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THE ABSURD TIMES
Illustration: How far right can you get? Netanyahu needed help.
Triumph of Idiocy
By
Czar Donic
I thought we had outgrown this crap. Now comes Adolf Trump
and Bormann Netanyahu to present what he calls a “peace plan”. It is actually no more than a smoke screen
to cover up, or even worse endorse, the actual wet dreams of Zionists for the
last century, the so-called climax of their dream. They are trying to eliminate the very concept of not only a
Palestinian State, but a Palestinian human being.
Can anyone actually take seriously the lie that this is a
“peace plan”? Can Adolf Trump actually
bring off this con job of the century, this apex of the past 100 years? Discourse in this country limits the
discussion here in the United States, but the United Nations is free to speak
the truth until the matter gets to the so-called “Security Council” where it is
vetoed by the United States. Perhaps
soon we will be able to discuss this further soon, but right now less irritated
discourse may suffice.
As far as the impeachment hearings go, he is impeached and
now is the time for delay, obfuscation, and pardon.
PALESTINE STOLEN
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has
announced plans to annex about 30% of the occupied West Bank, after Israel was
given the green light to do so by the United States. On Tuesday, President
Trump — with Netanyahu by his side — unveiled a so-called Middle East peace
plan that was drafted by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner without any input
from Palestinians. Under the plan, Israel will gain sovereignty over large
areas of the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem would be under total Israeli
control, and all Jewish settlers in the occupied territory will be allowed to
remain in their homes. The plan also calls for a four-year settlement freeze
and the possible creation of a truncated Palestinian state, but only if a
number of conditions are met. Palestinians responded to the U.S. plan with
protests in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas
rejected the deal. Only hours before the plan was announced, Netanyahu was
indicted for corruption, marking the first time in Israel’s history that a
sitting prime minister will face criminal charges. We speak with Mehdi Hasan,
senior columnist at The Intercept, and Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said
professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. Khalidi’s latest book
is titled “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced plans to move ahead with
annexing about 30% of the occupied West Bank, after Israel was given the green
light to do so by the United States. On Tuesday, President Trump stood by
Netanyahu to unveil the Middle East “peace” plan that was drafted by Trump’s
son-in-law Jared Kushner without any input from Palestinian leaders. The plan
was introduced just hours after Netanyahu was indicted for corruption and in
the middle of Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate.
Under the plan,
Israel will gain sovereignty over large areas of the occupied West Bank,
Jerusalem would be under total Israeli control, and all Jewish settlers in the
occupied territory would be allowed to remain in their homes. The plan also
calls for a four-year settlement freeze and the possible creation of a
truncated Palestinian state, but only if a number of conditions are met.
This is President
Trump.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: My
vision presents a win-win opportunity for both sides, a realistic two-state
solution that resolves the risk of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security.
Today, Israel has taken a giant step toward peace. Yesterday, Prime Minister
Netanyahu informed me that he is willing to endorse the vision as the basis for
direct negotiations — and, I will say, the general also endorsed, and very
strongly — with the Palestinians. A historic breakthrough.
AMY GOODMAN: Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the U.S. deal.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: For
too long, far too long, the very heart of the land of Israel, where our
patriarchs prayed, our prophets preached and our kings ruled, has been
outrageously branded as illegally occupied territory. Well, today, Mr.
President, you are puncturing this big lie. You are recognizing Israel’s
sovereignty over all the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, large and
small alike.
AMY GOODMAN: Palestinians
responded to the U.S. plan with protests in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the deal.
PRESIDENT MAHMOUD ABBAS: [translated]
I say to the partners Trump and Netanyahu: Jerusalem is not for sale. All our
rights are not for sale and are not for bargain. And your deal, the conspiracy,
will not pass.
AMY GOODMAN: For
more, we’re joined in New York by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of
modern Arab studies at Columbia University, the author of several books. His
latest is just out. It’s called The
Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Khalidi. Can
you start off by responding to this plan? The scene yesterday at the White
House: President Trump, in the midst of the Senate impeachment trial nearby in
the Capitol, standing next to the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had
just been indicted yesterday for corruption.
