Palestinians Reject $50 Billion to Sell Country
Faux-conference is the stuff of what fake news is made of
Empowering Weak & OppressedKevin Barrett
Dhu al-Qa'dah 29, 1440 2019-08-01
News & Analysis
On June 25 and 26, the corrupt tyrants of the House of Khalifah and their Saudi masters hosted a meeting of criminal oligarchs and their henchmen from four continents. The agenda: Kosher Nostra princeling Jared Kushner’s doomed attempt to bribe Palestinians into complicity in their own genocide.
Kushner’s idea, in a nutshell, was to strong-arm the Anglo-Zionist Empire’s Gulf puppet states into offering Palestine $50 billion in return for unconditional surrender. The vile terms of that abject surrender would come down like a hammer later, after the Palestinian mouse had nibbled the cheese.
But the mouse didn’t bite. Nor did anyone else. The whole affair turned into an unmitigated fiasco, a trainwreck that informed observers had seen coming a mile away.
The conference had an Orwellian title: “Peace to Prosperity.” But instead of proposing a viable peace plan as a road to prosperity, as the name suggests, the conference was just the latest in a series of Zionist-sponsored Western undertakings that sought to put the cart before the proverbial horse, by waving around fistfuls of other people’s mythical money as a first step, in the hopes that “peace” — for Palestinians, the peace of the grave — would magically follow. That oft-failed approached could be summarized as: “Let’s throw money at the Palestinians in hopes that they’ll go away.”
Kushner and his Zionist colleagues tried to spin the conference as a breakthrough in Arabian acquiescence to the Israeli expansionist agenda. But the reality was precisely the opposite. The only Arabian nations that even showed up were those under de facto Anglo-Zionist occupation (namely Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, and the Gulf puppet monarchies). And even those quisling governments pointedly refused to send anyone important. Instead, they were “represented” by obscure low-level ministers.
The Europeans, for their part, could not even be bothered to send junior ministers. Most deployed mid-level civil servants, while the French absentmindedly sent someone over from their Bahrain embassy (maybe it was the janitor?). As Daniel Levy wrote in The American Prospect, “In the absence of serious people, that paragon of global transparent governance, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, was left to play a starring role.”
It wasn’t just the serious people who failed to show up; it was also the serious money. Kushner’s mythical $50 billion aid package for Palestine remained entirely mythical, as the Gulf states conspicuously failed to offer pledges, much less pony up any actual cash.
But the biggest lacuna was not the absence of cash and important figures; it was the absence of the people the conference was supposedly about, namely the Palestinians. All Palestinian factions united to boycott Kushner’s charade, forcing the Americans to disinvite the Israelis in order to maintain the pretense that the whole production was something other than an Israeli-orchestrated public relations spectacle.
That spectacle predictably fell flat on its face. So why would Israel bother setting up such a monumental flop? Did they really believe they could engineer a split between Palestinians and their leadership? Did they imagine that ordinary Palestinians would drool at the prospect of Kushner’s phantasmagorical $50 billion, then rise up and force their leaders to surrender to the Zionists? Don’t the Israelis realize that the Palestinian people are generally far more committed to their cause than most of their leadership is? Are the Israeli PR experts really that incompetent? “The trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda,” Major General Shlomo Gazit once told BBC correspondent Alan Hart. Gazit’s point, put bluntly, is that Israelis are so in love with themselves, and so unable to see anyone else’s point of view, that they cannot tell the difference between propaganda lies and reality — an ethical and strategic failing that will eventually prove their undoing.
The Zionists hoped the Manama conference would succeed in dividing and conquering their opposition. Such has been the Israeli approach at least since Oden Yinon laid it out in his infamous article “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s.” Specifically, they hoped to divide the Palestinian people from each other, and from their leadership. And they wanted to divide Arabs from Arabs, and especially Arabs from Iranians (it is no accident that the Bahrain conference aimed at establishing closer ties between Arabian despots and the Zionist entity at the precise moment that the US was escalating tensions with Iran almost to the breaking point).
But the Conference at Four Seasons Manama backfired, unifying both the Palestinians and most other relevant parties in opposition to Kushner’s farce. The whole Palestinian leadership, including all significant factions (and even insignificant ones), boycotted the conference and held it in open contempt. In this they had the near-unanimous support of the Palestinian people. The only Palestinians who came to Manama were a couple of small-time wannabe businessmen on the make, angling for a few shekels and representing nobody but their own pathetic pocketbooks. They were reviled as traitors upon returning to Palestine.
“Kushner’s Folly” was also boycotted by most members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The most significant OIC countries including Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and of course Islamic Iran all refused to dignify the Manama proceedings with their presence.
Did the hardline Zionists who orchestrated the Manama charade through their puppet Kushner really expect anything to come of it? They cannot have been so naïve as to expect it to draw significant Palestinian participation. So it must have been set up to fail. To what end?
First, the conference was obviously designed to draw quisling Arabian elites deeper into the Zionist-sponsored fake peace process, in order to further align those elites against the Palestinians and their supporters, the most important of which is Islamic Iran. But those Arabian puppet governments, beginning with the Gulf sheikhdoms, can only go so far, because their people sympathize with the Palestinians. Any attempt at full normalization with Israel would likely lead to popular unrest and internally-driven regime change. So the Manama conference made, at most, an incremental contribution to the stealth realignment of Arabian elites with their erstwhile Zionist enemies.
Secondly, the conference was designed to sell the usual fake news story of “Palestinian rejectionism.” The Zionists have used this method countless times over the decades: make an absurd “offer” that no Palestinian could possibly accept, and then use the Zionist-dominated Western media to pump out the message, “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The reality — that the Palestinians have succeeded, bravely and brilliantly, in “missing” repeated opportunities to help genocide themselves — is obvious to everyone who hasn’t been hypnotized by the Zionist propaganda apparatus.
The Manama conference not only failed to achieve its ostensible, official objective, it also failed to achieve the above-mentioned real ones. Far from helping treasonous Arabian billionaires realign with Israel, it actually made realignment more difficult. The psychotically Islamophobic Trump regime, represented by Kosher Nostra princeling and First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner, is not exactly popular among the Arab masses, especially after the US endorsement of the Zionist theft of Jerusalem al Quds. The implosion of the “Kushner peace plan” is hardly a public relations plus for pro-Zionist Arabian traitors.
As for the narrative of Palestinian rejectionism, that was a hard sell even in the late-1990s, when the Zionists used their honey trap agent Monica Lewinsky to prevent Bill Clinton from forcing Israel to agree to terms the Palestinians could accept. Even back then, when Zionist domination of mainstream media meant total control of the official narrative, nobody with two synapses firing bought the nonsensical Zionist propaganda line that the failure of Oslo was somehow the fault of the Palestinians.
Today, the media landscape has changed. The mainstream media no longer commands widespread confidence, and the truth about the crimes of Zionism is getting harder and harder to hide. A substantial and growing number of westerners, including increasing numbers of American Jews, recognizes that extremist Likudnik Zionism has dragged Israel and the world to the brink of catastrophe. For these and other reasons, the fallout from the disastrous Manama conference, rather than putting the world to sleep, will only assist in its awakening.
