"President Trump said Thursday that U.S. aid to the Palestinians won't continue until they're willing to "sit down and negotiate peace."
At a bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Trump said that the Palestinians "disrespected" the U.S. a week ago by not allowing Vice President Mike Pence to see them on his trip to the Middle East. He suggested, therefore, the aid money is on the table.
"This was never brought up by any negotiators," Trump said, "But it's brought up by me."
Mr. Trump alluded to his decision in December to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's official capital, breaking the U.S.'s longstanding policy that the city's final status should be determined by peace negotiations.
"We took Jerusalem off the table so we don't have to talk about it anymore," he said Thursday. "What I did with Jerusalem was my honor.""
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As I have written before Trump is a total disaster in the ME. He has no policy other than that of the extreme nationalist right in Israel. He is evidently completely in thrall to his daughter and her Zionist husband. Perhaps his toady behavior toward Israel is a combination of that influence and a desire to suck up to all the people in New York City who treated him with contempt and hostility for many years.
He told the world today, while sitting next to his soul mate Bibi that the Palestinians are not truly human, have no human rights and that he has "taken Jerusalem off the table" so that the Palestinians will have to settle for some portion of the Holy Land allotted to them by Bibi and company.
He took the Holy City off the table? Who gave this man the right to do such a thing? pl
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-holds-bilateral-meeting-with-netanyahu-at-davos-live-stream/
Yes, you are correct. I was trying to be brief.
Later, with the introduction of the Office of the Supreme Jurisconsult, the power to suspend primary and secondary precepts of Islam (in the interest of the expediency of the Islamic Government) was vested in that office.
I do not know how this innovation, in practice and in theory, would work (or is working) with the existing practices of rulings of Grand Ayatollahs.
I heard that Ayatollah Sistani, while not opposed to Velayat Faqih, did not support it in Iraq since he thought that its introduction was unworkable with so many millions who followed Tariqat - mostly Kurds.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 27 January 2018 at 11:14 AM
Response to Comment 57.
The problem with these gene-studies is their sample-sizes. They are far to small and are sometimes selected in a manner which raises questions about the results.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/ashkenazi-origins-may-be-with-european-women-study-finds.html?_r=0
Personally I can't see any relevance when it comes to genetics. If Jews see themselves as a people then they are. Ditto with the Palestinians.
Zionist Jews can proclaim that there is no Palestinian people all they want the only thing that matters is that the Palestinians see themselves as a people.
Posted by: Poul | 27 January 2018 at 11:15 AM
I agree.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 27 January 2018 at 11:22 AM
Col,
That was my attempt at sarcasm, at the post I was responding to.
The more substantive point was that the state of Israel and the territories it has been occupying have been governed with very little if any thought of integrating or accommodating its current occupants. There seems to have been always an assumption that they could be made to "disappear" somehow, when it is convenient for Israel. This assumption remains in place still: everyone, not just Israelis, seem eager to assume that with a few words here and there, Palestinians can be made to disappear and can be safely ignored.
Although in jest, it is an amusing thought: what if the Palestinians proposed to become secular Jews en masse, on the condition that they are to be, collectively, accepted as equals by the Israeli society? At least that would make them difficult, if at all possible, to ignore.
Posted by: kao_hsien_chih | 27 January 2018 at 12:37 PM
The Palestinians could disappear tomorrow but the religious war will not end. The analogous war did not end until the Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed by Salah al Din.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 27 January 2018 at 02:28 PM
'' Personally I can't see any relevance when it comes to genetics.''
Neither can I and no one really cares about Jewish genetics except the Jews themselves.
All the babble about what Jews are or aren't is a distraction from The Problem.
The Problem isn't complicated either...The UN gave the Zionist 51%
of Palestine, they have now stolen another 30% of Palestine.
If say Texas or Virginia had been the Jews promised land Israel would be the shortest footnote in the dust bin of history.
Posted by: catherine | 28 January 2018 at 01:32 AM
TV, Matthew,
(reply to comment 49 and comment 58)
Everything I know about Buddhism I learned at Cox's Bazar.
Posted by: different clue | 28 January 2018 at 03:04 PM
catherine,
( reply to comment 86)
Well . . . Richard Steven Hack cares about it. He cares enough to have followed the studies for some time now.
Also, is there any evidence that the Jews viewed Jewness as a genetic thing? If there is, and the Jews did . . . how would the Jews have reconciled this genetic theory of Jewness with a history of accepting converts at times and even seeking converts at times . . . and merging these convert-delivered genetic input streams into whatever genetic basis you are saying the Jews really care about?
How is all this to be integrated together?
Posted by: different clue | 28 January 2018 at 03:10 PM
One could see this as evidence of a genetic view of Jewishness. A very first half of the 20th century-like policy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html
Posted by: Poul | 29 January 2018 at 11:48 AM
Poul,
( reply to comment 89)
I had not read about this before now. It is interesting, in a depressing sort of way. And one could indeed see it as evidence of such a genetic view on the part of the people who thought up and applied the policy.
I wonder if the people who invented this policy were proportionally descended from all the major-presence ethnic-cultural ancestry Jewish immigrant groups in Israel or only descended from the Yiddish-ancestry group. And even more narrowly from the Labor-Left oriented Sabra-self-imagining subset of the "founders" of present day Israel. It certainly seems more self-consciously Modernizing policy based on an early 20th century attitude. It seems out of step with what I would understand to be an older non-modern and pre-modern Jewish understanding of Jewishness formed before the days of popularized genetic and eugenic "scientismic" beliefs.
