.
The bottom line issue is dignity. Do you escalate and continue to break a people's back to bring them to heel, or do you recognize the injustices that have occurred -- that you may have committed -- and create a structure that facilitates real justice and peaceful co-existence? Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu give no evidence that they see the latter as important for people they deem inconvenient and superfluous to their dreams of greatness.
If I heard him correctly, Mr. Netanyahu blamed the League of Nations for getting it all wrong from the beginning with its post-WWI Palestine Mandate. For Mr. Netanyahu, it's always someone else's fault. In this case, he's saying it was the fault of British Colonialism and the world. It's funny that, not unlike my line here, he's suggesting everything went awry with decisions made in the first half of the 20th century. Instead of historic decisions wronging the Palestinians, he suggests history wronged the Jews and Israel. One thing we've learned is that there were a lot of moral crimes committed under the relentless drive of European Colonialism and it's offspring, post-WWII American Imperialism. One reaction to these historic lessons is the disdain leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu show for overarching, international bodies like the League Of Nations and the United Nations. If they have the power and the will, their national Manifest Destiny will not be thwarted.
Referring to the Security Counsel resolution to condemn Likudist Israel, Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer told The New York Times, "[The Palestinian's] strategy is not to negotiate with Israel because a deal is give and take. They want take and take." (Italics mine.) The spinning audacity of such a statement is emblematic and worth examining. What it does is blame the victim for the crimes of the oppressor. It has traction because Palestinians are human and do bad things, too. As the Likudist settler movement expropriates land, it has been consistent Israeli policy to refuse any kind of negotiation until Palestinians accepted all the terms on the table to be negotiated. Demand that the people you've beaten down and run into refugee camps accept their occupation as legitimate before you will agree to sit down and negotiate lifting the obnoxious conditions. Those on the wrong end of Israeli oppression have always known it was two-faced nonsense -- as those on the oppressor side of the equation knew the same. Wink. Wink. It was always Kafkaesque. Catch 22. All those damn Palestinians want is to "take and take" from the people chosen by God. The United States has been an accessory to this con game from the beginning.
If the two-state solution is finally dead, as was declared by ex-UN Ambassador John Bolten on Fox News recently, where does the Netanyahu line go in the future under Donald Trump? If Palestinian anger and indignation from the past 50 years is not respected, if dignity is not allowed, where can it go but more of the same getting worse and worse each year? As we know, under a one-state Israel it's either a Jewish dictatorial state or democracy. Can't have both.
I have great empathy for the Israeli people under the yoke of fear fueled by the rightwing Likud government. But it's time for some straight talk to open up the conversation. So we should be grateful to President Obama for having the last-minute courage to allow the Security Counsel condemnation to go on the record. He's getting flak from both parties. Donald Trump and company will be scrambling to undo it, as they scramble to maneuver through the Russian thicket of intrigue. According to reports, it's not going to be easy to overturn the Security Counsel resolution. It could take years, if it's possible at all. Meanwhile, the condemnation is an international fait-accompli on the books, and Benjamin Netanyahu and the Twitter King will just have to deal with it.
It could even put a little juice back into the UN at a time that that's greatly needed.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
2
