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Gifts of Trump to Israel in  2018 . Part 2

US policies have encouraged Netanyahu, who will serve a fifth term as prime minister, to boast of maintaining forever Israeli sovereignty over a “united Jerusalem”, as Israel’s “eternal capital”, and to vow to never relinquish Israel’s control over any Palestinian territories west of the Jordan River. He has also pledged to annex all the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In the meantime, the Palestinian leadership and Arab rulers have done little more than issuing inconsequential statements.

Zealots on steroids : These and other changes to the traditional US foreign policy in the Middle East have come at the initiative of Trump’s three top Middle East advisors: his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his two former New York lawyers, Jason Greenblatt and David Freedman, who have been actively promoting pro-Israeli policies for decades. (more…)

Gifts of Trump to Israel.  List for 2018. Part 1

Over the past two years, the Trump administration has launched an all-out diplomatic assault on the Palestinians, while preparing a new initiative to resolve the Middle East conflict. It has claimed its plan is different from any other. Indeed, the Palestinians have not seen the actual plan, but they have a pretty good feeling about what it will involve. They have watched closely as the Trump administration has spat out one policy after the other with the clear intention of humiliating and subduing them  Over the past year and a half, US President Donald Trump administration has been giving Benjamin Netanyahu’s government one political “gift” after the other.

In December 2017, his administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv in May 2018. In January 2018, it has frozen all assistance to UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with supporting millions of Palestinian living as refugees, and in June that year, it quit the UN Human Rights Council after accusing it of having a bias against Israel on account of its policies in occupied Palestine. (more…)

Kushner’s main goal is to break the Palestinians’ spirit and their hope for a sovereign state on all territories occupied in 1967

‘The art of humiliation’

In an attempt to offer his own rendition of the old adage, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs”, Mr Kushner ( son in law of Trunp ) wrote in a January 2018 email that: “Our goal can’t be to keep things stable and as they are, our goal has to be to make thing significantly BETTER! Sometimes you have to strategically risk breaking things in order to get there.”

All of this reminds me of an old story Kushner surely knows – a Hebrew parable about a poor man who complained to his rabbi about living with his big family in a small house. The rabbi told him to bring all his animals into the house. Though astonished, the man did what he was told. The next day he rushed back to see the rabbi and complained that the situation has gotten much worse. (more…)

When Israel imposes contraception on its Ethiopian women

The Israeli Ministry of Health admitted to having injected one contraceptive agent in immigrant Falasha Jews. Without their knowledge.

By Armin Arefi

The mystery is finally lifted on the astonishing 50% decline in the fertility rate of Ethiopian Jews in Israel since 2000. After five years of successive denials, the Israeli government admitted that it had established a system of contraception of immigrant women of Ethiopian origin before their arrival in Israel. The affair made a big splash last December, after the Israeli TV broadcast of a report in the educational show, Vacuum. Thirty-five Ethiopian immigrant women say they were forced to accept an injection of Depo-Provera, a long-term contraceptive agent, eight years ago, at the risk of not being allowed to enter Israeli territory.“They told us it was a vaccine,” says a woman interviewed by journalist Gal Gabbay, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported Sunday. “They told us that people who have many children suffer.” “We told them we did not want the injection,” says Emawayish, another Ethiopian.

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