Interesting that it happened in Israel. Would diaspora Jews anywhere else be involved in such a program based on such concepts?
Posted by: different clue | 30 January 2018 at 01:36 AM
I would bet on the European Jews and their descendants as the driving force behind such views.
You had similar problems when the Arabic Jews arrived in Israel. Hopefully time will weaken the strength of such ideas, but that is an internal Israeli matter.
https://972mag.com/the-roots-of-anti-mizrahi-racism-in-israel/114424/
There were extremists when it came to who was a proper Jew.
I can't remember if it was Gelblum who got a book banned in '49-50 for its vitriolic hatred of Arabic Jews.
Posted by: Poul | 30 January 2018 at 01:08 PM
Addendum to comment 91.
https://972mag.com/the-roots-of-anti-mizrahi-racism-in-israel/114424/
Quote:
“This is a race unlike any we have seen before. They say there are differences between people from Tripolitania, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, but I can’t say I have learned what those inferences are, if they do, in fact, exist. They say, for example, that the Tripolitanians and Tunisians are “better” than the Moroccans and Algerians, but it’s the same problem with them all… The primitiveness of these people is unsurpassable. As a rule, they are only slightly more advanced than the Arabs, Negroes and Berbers in their countries… The [North] Africans bring their ways with them wherever they settle. It is not surprising that the crime rate in the country is rising… above all there is one equally grave fact and that is their total inability to adjust to the life in this country, and primarily their chronic laziness and hatred for any kind of work.” Arye Gelblum, Haaretz, April 22, 1949.
Posted by: Poul | 30 January 2018 at 01:10 PM
EO (#70)
I'd echo your sentiment re the important distinction between academic discussion - in this case on quantifying the authenticity of 'Jewishness' - and the far from academic practical issues surrounding the Palestinian Question. The former should have no bearing on the latter.
Re your second point, just yesterday I had a discussion with an influential proponent of the idea that Jews should, in fact, be collectively held accountable for the policy of the State of Israel. The argument being that by failing to speak out against the more odious aspects of it, they could be deemed to be tacit supporters. I argued that this approach would likely be counterproductive, as well as making it more difficult for those who already do speak out. We agreed to disagree, but I did have some sympathy for my protagonist's argument that such an approach would at least force conversation on the topic more into the open - the last thing Israel would want.
Posted by: Account Deleted | 30 January 2018 at 04:49 PM
To be fair, since Louis Brandeis & Rabbi Stephen Wise formed the American Jewish Congress in 1918, the zionist project has seen almost exclusively green lights, with a few cautionary interludes that zionists switched out by means of terror.
Trump's only innovation is not to "put things on the table" but to shine a spotlight on the table settings.
Posted by: Croesus | 30 January 2018 at 06:19 PM
The most prominent founders of zionist Israel were eugenicists --
Max Nordau and the Making of Racial Zionism https://tinyurl.com/ybrzqe3k
Max Nordau, Co-Founder of the World Zionist Organization with Theodor Herzl
From Degeneration to Regeneration http://www.jewishmag.com/180mag/max_nordau/max_nordau.htm
Arthur Ruppin and the Production of the Modern Hebrew Culture by Etan Bloom
https://www.scribd.com/document/93755279/Etan-Bloom-Arthur-Ruppin-and-the-Production-of-the-Modern-Hebrew-Culture
(According to Bloom, Ruppin was an award-winning scholar of eugenics and practitioner of applied eugenic theory in the selection and formation of "human material" into the "new Jew" that would populate Israel.)
Posted by: Croesus | 30 January 2018 at 06:38 PM
Poul,
(reply to comment 92),
I will venture to guess that such attitudes came specifically from the Labor-Left side of the East-European derived Jewish community in Israel. The Arab Jews were very aware of this attitude. I believe they attributed it to the Labor-Left side . . . the Kibbutzists and etc. Begin was able to get the vast majority of their votes on the basis of being hated and despised by the same people who hated and despised them.
But that is all based on things that I read, and I don't know how it would be there these several decades later.
Posted by: different clue | 30 January 2018 at 08:55 PM
Sounds like the converse of the Racialist theories of Count de Gobineau and his ilk, another product of European Intellect when God died there.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 30 January 2018 at 11:10 PM
Israel has long pursued a quiet final solution by overpumping the Gaza aquifer, causing it to fill with seawater; bombing and destroying water processing and sewage processing; and denying the electricity supplies to run what's left. 97% of water is undrinkable. That's when it runs, perhaps one hour a day. No water means no flush toilets, means human waste literally builds up in cess pits, which then seeps into what's left of the groundwater. 80% of Gazans depend on aid, including water trucked in at expensive rates. 60% are unemployed. 50% are under 18. The U.N. projects Gaza will be uninhabitable before 2020, but aid workers project 2018. Gaza is one embargo or one epidemic away from a 1M children genocide.
https://972mag.com/gaza-will-be-unlivable-next-year-not-2020-as-the-un-says/128598/
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=57157#.WnFK3ainE2w
https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/gaza_10_years_later_-_11_july_2017.pdf
Posted by: Imagine | 31 January 2018 at 12:22 AM