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
Well, what these two miscreants have done, one of them impeached and the other
indicted, is to roll out an Israeli peace plan, a peace plan that was dictated
to young Jared Kushner by his Israeli mentors, and who have fulfilled the wish
list of the extreme Israeli right ever since they conquered the West Bank in
1967 — and I would even say going back even further. This is meant to end the
Palestine question. This is meant to expand “Greater Israel” from the river to the
sea. There’s no state in this for the Palestinians. Sovereignty will reside
solely in Israel. Control will reside solely in Israel. And in fact what it
means is not just annexation and so on and so forth; it means that the United
States and Israel are going to dictate the terms, or try to dictate the terms,
of a settlement.
We will never see
this thing come to pass. It is so unrealistic. It is so at odds with not only
international law, but everything everybody has put forth, except the extreme
Israeli right and their friends in Washington, since the beginning of this
conflict. It is, in my view, yet another declaration of war on the
Palestinians, in this 100 years’ war that’s been going on since the beginning
of the 20th century.
AMY GOODMAN: So,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Trump’s plan a “conspiracy.” And the
prime minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, said, in advance of its release, it’s
“nothing but a plan to liquidate the Palestinian issue.” If you can say more
how this plan came into being? I want to turn, though, first, to the voices of
some Palestinians who took to the streets on Tuesday to protest the U.S. deal.
FARID ALBERIM: [translated]
Regarding the plan of the century, we say to Trump and the American
administration that our people are united behind our Palestinian leadership,
represented by President Abbas. We reject this plan, the plan of shame that has
nothing to offer Palestinians.
MOHAMMED ALBAKRI: [translated]
I think that this speech came to support Benjamin Netanyahu, to help him to
pass his internal crisis. It is also part of the election campaign for Donald
Trump in the coming election. It is nothing more than an election campaign for
both.
JIHAD ALQAWASMEH: [translated]
This plan is a gift from a big thief to a small thief.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Khalidi, those are voices of Palestinians, from Gaza to Hebron. So, what
exactly does it mean when the U.S. stands with Israel at the White House and
puts this forward, developed by the young developer Jared Kushner?
RASHID KHALIDI: Yeah.
Well, I don’t think Jared Kushner has an idea in his head about anything to do
with Palestine or Israel. He knows what he’s told. And this is dictated to him
by his Israeli mentors, and it is meant to be an Israeli diktat to the
Palestinians, telling them, “You will not have Jerusalem. You will not have
sovereignty. You will not have any of your national rights. And you will get
what we choose to give you, when we choose to give it to you.”
And the United
States has now endorsed that position. In so doing, the United States actually
separates itself from every country in the world, except a few client states in
the Arab Gulf. It puts itself in a position completely at odds not only with
past American positions, but every aspect of international law. We heard
Netanyahu call — the description of the Occupied Territories as “illegally
occupied,” we heard him call that a lie. The liar here is Netanyahu.
International law is not determined by an indicted — an impeached president and
an indicted Israeli prime minister. It’s determined by others. And others have
long since determined that those territories are illegally occupied, that what
Israel does in Jerusalem — everything it does in Jerusalem — is illegal.
And so, this is a —
I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy. This is something cooked up by two political
leaders trying to escape the plight that they’re both in, in order to increase
their chances at the next election. There’s one in Israel in a little more than
a month and a bit, and there’s one in our country in November. And both of them
think that this will help them in that regard.
It won’t see the
light of day. But the things that it includes, such as annexation and so forth,
will go ahead — and they were going to go ahead in any case. So, I don’t
think this is a momentous plan, in any way, shape or form. It simply
represents, as I said, the wish list of the extreme Israeli right, which has
now been endorsed by the American president. It has actually no valence beyond
that.
AMY GOODMAN: This
is President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner speaking on CNN.
JARED KUSHNER: I
come from a real estate background. It was very, very difficult to draw these
lines and to get a map where you could have contiguity to a Palestinian state.
And again, this isn’t because of something that we — that we developed. This is
something that we inherited, the situation where Israel continues to grow and
grow. And what the president secured today was Israel agreeing to stop, for
four years, more settlements, to give the Palestinians their last chance to
finally have a state.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor
Khalidi, your response? And then, put it in the context of history.
