Jew World Order

It’s clear that the Biden administration isn’t going to roll back a lot of Trump era policies in Israel/Palestine. Besides restoring funding to UNRWA, what has changed? Biden’s not going to move the embassy back or curb settlement expansion in any way. What about the Abraham Accords, which strengthened Israel’s relationships with local autocrats and offered nothing to Palestinians?

They try not to mention it very much, but it’s clear that many Democratic lawmakers think the Abraham Accords are great. Last December Axios reported that Biden was going to maintain the agreement in an effort to work up goodwill with Netanyahu. While testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March, Secretary of State Tony Blinken was asked what Mike Pompeo had done well in the role. He pointed to the accords.

Now Jared Kushner has founded something called the Abraham Accords Institute, which will promote trade and tourism between Israel, Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco and Sudan. According to Axios, Kushner is trying to court more Democrats to the board but it already features Haim Saban, the Israeli-American businessman who was one of Biden’s biggest donors during the presidential campaign.

Saban’s involvement shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. During a Jewish Insider event last September he repeatedly praised Kushner and the Trump administration’s moves in the region:

“This is a difficult one, this is really a very complicated one where a lot of smart people for decades have worked at trying to find a solution and have failed, which is why I came out in support of the Trump peace plan. Because I thought, you know what– it’s outside of the box. I should say, ‘The Jared peace plan.’ But anyway– it’s out of the box, it’s very different than everything that was done before. And you can’t keep on trying to do the same thing and expect a different result.

With that plan, with the Jared Plan, It became something that maybe has a shot. Maybe has a shot. But whether [Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] gathers the courage to move forward and sit at the table or whether his successor has the courage, one thing that is missing is educating the Palestinian people for peace.“

Ah yes, the problem is we just need to educate those violent Palestinians more.

The deal that Trump worked out with the UAE involved them getting $23 billion in weapons. While he was running Biden’s campaign website declared that foreign policy would change once a Democrat was back in charge. The United States would “revitalize our national commitment to advancing human rights and democracy around the world.”

In April the new President announced that he was green lighting the UAE sale. This move came just a couple months after Biden said he was ending U.S. support for the war on Yemen. That’s a war that the UAE has helped wage. Here’s Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold at Responsible Statecraft:

In 2017, Human Rights Watch and the Associated Press accused the UAE of operating secret prisons in Yemen where prisoners were subjected to horrific forms of torture. Former inmates describe cramped conditions covered in feces, being beaten, sexually assaulted, and trussed up on a “grill.” “We could hear the screams,” said a former detainee held for six months at the Rayan airport. “The entire place is gripped by fear. Almost everyone is sick, the rest are near death. Anyone who complains heads directly to the torture chamber,” said one former detainee.…

In addition to its direct involvement, the UAE supported local proxies — around 90,000 fighters — providing them with direct training, capacity building, logistics assistance, and salaries. It also brought in mercenaries from as far away as Colombia, and weapons sold to the UAE ended up in the hands of al Qaeda-linked militias inside Yemen.…

Anxious to get out of a losing war that has been so bad for its image, the Emirates held a ceremony on February 9, 2020, to mark the end of their involvement in the Yemen war, moving from a “military-first strategy to a peace-first strategy.” But humanitarian groups on the ground tell us that the UAE maintains a presence in Socotra, Mukallah, and a small presence in Aden. In addition, it offers financial and military support to a variety of armed groups and political movements that have had a destabilizing influence throughout the country, particularly in the South.

So Biden declares he’s ending support for the war on Yemen, then sends a country that helped destroy Yemen F-35 stealth fighters and MQ-9 Reaper drones.

I guess that’s outside of the box.

Odds & Ends

👟 I spoke with Boston activists about the BDS campaign targeting Puma there. The sportswear company sponsors the Israel Football Association where multiple teams play on illegally seized land.

💻 Last month Facebook shut down the page for an event sponsored by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies program, then they removed the program from Facebook altogether. Jewish Voice for Peace has sent a letter to the Zuckerbergs about this censorship:

As with the removal of other profiles and pages, Facebook’s erasure of the AMED Studies program page demonstrates the egregious role private tech companies have taken in suppressing free and open intellectual exchange. In deleting the AMED page of this vital, intersectional program that unapologetically stages open classrooms on the intersection between the Palestinian struggle and various other liberation movements across the globe, Facebook is depriving countless students, scholars, organizers, and community members of access to irreplaceable pedagogical material and programming.

⚖️ The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) International Committee’s Palestine Subcommittee sent a memo to the Biden administration explaining the legal basis for reversing Trump’s policies in Israel/Palestine.

🇵🇸 Rep. Rashida Tlaib on tweeted at Secretary of State Antony Blinken: “When will the US condemn racist violence against Palestinians? Is it your policy to support settlers stealing Palestinian homes & burning their lands? Billions of U.S. taxpayer $ support the racist Netanyahu government & the apartheid state they enforce every year.”

🗣️ Sending this out early because I will be part of The Jerusalem Fund’s Hisham Sharabi Memorial Symposium this afternoon. I’ll be on a panel with Omar Baddar and Lamis Deek, talking about Palestine in U.S. politics.

Stay safe out there,

Michael

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