Duh, Jared! So who built the PA as a ‘police state’? – CounterPunch

Nazareth.

Maybe something good will come out of the Trump plan, after all. By pushing the Middle East peace process to its logical conclusion, Donald Trump has made crystal clear something that was supposed to have been obscured: that no US administration has ever really seen peace as the objective of its peacemaking.

The current White House is no exception it has just been far more incompetent at concealing its joint strategy with the Israelis. But that is what happens when a glorified used-car salesman, Donald Trump, and his sidekick son-in-law, the schoolboy-cum-businessman Jared Kushner, try selling us the deal of the century. Neither, it seems, has the political or diplomatic guile normally associated with those who rise to high office in Washington.

During aninterviewwith CNNs Fareed Zakaria this week, Kushner dismally failed to cloak the fact that his peace plan was designed with one goal only: to screw the Palestinians over.

The real aim is so transparent that even Zakaria couldnt stop himself from pointing it out. In CNNs words, he noted that no Arab country currently satisfies the requirements Palestinians are being expected to meet in the next four years including ensuring freedom of press, free and fair elections, respect for human rights for its citizens, and an independent judiciary.

Trumps senior adviser suddenly found himself confronted with the kind of deadly, unassailable logic usually overlooked in CNN coverage. Zakaria observed:

Isnt this just a way of telling the Palestinians youre never actually going to get a state because if no Arab countries today [are] in a position that you are demanding of the Palestinians before they can be made a state, effectively, its a killer amendment?

Indeed it is.

In fact, the Peace to Prosperity document unveiled last week by the White House is no more than a list of impossible preconditions the Palestinians must meet to be allowed to sit down with the Israelis at the negotiating table. If they dont do so within four years, and quickly reach a deal, the very last slivers of their historic homeland the parts not already seized by Israel can be grabbed too, with US blessing.

Preposterous conditions

Admittedly, all Middle East peace plans in living memory have foisted these kinds of prejudicial conditions on the Palestinians. But this time many of the preconditions are so patently preposterous contradictory even that the usually pliable corporate press corps are embarrassed to be seen ignoring the glaring inconsistencies.

The CNN exchange was so revealing in part because Kushner was triggered by Zakarias observation that the Palestinians had to become a model democracy a kind of idealised Switzerland, while still under belligerent Israeli occupation before they could be considered responsible enough for statehood.

How was that plausible, Zakaria hinted, when Saudi Arabia, despite its appalling human rights abuses, nonetheless remains a close strategic US ally, and Saudi leaders continue to be intimates of the Trump business empire? No one in Washingtonis seriously contemplating removing US recognition of Saudi Arabia because it is a head-chopping, women-hating, journalist-killing religious fundamentalist state.

But Zakaria could have made an even more telling point was he not answerable to CNN executives. There are also hardly any western states that would pass the democratic, human rights-respecting threshold set by the Trump plan for the Palestinians. Nor, of course, would Israel.

Think of Britainsfloutinglast year of a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague that the Chagos Islanders must be allowed to return home decades after the UK expelled them so the US could build a military base on their land. Or the Windrush scandal, when it was revealed that a UK government hostile environment policy was used to illegally deport British citizens to the Caribbean because of the colour of their skin.

Or what about the US evading due process by holding prisoners offshore at Guantanamo? Or its use oftortureagainst Iraqi prisoners, or its reliance onextraordinary rendition, or itsextrajudicial assassinationsusing drones overseas, including against its own citizens?

Or for that matter, its jailing and extortionatefiningof whistleblower Chelsea Manning, despite the Obama administration granting her clemency. US officials want to force her to testify against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for his role in publishing leaks of US war crimes committed in Iraq, including the shockingCollateral Murdervideo.

And while were talking about Assange and about Iraq

Would the records of either the US or UK stand up to scrutiny if they were subjected to the same standards now required of the Palestinian leadership.

Impertinent questions

But lets fast forward to the heart of the matter. Angered by Zakarias impertinence at mildly questioning the logic of the Trump plan, Kushner let rip.

He called the Palestinian Authority a police state and one that is not exactly a thriving democracy. It would be impossible, he added, for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians until the Palestinians, not Israels occupying army, changed its ways. It was time for the Palestinians to prioritise human rights and democracy, while at the same time submitting completely to Israels belligerent, half-century occupation that violates their rights and undermines any claims Israel might have to being a democracy.

Kushner said:

If they [the Palestinians] dont think that they can uphold these standards, then I dont think we can get Israel to take the risk to recognize them as a state, to allow them to take control of themselves, because the only thing more dangerous than what we have now is a failed state.