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
I mean, one actually has to look at this ludicrous plan, the 181 pages, and
look at the map and see that either Jared Kushner is blind or he’s a liar.
There is no contiguity for the Palestinian — so-called Palestinian state. There
are five or six chunks, separated by swaths of Israeli territory, which is part
of a plan that goes back to almost the beginning of the occupation: to chop up
the West Bank so there can be no Palestinian state, so there can be no
contiguity. If he can’t see that, or is lying to the people on CNN, that’s
his problem. We should not be taken in. I suggest everybody have a quick look at
that plan, because what is clear is that this is something that — I mean, you
can talk about it in terms of Bantustans, you can talk about it in terms of any
other kind of humiliating imposition on the rights of the indigenous population
by a settler colonial regime, which is what we are seeing here. And Mr. Kushner
is aiding and abetting this in his ignorance and in his passion for the extreme
Israeli right’s positions.
AMY GOODMAN: So,
your book, which talks about the hundred years’ war on Palestine, this is yet
just another moment in history.
RASHID KHALIDI: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Put
this into context of that century.
RASHID KHALIDI: Well,
and one of the things that I point out is that this is not a war waged just by
Israel or by the Zionist movement on the Palestinians. This is a war that was
aided, abetted, endorsed and made possible at every stage by the greatest power
of the age, whether that was Great Britain at one stage or the United States
and the Soviet Union in 1947 or, today, President Trump. Israel could not do
this without external support. The Zionist movement could not have established
itself as it did without Great Britain.
And so, as you
suggest, this is yet another stage in a very long process whereby not just
Israel and the Zionist movement, but a whole range of collaborators or people
in collusion with Israel have enabled Israel to do what it has managed to do.
And it is a war on Palestine. This is not a struggle between two equals. This
is not simply a struggle between two national movements. There are two peoples
involved, but one of them has enormous support from the outside, and the other,
the Palestinians, are an indigenous people faced with this Moloch-like colonial
settler movement, which is grinding up their country, taking as much of it as
it can, and only able to do this because of support from great powers like the
United States under President Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: I
want to break, and we’re going to continue with professor Rashid Khalidi, the
Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His new
book is just out, The Hundred Years’
War on Palestine. And Mehdi Hasan will also join us, of Al Jazeera
and The Intercept. We’ll
continue to talk about the — what President Trump calls the Middle East
“peace” plan, but Palestinians call everything from a conspiracy to simply
reject this plan about what will happen in the Middle East. Then we’ll talk
about the impeachment trial, with Mehdi Hasan, that’s going on now in the
Senate. And finally, what’s happening in South Dakota targeting trans youth?
Stay with us.
The original content of this program is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this
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however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional
permissions, contact us.
We continue our discussion of President
Trump’s long-awaited Middle East plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
which he has described as the “deal of the century.” The plan was drafted by
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner without any input from Palestinians and would
give Israel sovereignty over large areas of the occupied West Bank, control
over all of Jerusalem, and keep all illegal settlements built in the occupied
West Bank. We speak with Mehdi Hasan, senior columnist at The Intercept, and
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia
University. Khalidi’s latest book is titled “The Hundred Years’ War on
Palestine.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not
be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This
is Democracy Now!,
democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren responded to President Trump’s so-called Middle
East peace plan.
Sanders issued a
statement saying, quote, “Any acceptable peace deal must be consistent with
international law and multiple UN Security Council resolutions. It must end the
Israeli occupation that began in 1967 and enable Palestinian self-determination
in an independent, democratic, economically viable state of their own alongside
a secure and democratic state of Israel. Trump’s so-called 'peace deal' doesn’t
come close, and will only perpetuate the conflict, and undermine the security
interests of Americans, Israelis, and Palestinians. It is unacceptable,”
Sanders tweeted.
Elizabeth Warren
tweeted, “Trump’s 'peace plan' is a rubber stamp for annexation and offers no
chance for a real Palestinian state. Releasing a plan without negotiating with
Palestinians isn’t diplomacy, it’s a sham. I will oppose unilateral annexation
in any form—and reverse any policy that supports it,” Senator Warren said.
