Photo by Lorenzo Tlacaelel | CC by 2.0
2017 was a boon year for American billionaires who got a further boost in the form of a massive tax break, while thousands of miles away, another corrupt and undeserving recipient of US taxpayer generosity broke out the champagne to celebrate a windfall. While the rest of the world mourns Jerusalem as an ethnically cleansed grave yard for diplomacy, Israel is welcoming this latest victory in its ongoing campaign to stamp out its Muslim population and erase their monuments and presence from history.
With the US’s latest move to overturn the UN’s status quo stance that recognizes East Jerusalem as a capitol of a future Palestinian state, its allied “partner” in this illusory and pointless charade has dispensed with all pretense of being committed to a two state outcome, and is prepared to step into the international arena as a belligerent, ‘gloves off’ violator of the few, mostly unenforced laws that present impediments to the illegal expansion of its settlements.
On the plus side, Palestinians will no longer have to endure the endless farce of “negotiations” for a final . . . I mean, “two state solution” that would grant their blockaded Bantustans “sovereign territory” without defenses, and only symbolic political power.
Under a Trump presidency, we can now at least stop pretending that Palestinians ever had a voice in determining their fate inside their barbed wire enclosures. Their presence during any rounds of talks was little more than a ‘Punch and Judy’ show featuring an already dead Judy getting blamed for being pummeled to death by the real “victim” of the staged domestic assault drama that forms the basis of Israel’s relationship with the entire world. Any further ‘talks from now’ will spare the Palestinian side of being forced to play along as the battered wife at the so-called bargaining table, and compel Israel at some point to charter a genuinely democratic course alongside its equal Palestinian partners in the process.
The choice is in Israel’s hands – continue to uphold a doomed system of oppression the rest of the world is beginning to recognize as an openly barbaric exercise in manipulation and deceit, or officially sanction a single multi-ethnic, multi-faith state that grants equal rights to all its citizens and allows them full and free access to its opportunities and potential.
The idea that an incarcerated population can somehow collude with their armed keepers to dismantle the institution that imprisons them is a fantasy upholding an already fictional scenario of adversarial “equals” – one in leg irons and handcuffs – hammering out an ‘agreement’ that in the end, amounts to a failed bid for extra fish sticks on Tuesdays.
All penitentiaries are structured on a deliberate imbalance of power resistant to any internal struggles, and only vulnerable to the external factors that determine its usefulness as a tool for societal control. South African ended apartheid when it became apparent to its beleaguered leadership that the economic penalties incurred by its continuance outweighed the non-existent benefits of being an isolated, universally condemned entity on the verge of economic collapse.
Unfortunately, Israel unlike its one time apartheid counterpart, embraces its global pariah status as a defining feature of its existence. And why shouldn’t it as long as US lawmakers on both sides of the aisle draft laws that criminalize the same sort of sanctions and boycotts that redeemed South Africa in the eyes of the world?
Now that the US’s latest ambassador to the UN has torn the sheep mask off Israeli diplomatic efforts to present itself as the injured party in this wholly theatrical ‘negotiation’ process, America’s apartheid proxy is free to carry out genocide without having to masquerade as a “liberal and democratic state”. That particular function has been outsourced most recently to Radiohead and Nick Cave.
Nikki Haley’s ‘diplomacy by debacle’ strategy might prove beneficial to the Palestinian cause in more than one way as it has already incited outbursts of lucidity from the establishment media, mostly united in their view that the US is blithely green lighting an initiative that will only exacerbate existing tensions and further destabilize an already volatile region. You might say that their condemnation of his Trump’s latest scheme to unleash Armageddon has less to do with addressing a decades long imbalance of their Mideast reporting, and more concerned with highlighting his ignorance and lack of his predecessors’ finesse when it comes to aiding and abetting Israel’s high crimes.
Notice, for example, their selective amnesia regarding a certain unnamed First Lady, who, in 1999 declared Jerusalem as “the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel ” as she plotted her first Senate race. Fast forward to 2016 when she issued a sharp rebuke to UNESCO for not declaring Jerusalem’s holy sites the exclusive domains of Jewish worshippers in a resolution to preserve its multi-faith characteristics. Inconvenient facts seldom intrude into official narratives unless of course, they are planted there by Vladimir Putin.
Remind me again which maniac managed to win the election. Was it the one who spent decades helping to separate Muslims from their holy sites in Jerusalem or the one who sealed the deal with HER party’s mostly blessings?
By now its apparent that the US’s sputtering political machinery can only function as an echo chamber where bad ideas are amplified and reverberated by the twin engines that power it. Jerusalem the “indivisible capitol” or Jerusalem the “a nice chunk of real estate for a Jewish-only casino complex” – these ‘differences’ merely highlight the cosmetic adjustments necessary to sell endless war and economic deprivation to the artificially constructed demographic pool known as ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ states.
If Hillary Clinton is hesitant to admit that she involuntarily outsourced her presidency to Donald Trump, (who is less bashful when it comes to taking credit for foreign policy blunders) she might also be regretting her premature victory laps around Tripoli when her State Department became a rogue arm of the Pentagon, and the Secretary herself, a preening General in the Situation Room quipping “We came. We saw. He died”. Trump might have added “It was terrific” in order to incite a media storm of indignation over a callous and brute stupid remark in the immediate aftermath of the murder of the US-deposed Libyan president and his posthumous sodomization by IS goons carrying out her “diplomatic” imperatives. Trump’s loose sphincter outbursts compel journalists/late night comedians to provide actual context to enhance their coverage of these sulfur-based events that was lacking when his Democratic rival was creating failed states and saber-rattling for Israel from the backside of her control top pantyhose.
When your guided verbal missiles are aimed at Germany and the UK, people will notice – even if you are only destroying their chances of attending Nikki Haley’s Booby Prize Banquet to say “muchos obliged” to Guatemala for understanding the meaning of a severed horse head on its bed, and its ambassador’s broken arm. When a president’s ‘kill list’ targets Bedouin wedding celebrants, you can bet that your American readership is wondering which Jenner sister is pregnant.
Still, despite what seems an irreversible blow to any last gasp chance for global stability, there are bright spots on the leaden, mostly invisible horizon. Not only for Palestinian liberation from the manacles of the ‘negotiating table’, but a chance to reassess both foreign and domestic policy as it lays naked and drooling on a single occupant bed eating cheeseburgers. The embittered clown now locked in the Lincoln bedroom offers us a rare glimpse into the inner chamber pots of power that might (in the long run) impel a stupefied electorate to abandon party affiliation in favor of a systemic overhaul that would prioritize the needs of the non-plutocrat segment of the population, and address the real world problems left in the wake of the entrenched duopoly’s ongoing assaults on both domestic and overseas targets.
With its crudely stated intent to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, the Trump administration may have just delivered aTrojan Horse to Netanyahu’s doorstep in the form of a ‘gift’ that upon further inspection reveals a ticking, dove-filled time bomb.
