May 23, 2019--Jared Kushner's "Deal of the Century"

More than two years after Trump designated his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as responsible for "fixing the Middle East," to bring about, in Trump's words, the "Deal of the Century," that fix, that deal is slowly emerging from the shadows.

It appears, though, that it is already dead on arrival. 

Hold off with the Nobel Peace Prizes.

Here's what's happening. Actually, what's not happening.

The Kushner plan has two parts--the first is economic--what Trump is promising will happen if all parties agree to the fix. The second part is the political deal--what the various parties will need to agree to in order to reap the economic benefits.

To move the process along Trump-Kushner are inviting Arab economic leaders to a meeting in Bahrain where they will learn about the billions of dollars that will supposedly come their way if they agree to go along with the political agenda.

The problem is that Kushner has not told anyone what's in the political package--what is expected of the Palestinians (likely a lot) and what's expected of Israel (likely very little).

Since they are very smart (especially when it comes to someone attempting to take advantage of them) most of the Palestinian business types who are being invited to the meeting are feeling insulted and for the most part are planning not to attend.

To quote one, Zahi W. Khuri, a Palestinian-America who owns the Coca-Cola franchise in the West Bank and Gaza Strip--

He called it "offensive" to talk about investment in the Palestinian economy before addressing the people's "national aspirations."

"Putting this first is a blatant payoff. You insult the people by talking about their quality of life when you keep them locked up under the Israeli occupation. In nation-building you start with dignity and freedom. You don't start by bribing and buying people."

This approach, putting bribery first and the political deal last--in other words starting with the money--tells us more about Kushner and Trump than the Palestinians.

This is how they think--because Kushner is Jewish that's all the experience he needs to make a deal. But at the heart of the matter it's all about money. For Trump-Kushner that's always been the case and so they cynically assume it is for everyone else.

It could be that they're in for a rude awakening.

March 23, 2015--The Wall We Need

The wall we need is not the one we've been talking about for well over a year--Donald Trump's "beautiful" wall along the border with Mexico. The wall for which he in a delusion assured us Mexico would pay.

We now discover that Mexico understandably continues to see this to be offensive and is so furious about the way they are being treated by President Trump that they have virtually severed relations with us.

We also discovered that the budget Trump submitted to Congress last week--the one received by both parties as "dead on arrival"--includes about $4.0 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to pay for the first phase of wall building. There is not a word about Mexico anteing up.

If we want to assess if a wall of this kind will be effective in shutting down illegal border-crossing, we need look no further than how well the various walls Israel has erected to contain the movement of Palestinians have worked.

Two years ago as Palestinian rockets rained down on Israel, fired from Gaza, the Israeli army discovered dozens of elaborate smugglers' tunnels under the fence, tunnels in many cases that were electrified and included lights and even air conditioning.

But there is one thing we can be certain about--the security fence that circles the White House is equally ineffective.

Evidence for that is the revelation last week that someone jumped that fence as if it weren't there and managed to elude Secret Service agents for a full 17 minutes before he was spotted and captured. He apparently had made his way right up to a White House entrance and was fiddling with the doorknob in an attempt to enter the premises.

President Trump was in residence at the time and we can only suspect that when the SS finally learned about the intrusion they roused him from his bed and bundled him down to the bunker six floors below the East Wing.

The same "undisclosed location" where they hid Vice President Cheney on 9/11.

From an electronic sensor the Secret Service was alerted to the fact that there was an intruder, but they could not locate him on the White House grounds.

The White House sits on only18 acres and one would assume that there are motion detectors every few yards and other surveillance devices that are so sensitive and secretive that we can only imagine their capabilities.

Assume away.

Not only should we be concerned about the possible danger President Trump faced but we should also be concerned in general about our capacity to monitor our borders and collect useful and time-sensitive data and intelligence from various hot spots around the world where we depend upon electronic as well as human intelligence to keep us safe.

Very much including what is going on in North Korea.

But who knows--the 26-year-old who snuck onto the White House grounds, when captured, said, "I am a friend of the president. I have an appointment."

Maybe he knew Trump was lonely with his wife and son in New York and would be happy to see him. They could watch Hannity together.

The next morning, the president said the "Secret Service did a fantastic job last night."

I also worry about his sense of what he considers to be fantastic.

Jonathan Tuan-Anh Tran

August 7, 2014--Israeli (Jewish) Exceptionalism

The outrage and debate continues over civilian casualties in Gaza and Israel. More accurately, about what has been happening in Gaza. There have been relatively few Israeli civilian causalities and, even if there were many more, the outrage would, by comparison, be muted.

Hamas and the Palestinians are not just the underdogs in this fight--improvised rockets versus jet fighters and smart bombs--but they are also not Jews.

This must be said--being not-Jews means less is expected of the Palestinians.

More is expected of the Jews (and I mean Jews as distinguished from Israelis) because of the Holocaust. Because of it, it goes, Jews should know better when it comes to inflicting harm and worse on innocents--people who are killed or wounded not because they are enemy combatants but because of who they are.

Jews were rounded up and mass murdered in Germany, and in much of the rest of continental Europe, because they were Jews. Not soldiers, not resistance fighters. For this reason, Jews should know better. But they also know that the world stood by largely silent. And thus were complicitous. This complicates matters.

By this logic Israeli Jews, and the rest of us who are Jews, should be very careful about setting upon anyone just because of who they are. We should know that if we allow this, worse perpetrate this, "they" will come for us next. As they have for millennia.

This is the Jews' patrimony. Mine as well.

So here we are today seeing the slaughter of innocents in Gaza. Carried out by Israelis. By Jews.

That is not our patrimony nor the lessons we should have learned from our own history.

All right. Point made.

But there is another, related point to make--

To expect Jews, Israelis to act as if there is something often referred to as Jewish Exceptionalism is to apply a higher standard to them than to any other nation or people.

Where is the equivalent outrage about the United States being responsible for hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes, a few human rights group keep that tally and attempt to grab an occasional headline. But beyond that there is, again, silence.

How much "collateral damage" (that hideous euphemism that means killing of innocent people), how much has there been in South Sudan or Eastern Ukraine? How widely reported has that been? And what martial etiquettes have been assigned to the Russian-backed forces or the Sudan People's Liberation Army? Certainly not the same as those imposed on Jews and Israelis.

But stories about the 1,400 Palestinians who have thus far been killed--admittedly at least half of them noncombatants--have been on the front page of the New York Times for days. Including yesterday, explicitly, with multicolored graphs distinguishing among different categories of the dead, "Civilian or Not? New Fight in Tallying the Dead in Gaza."

This has the tincture of anti-Semitism.

It is no coincidence that anti-Semetic rallies and confrontations have been erupting in many places in Europe, horrifyingly also in Germany. This derives not just from a long history of festering hatred but from the conflation of Israel and Jews--of a nation with a people.

They, we are not one and the same. Many Jews, including me, though we recognize the existential threat to Israel that Hamas and its tunnels and rockets represent and Israel's right to defend itself, not all Jews support a separate state of Israel or the current reactionary, repressive government.

And thus to expect us to be any better than other people is unreasonable. And since it it expressed so one-dimensionally, and leads so quickly to condemnations and worse, all Jews are wise to have their radar tuned to high. Danger of the old sort is lurking.