Well, we go now to
Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Mehdi Hasan, senior columnist at The Intercept and host of the Deconstructed podcast. He’s also
host of UpFront at Al
Jazeera English. And still with us in New York, professor Rashid Khalidi, the
Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His new
book, The Hundred Years’ War on
Palestine.
Mehdi Hasan, if you
can respond to the presidential candidates responding to the Middle East plan,
and then how the media has covered it?
MEHDI HASAN: I’m
glad that some of the presidential candidates, Amy, have come out strongly.
Elizabeth Warren came out very quick, Bernie Sanders referring to it as
“annexation.” Obviously, I would like them to go further, but I know the limits
of U.S. political discourse when it comes to Israel-Palestine. It’s good at
least that in this election cycle you have two candidates, Warren and Sanders,
talking very explicitly about Netanyahu’s racism, about annexation, about this
“peace plan,” quote-unquote “peace plan,” being a sham. In fact, I think anyone
who describes this as a, quote-unquote, “peace plan” — and, there you go, I
just fell into the trap, because we keep hearing this phrase all the time —
it’s malpractice. This is not a peace plan. When you hear any political
candidate for office, any journalist referring to it as a “peace plan,” you
really need to stop and think twice about that, because this is a plan for
apartheid, this is a plan for settler colonialism, as Professor Khalidi
mentioned earlier, before the break. And I think we need to be clear about our
terms.
And, of course, you
know, The New York Times put
out a tweet yesterday when the plan came out, a breaking news tweet, where they
talked about the Palestinians being asked to make more concessions. Just that
language that we have here in the U.S. about Israel-Palestine, the idea that an
occupied people, who have had their land stolen from them, are expected to
concede that land to the people who have occupied them and stolen their land,
it’s madness. It’s not language we would use in any other walk of life or in
any other conflict. We don’t use it in the context of Crimea, Ukraine and
Russia. But we do use it, and we have used it for years, in the Middle East in
relation to the Occupied Territories.
What’s so
interesting about the current moment, of course, is that Donald Trump — there’s
always a silver lining to Donald Trump’s awfulness. And that is that he takes
any issue, and he’s so extreme on it — he’s so extreme even by American
presidential standards — that he forces people off whatever fence they
were sitting on. And I think what he’s done in the last 24 hours, with the help
of his son-in-law, with the help of Netanyahu and MBS of Saudi
Arabia, who has also endorsed this plan, is the he’s forced people to basically
take off the blinkers and recognize this for what it is. The conflict now is no
longer Israel versus Palestine, as it’s often set up — as Professor
Khalidi pointed out, it’s not; it’s a one-sided war — but it’s apartheid.
And Americans now have to decide: Do they support apartheid, or do they not
support apartheid? There’s no more nonsense about two-state solutions and all
of that rubbish. That’s gone. That’s finished, finally over. No one pretends
it’s still there on the table. It’s: Do you support apartheid, or do you not
support apartheid? That is what we should be asking Democratic presidential
candidates, and that is what journalists should be discussing in the media, in
their op-eds, in their cable news discussion panels.
AMY GOODMAN: And,
Mehdi, talk about American opinion polls. They’re very interesting on the issue
of Israel-Palestine.
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
So, we are often told by supporters of the Israeli occupation in Washington,
D.C., especially Republicans, that the reason the United States backs Israel so
blindly, gives it billions of dollars, turns a blind eye when it massacres
children in Gaza, is because American public opinion is behind Israel, because
Americans want to support the, quote, “only democracy in the Middle East,” as
it’s often sold, which is not actually true. Going back many, many years, if
you look at the polling on this subject, most Americans, the majority or
plurality of Americans, say they don’t want the United States to take the side
of Israel or the Palestinians. They want the United States to be what it claims
to be, but of course is not, and that is an honest broker, an impartial outside
force, which it’s never been, of course.
