• How Israel lobby attacked an Auschwitz survivor to smear Corbyn | The Electronic Intifada - Adri Nieuwhof - Lobby Watch - 7 August 2018

    https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/how-israel-lobby-attacked-auschwitz-survivor-smear-corbyn

    Hajo Meyer at his home in Heiloo, Netherlands on 29 July 2014. Adri Nieuwhof

    British media have been abusing my friend, the late Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer, as part of their campaign to smear Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite.

    In 2010, Corbyn hosted a Holocaust Memorial Day event in London, where Meyer was the main speaker.

    In recent days, The Times created a furor with an article declaring that Meyer “made the comparison between the Nazi regime and Israeli policy.”

    Right-wing Labour lawmakers opposed to Corbyn went on the attack.

    MP John Mann declared that the event violated “any form of normal decency,” while fellow lawmaker Louise Ellman said that the event made her “wonder if this is the reason that the Labour Party wanted to dilute the definition of anti-Semitism in this way.”

    Ellman – a long-time apologist for Israeli human rights violations – is an officer of Labour Friends of Israel, a lobby group with close ties to the Israeli embassy.

    Ellman was referring to the deeply flawed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism which mentions “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as an example of anti-Jewish bigotry.

    Under pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups, Labour’s National Executive Committee last month adopted the IHRA definition as part of the party’s rule book. (...)

  • Israel lobby billionaire praises Kushner for collusion with Netanyahu | The Electronic Intifada | Ali Abunimah Power Suits 4 December 2017
    https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lobby-billionaire-praises-kushner-collusion-netanyahu

    President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received public praise on Sunday from a billionaire Israel lobby financier for his possibly illegal attempts to derail a UN Security Council vote condemning Israel’s settlements a year ago.

    This came as news broke that Kushner failed to disclose in government ethics filings his role as director of a family foundation that funded Israeli settlements.

    Kushner, a senior adviser to Trump, is in charge of efforts to revive the so-called peace process.

    New details of Kushner’s Saudi-backed plan reported Sunday confirm that it would require nothing less than a complete capitulation by the Palestinians to Israel’s demands, leaving them with a state in name only.
    “Nothing illegal”

    On Sunday, Kushner appeared at the Saban Forum, an Israel lobby conference at Washington’s Brookings Institution, financed by Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban.

    Saban and Kushner sat on stage for what was billed as a “keynote conversation.”

    “You’ve been in the news the last few days, to say the least. But you’ve been in the news about an issue that I personally want to thank you for, because you and your team were taking steps to try and get the United Nations Security Council to not go along with what ended up being an abstention by the US,” Saban said in the exchange in the video at the top of this article.

    “As far as I know there was nothing illegal there but I think that this crowd and myself want to thank you for making that effort.”

    “Thank you,” Kushner responded.
    (...)

    “Peace” plan

    Given the systematic lack of accountability for senior US officials, dating back decades, there is little reason to expect that anything short of an indictment will remove Kushner from his role.

    And the more that is known about the “peace plan” he is helping forge, the clearer it is that Kushner and his colleagues are simply mouthpieces for Netanyahu.

    On Sunday, The New York Times characterized the as yet unpublished plan in the following terms: “The Palestinians would get a state of their own but only noncontiguous parts of the West Bank and only limited sovereignty over their own territory. The vast majority of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which most of the world considers illegal, would remain. The Palestinians would not be given East Jerusalem as their capital and there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.”

    These were the elements reportedly conveyed to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman last month with an ultimatum that he accept them or resign.

    These ideas are so far below what any Palestinian could ever accept that even Abbas was “alarmed and visibly upset” by the Saudi proposal, according to an official from his Fatah party cited by the Times.

    The White House has denied that its plan has been finalized, and Saudi Arabia denied it supported such positions, according to the Times.

    But the newspaper provides ample reason to doubt those denials, noting that: “the main points of the Saudi proposal as told to Mr. Abbas were confirmed by many people briefed on the discussions between Mr. Abbas and Prince Mohammad, including Mr. [Ahmad] Yousef, the senior Hamas leader; Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Parliament; several Western officials; a senior Fatah official; a Palestinian official in Lebanon; a senior Lebanese official; and a Lebanese politician, among others.”

    The Saudis have been pressuring the Palestinians to capitulate to Israel evidently to clear the Palestinian cause out of the way so that the growing Saudi-Israeli alliance aimed at Iran can be brought fully into the open.

    One element of the plan reportedly includes giving Palestinians a capital in the village of Abu Dis, instead of Jerusalem.

    This is a revival of a 1990s fantasy in which the small village would be renamed “al-Quds” and declared the “capital of Palestine,” while the real city of Jerusalem is swallowed up by Israel.

    Israel currently uses part of Abu Dis as an illegal garbage dump.

    #Flynn #Kushner #Mueller

    • L’étrange cas de Jared Kushner et du lobby israélien
      Richard Silverstein | 4 décembre 2017
      http://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/opinions/l-trange-cas-de-jared-kushner-et-du-lobby-isra-lien-1758255038

      Il était clair que l’objectif de toute la hiérarchie, à commencer par Netanyahou et Trump, était de détruire la résolution, qui bénéficiait du soutien tacite de l’administration Obama.

      Bien que les États-Unis se soient finalement abstenus, l’administration Obama n’a manifestement rien fait pour arrêter la résolution – ce qui signifie qu’elle l’a tacitement soutenue. Par le passé, elle avait en réalité opposé son veto à des propositions pratiquement identiques du Conseil de sécurité.

      L’abstention était alors une initiative assez audacieuse de la part des États-Unis. Par conséquent, en intervenant pour tuer la résolution, Kushner a franchi la ligne entre le fait d’utiliser son droit de s’exprimer librement sur la politique du gouvernement garanti par le Premier Amendement et le fait de subvertir la politique étrangère officielle des États-Unis. Il s’agit là d’un terrain juridique encore inexploré.

      L’inclusion de la loi Logan dans une liste d’accusations contre Kushner ne serait pas seulement un fait nouveau : cela avertirait en effet le lobby israélien qu’une ligne rouge a été franchie. Et qu’une fois que cette ligne est franchie, on a affaire à un comportement criminel. Ce serait là une première. Un coup de semonce choquant qui ferait vaciller le lobby.

      Cependant, on peut douter que Mueller fasse de la loi Logan un élément clé de sa stratégie juridique. Lorsque l’on poursuit un président des États-Unis, on préfère ne pas s’essayer à des théories juridiques non éprouvées ou ésotériques.