On Jared Kushner's 25 books of undiluted Zionist propaganda

Middle East Eye

On 28 January, amidst great fanfare, US President Donald Trump unveiled new details of the so-called “deal of the century”- designed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by, you know, definitively screwing over the Palestinians. 

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that, according to the Trumpian plan, the Palestinians "would have no territorial contiguity, would be fully economically dependent on Israel, and most importantly, would be giving up the Palestinian national vision to establish a sovereign state”.

Illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank would be annexed to Israel, and Jerusalem would be recognised as the undivided Israeli capital.

Some "deal".

The day after the unveiling, Trump’s senior White House adviser and simultaneous son-in-law Jared Kushner - the primary architect of the plan - appeared on Sky News Arabia to enumerate some of his qualifications as Middle East peacemaker: “I’ve been studying this now for three years. I’ve read 25 books on it.”  To be sure, three years is an impressively short time to go from having zero experience in politics or foreign policy to resolving one of the defining conflicts of the modern era. 

A Washington Post columnist aptly quipped: “I have just read 25 books and am here to perform your open-heart surgery."

Since Kushner has not deigned to reveal the titles of any of his chosen texts, I attempted to contact him for the full reading list, stressing that I felt it would be “an immensely helpful resource for other folks out there who might be considering spontaneous reinvention as Middle East experts”.

As of this article’s publication, however, I had yet to hear back.

But it doesn’t take a Middle East expert to guess the nature and orientation of Kushner’s top 25. After all, only by reading 25 books of undiluted Zionist propaganda could anyone concoct the “deal of the century”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Outside the Box

Evergreen Review

On September 11, 2001, I was in Austin, Texas, completing a summer stint as office peon of the Texas Association of Broadcasters between my sophomore year at Columbia and junior year abroad at the University of Rome. The TAB was overseen by a middle-aged woman named Ann, who resembled a demonic Furby and who specialized in rendering existence tedious in the way that only Americans in office buildings seem to know how. Human vibes rarely emanated from her being, and an Exorcist-type spectacle ensued whenever I deviated slightly from the prescribed script for asking if she could take a call from so-and-so. Each and every malfunction of the Xerox machine was further proof that I had no future.

Befitting the inhospitable environment, the office thermostat was set to tundra mode, meaning that in the dead of the infernal Texas summer I came to work bundled in sweaters. I often spent my lunch breaks asphyxiating myself in my car in the parking lot, windows rolled up, in an effort to coax some life back into my cells. At my desk, I rebelled against tyranny by drinking wine out of my coffee cup and placing calls to Chile on the office telephone.

Beyond the confines of the workplace, it had been a less than monotonous summer owing to an operation on my cervix—after which surgery every gynecologist I would ever visit outside the US would inevitably inquire in horror as to what third world country’s doctors were responsible for internally mutilating me. Over time, my cervical inferiority complex would grow into a sense of violation by my very own homeland, an entity that would rather go bomb people than provide its citizens with effective health care or other useful amenities. 

September 11, of course, produced all sorts of new opportunities on that front. I was back at the TAB post-cervical invasion, and spent the day in the conference room watching replays of the planes hitting the World Trade Center on a large projector screen. Outside, US flags began to proliferate at an obscene rate, and, as the government-media nexus sought to portray the assault on American borders and iconography as a direct violation of every individual American, folks across the country were catapulted to new levels of patriotic resolve and indignation. The stage had decisively been set for the impending slaughterfest known as the US War on Terror and the increasing public internalization of the logic of empire, according to which borders only matter when we say they do. READ MORE AT EVERGREEN REVIEW.

Israel and El Salvador: Love in a time of genocide

Middle East Eye

In January 2016, Israel’s Ynet news site reported that El Salvador was threatening to close its embassy in Tel Aviv and move it to Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. 

The threatened relocation had nothing to do with solidarity with Palestine; according to Ynet, the Salvadorans were simply furious that Israel had decided to cut back on costs by closing its embassy in San Salvador and were seeking retaliation.

El Salvador denied the report, and the embassy stayed put in Tel Aviv - where, it bears mentioning, it had been moved from Jerusalem only a decade before. In fact, for a brief spell in 2006, El Salvador was the only country in the world with an embassy in Jerusalem. Call it pre-trumping Trump.

The Israelis were probably correct in calculating that they don’t actually require a diplomatic presence in El Salvador, since the country is pretty much “in the bag”. (Thankfully, the former embassy website is still active and boasts an educational video in Spanish about important Israeli achievements, such as a ban on the use of “underweight models”. Underweight Gazans, on the other hand, are apparently fine - as are regular Israeli military massacres of Palestinian civilians.)

I myself am currently in San Salvador, and can safely say that, when you start seeing Stars of David everywhere and even windshields of pharmacy vans emblazoned with slogans such as “Almighty One of Israel” - in a country with an estimated Jewish population of 150 individuals - you know you’re in a place with a serious Israel problem.

It’s particularly ironic given the sizeable Palestinian community in El Salvador, mostly immigrants from Bethlehem who began arriving in the late 19th century. Now, there are more Palestinians in El Salvador than in Bethlehem itself - including the country’s new president, Nayib Bukele, a distinctly nauseating character who thinks US President Donald Trump is “very nice and cool”, despite Trump’s classification of El Salvador as a “sh**-hole country”. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

The Mainstream Media Is a Cheerleader for War With Iran

Jacobin

In the aftermath of the United States’ latest war crime — the assassination-by-drone strike in Baghdad of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — Fox News decided to educate its audience on the proper takeaway from the episode.

The upshot was not, of course, that the illegal killing was kind of a big deal or that the person who authorized it — Donald Trump — had potentially set the stage for calamity and bloodshed of untold proportions. Rather, the crucial point to focus on was the “polarized reaction by American news outlets.”

Trotted out to confirm the severity of the situation was one William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School, who bemoaned the sad state of the “liberal media”: “Take any topic and they portray Trump as irresponsible and ignorant. This time those portrayals are on steroids, with Trump being portrayed as a warmonger surrounded by sycophants isolated from reality.”

Well, yeah.

In reality, the oft-invoked allegation of “polarization” in the media and the broader political establishment hardly holds water; it’s like arguing that 21 degrees Fahrenheit and 22 degrees Fahrenheit are polar opposites. Just recall, for example, that time Trump fired cruise missiles at Syria and the liberal media thought it was pretty much the most exciting thing to have ever happened.

A glance at media coverage of the Soleimani assassination also fails to produce much evidence of a fanatical anti-Trump campaign. The lead paragraph of a New York Times article about the “Master of Iran’s Intrigue” is devoted to establishing how Soleimani was “behind hundreds of American deaths in Iraq and waves of militia attacks against Israel.” The second paragraph reiterates that he was a “powerful and shadowy . . . spymaster at the head of Iran’s security machinery.”

In other words: he deserved it. And never mind that the United States has been behind countless thousands of Iraqi deaths in Iraq or that — as the article later reveals — the “waves of militia attacks” took place during the brutal twenty-two-year military occupation of south Lebanon by Israel, which also boasts the distinction of having slaughtered tens of thousands of people in that country.

When you’re not actually in the business of speaking truth to power, some things are better left unsaid. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.