And what’s so
interesting is, about — I think it was about a year ago, at the University
of Maryland, Shibley Telhami, who’s a great academic and pollster, carried out
some polling of Americans on the Middle East, which found that there was almost
an even split between Americans on whether they support a two-state solution,
as is framed by the establishment, 36%, I think, of Americans, versus a
one-state solution, a democratic, binational, secular state in which
Palestinians and Jews all have, you know, one vote — one person, one vote
— equal rights, and that was around 35%. It was almost even. It was a
third of Americans were two-state, a third of Americans were one-state. And
here’s what’s so interesting, Amy. When you tell Americans that there is no
two-state solution, that option is gone, the vast majority, two out of three
Americans, say, “We support a one-state solution with equal rights for
everyone,” because Americans — shock, horror — like the idea of one
person, one vote. That’s what this country is supposed to be built on. And they
don’t like the idea of saying, “You know what? We’re going to take a people and
put them under occupation and disenfranchise them in perpetuity.”
And that’s what this
Kushner plan does. It basically says, “You’re never getting anything else. This
is what you get.” Israel gets to annex what it likes, takes over whatever part
of the West Bank it likes. And the Palestinians know they don’t get any rights.
What’s so astonishing about this plan — and, you know, Americans, I would
argue, the average American, would not support this idea — that a Palestinian
refugee not only loses their status as a refugee under this plan forever, but
Israel gets to veto Palestinian refugees from returning even to a Palestinian
state, not just to Israel. Forget the right of return to Israel. Under this
plan, if you look at the small print, they can’t even return to a Palestinian
state without an Israeli veto.
So, I think this is
all a reminder once again that — you know, Edward Said said it best back
in 1978. He said, here in the United States and in the West, amongst
establishment types, the Palestinian person politically does not exist. They
have been completely obliterated. And I think we saw that in the last 24 hours,
where you have a White House press conference, at which no Palestinian spoke, a
White House meeting with the Israeli leadership but not with any members of the
Palestinian leadership, and a plan put forward by the White House which had no
Palestinian input whatsoever. It’s the complete and utter erasure of the
Palestinians by the U.S. political establishment, by the U.S. administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Well,
Mehdi Hasan, before we move on to the issue of the Senate impeachment trial of
President Trump that’s taking place at the same time — it seems to have
motivated a great deal in President Trump, from January 3rd, the assassination
of Qassem Soleimani, to his setting precedent last Friday speaking at a “right
to life” march in Washington, D.C., the first sitting president ever to do
this, and then suddenly announcing he’s releasing a Middle East “peace” plan —
I wanted to turn back to Rashid Khalidi. You had talked about some Gulf states
perhaps supporting the president. If you can talk about the significance of
Saudi Arabia, perhaps one of the most closest allies with the United States,
along with Israel?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well,
I think this brings up something that people don’t think about very often. The
only reason that Israel is able to maintain its regional superiority is because
most Arab states are not democratic. The only countries that could or would buy
into this are countries which can suppress their domestic public opinion. So,
the absolute monarchies of the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates, Oman
and Bahrain, whose ambassadors were at this shameful ceremony yesterday in
Washington, are countries, like a few others in the Arab world, Egypt and so
forth, ruled in different ways, but in ways that completely exclude
representation, democracy, parliaments, public opinion, a free press, and so on
and so forth. In those Arab countries where those things do exist, countries
like Lebanon or Kuwait or Tunisia, you have popular outrage at what is being
done in Washington. The absence of democracy in the Arab world is a
precondition for this kind of thing happening. Only regimes which completely —
which are capable of completely suppressing their public opinion would support
such an outrageous derogation of international law, Arab rights, Arab dignity,
as, unfortunately, a few of these governments have and, I’m afraid, will.
But it’s vital to
represent, and it’s vital to understand, these are not the Arabs. These are a
group of kleptocrats who control their countries absolutely, against the will
of their people, and who are able to get away with this partly because they’re
protected by the United States. So, you have had a few Arab governments that
have either squeaked their approval or failed to indicate their disapproval or
shamefully sent their ambassadors to this sham ceremony. But it is vital to
understand what they are and who they are and what they represent. They don’t
represent anybody except the elites which dominate those countries.
AMY GOODMAN: Rashid
Khalidi, we want to thank you for being with us, Edward Said professor of
modern Arab studies at Columbia University. His latest book, just out, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine.
The original content of this program is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No
Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this
work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates,
however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional
permissions, contact us.