Lets take a moment to unpack that short statement to examine its many conceptual confusions.

First, theres the very obvious point that police states and dictatorships are not failed states. Not by a long shot. In fact, police states and dictatorships are usually the very opposite of failed states. Iraq was an extremely able state under Saddam Hussein, in terms both of its ability to provide welfare and educational services and of its ruthless, brutal efficiency in crushing dissent.

Iraq only became a failed state when the US illegally invaded and executed Saddam, leaving a local leadership vacuum that sucked in an array of competing actors who quickly made Iraq ungovernable.

Oppressive by design

Second, as should hardly need pointing out, the PA cant be a police state when it isnt even a state. After all, thats where the Palestinians are trying to get to, and Israel and the US are blocking the way. It is obviously something else. What that something else is brings us to the third point.

Kushner is right that the PA is increasingly authoritarian and uses its security forces in oppressive ways because thats exactly what it was set up to do by Israel and the US.

Palestinians had assumed that the Oslo accords of the mid-1990s would lead to the creation of a sovereign state at the completion of that five-year peace process. But that never happened. Denied statehood ever since, the PA now amounts to nothing more than a security contractor for the Israelis. Its unspoken job is to make the Palestinian people submit to their permanent occupation by Israel.

The self-defeating deal contained in Oslos land for peace formula was this: the PA would build Israeli trust by crushing all resistance to the occupation, and in return Israel would agree to hand over more territory and security powers to the PA.

Bound by its legal obligations, the PA had two possible paths ahead of it: either it would become a state under Israeli licence, or it would serve as a Vichy-like regime suppressing Palestinian aspirations for national liberation. Once the US and Israel made clear they would deny the Palestinians statehood at every turn, the PAs fate was sealed.

Put another way, the point of Oslo from the point of view of the US and Israel was to make the PA an efficient, permanent police state-in-waiting, and one that lacked the tools to threaten Israel.

And thats exactly what was engineered. Israel refused to let the Palestinians have a proper army in case, bidding to gain statehood, that army turned its firepower on Israel. Instead a US army general, Keith Dayton, was appointed to oversee thetrainingof the Palestinian police forces to help the PA better repress internal dissent those Palestinians who might try to exercise their right in international law to resist Israels belligerent occupation.

Presumably, it is a sign of that US programmes success that Kushner can now describe the PA as a police state.

Freudian slip

In his CNN interview, Kushner inadvertently highlighted the Catch-22 created for the Palestinians. The Trump peace process penalises the Palestinian leadership for their very success in achieving the targets laid out for them in the Oslo peace process.

Resist Israels efforts to deprive the Palestinians of statehood and the PA is classified as aterrorist entityand denied statehood. Submit to Israels dictates and oppress the Palestinian people to prevent them demanding statehood and the PA is classified as apolice stateand denied statehood. Either way, statehood is unattainable. Heads I win, tails you lose.

Kushners use of the term failed state is revealing too, in a Freudian slip kind of way. Israel doesnt just want to steal some Palestinian land before it creates a small, impotent Palestinian state. Ultimately, what Israel envisions for the Palestinians is no statehood at all, not even of the compromised, collaborationist kind currently embodied by the PA.

An unabashed partisan

Kushner, however, has done us a favour inadvertently. He has given away the nature of the US bait-and-switch game towards the Palestinians. Unlike Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Aaron David Miller previous American Jewish diplomats overseeing US peace efforts Kushner is notpretending to be an honest broker. He is transparently, unabashedly partisan.

In an earlier CNN interview, one last week with Christiane Amanpour, Kushner showed just how personal is his antipathy towards the Palestinians and their efforts to achieve even the most minimal kind of statehood in a tiny fraction of their historic homeland.

He sounded more like a jilted lover, or an irate spouse forced into couples therapy, than a diplomat in charge of a complex and incendiary peace process. He struggled to contain his bitterness as he extemporised a well-worn but demonstrably false Israeli talking-point that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

He told Amanpour: Theyre going to screw up another opportunity, like theyve screwed up every other opportunity that theyve ever had in their existence.

The reality is that Kushner, like the real author of the Trump plan, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would prefer that the Palestinians had never existed. He would rather this endless peace charade could be discarded, freeing him to get on with enriching himself with his Saudi pals.

And if the Trump plan can be made to work, he and Netanyahu might finally get their way.

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Duh, Jared! So who built the PA as a 'police state'? - CounterPunch