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As U.S. pushes for Mideast peace, Saudi king reassures allies |
Reuters

▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-paelestinians-usa-saudi/as-u-s-pushes-for-mideast-peace-saudi-king-reassures-allies-idUSKBN1KJ0F9

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has reassured Arab allies it will not endorse any Middle East peace plan that fails to address Jerusalem’s status or refugees’ right of return, easing their concerns that the kingdom might back a nascent U.S. deal which aligns with Israel on key issues.

King Salman’s private guarantees to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his public defense of long-standing Arab positions in recent months have helped reverse perceptions that Saudi Arabia’s stance was changing under his powerful young son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, diplomats and analysts said.

This in turn has called into question whether Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam and site of its holiest shrines, can rally Arab support for a new push to end the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, with an eye to closing ranks against mutual enemy Iran.

“In Saudi Arabia, the king is the one who decides on this issue now, not the crown prince,” said a senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “The U.S. mistake was they thought one country could pressure the rest to give in, but it’s not about pressure. No Arab leader can concede on Jerusalem or Palestine.”

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Palestinian officials told Reuters in December that Prince Mohammed, known as MbS, had pressed Abbas to support the U.S. plan despite concerns it offered the Palestinians limited self-government inside disconnected patches of the occupied West Bank, with no right of return for refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.

Such a plan would diverge from the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 in which Arab nations offered Israel normal ties in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in 1967.

Saudi officials have denied any difference between King Salman, who has vocally supported that initiative, and MbS, who has shaken up long-held policies on many issues and told a U.S. magazine in April that Israelis are entitled to live peacefully on their own land - a rare statement for an Arab leader.

The Palestinian ambassador to Riyadh, Basem Al-Agha, told Reuters that King Salman had expressed support for Palestinians in a recent meeting with Abbas, saying: “We will not abandon you ... We accept what you accept and we reject what you reject.”

He said that King Salman naming the 2018 Arab League conference “The Jerusalem Summit” and announcing $200 million in aid for Palestinians were messages that Jerusalem and refugees were back on the table.

FILE PHOTO: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud attends Riyadh International Humanitarian Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia February 26, 2018. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser
The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the current status of diplomatic efforts.

RED LINES

Diplomats in the region say Washington’s current thinking, conveyed during a tour last month by top White House officials, does not include Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, a right of return for refugees or a freeze of Israeli settlements in lands claimed by the Palestinians.

Senior adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has not provided concrete details of the U.S. strategy more than 18 months after he was tasked with forging peace.

A diplomat in Riyadh briefed on Kushner’s latest visit to the kingdom said King Salman and MbS had seen him together: “MbS did the talking while the king was in the background.”

Independent analyst Neil Partrick said King Salman appears to have reined in MbS’ “politically reckless approach” because of Jerusalem’s importance to Muslims.

“So MbS won’t oppose Kushner’s ‘deal’, but neither will he, any longer, do much to encourage its one-sided political simplicities,” said Partrick, lead contributor and editor of “Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy: Conflict and Cooperation”.

 Kushner and fellow negotiator Jason Greenblatt have not presented a comprehensive proposal but rather disjointed elements, which one diplomat said “crossed too many red lines”.

Instead, they heavily focused on the idea of setting up an economic zone in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with the adjacent Gaza Strip possibly coming under the control of Cairo, which Arab diplomats described as unacceptable.

In Qatar, Kushner asked Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to pressure the Islamist group Hamas to cede control of Gaza in return for development aid, the diplomats said.

One diplomat briefed on the meeting said Sheikh Tamim just nodded silently. It was unclear if that signaled an agreement or whether Qatar was offered anything in return.

“The problem is there is no cohesive plan presented to all countries,” said the senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “Nobody sees what everyone else is being offered.”

Kushner, a 37-year-old real estate developer with little experience of international diplomacy or political negotiation, visited Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Israel in June. He did not meet Abbas, who has refused to see Trump’s team after the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem.

In an interview at the end of his trip, Kushner said Washington would announce its Middle East peace plan soon, and press on with or without Abbas. Yet there has been little to suggest any significant progress towards ending the decades-old conflict, which Trump has said would be “the ultimate deal”.

“There is no new push. Nothing Kushner presented is acceptable to any of the Arab countries,” the Arab diplomat said. “He thinks he is ‘I Dream of Genie’ with a magic wand to make a new solution to the problem.”

A White House official told reporters last week that Trump’s envoys were working on the most detailed set of proposals to date for the long-awaited peace proposal, which would include what the administration is calling a robust economic plan, though there is thus far no release date.

Editing by Giles Elgood
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The Promise of Radical Municipalism Today
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-promise-of-radical-municipalism-today

Our cities are being hollowed out. Real estate developers carve up downtown areas for profit, displacing the poor to the urban periphery. One by one, public spaces are disappearing; cafés and...

Church of Holy Sepulchre crisis: Israel burns its bridges with the Christian world

Decision makers have continually ignored the political, religious and diplomatic sensitivities when trying to solve problems that concern Jerusalem’s Christian community

Nir Hasson Feb 26, 2018

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem is a place that runs to the beat of the Middle Ages and according to an uncompromising series of rules set in the mid-19th century. One of the unwritten traditions is a continual dispute between the three churches that run it: Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian.
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Knowing all this, the incident that occurred on Sunday was a historic event. The heads of three communities, the Greek Orthodox patriarch, the Armenian patriarch and the Catholic custodian of the Holy Land, met at the entrance to the church. They cleared the place of tourists and had the heavy doors shut. Large signs, printed up ahead of time, were hung outside with images of the church’s two enemies: Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and Knesset member Rachel Azaria of Kulanu. At the top was written, “Enough is Enough.”
The protest came in response to two recent major steps. One was Barkat’s decision to end the municipal tax exemption for church-owned properties in Jerusalem and to put liens on the churches’ bank accounts for the tax debts. The second was a bill sponsored by Azaria that would allow the expropriation of lands sold by churches to private buyers. It was on Sunday’s agenda for a Knesset committee that decides whether or not the governing coalition will support legislation.

Worshippers kneel and pray in front of the closed doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City, February 25, 2018.\ AMIR COHEN/ REUTERS
The churches’ action on Sunday shows that they are in an impossible situation, with pressure from all sides: Israel, their Palestinian faithful, church institutions, pilgrims and their sponsor countries (Jordan, Greece, Armenia and the Vatican). Decision makers continually ignore the political, religious and diplomatic sensitivities when they try to solve problems that concern the churches.
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According to the churches, the agreement that had allowed the churches not to pay municipal taxes existed since Ottoman times, and British, Jordanian and Israeli governments have all honored it. They say the move to collect the taxes is part of Barkat’s fight against the national government and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon over the city’s budget. Meanwhile, the mayor maintains that the agreement on taxes only applies to houses of worship and not commercial properties owned by the churches.

Between the taxes and the legislation put forward by Azaria, it’s the latter that has church leaders worried the most. According to the proposed law, the government would be able to expropriate land that had been church-owned and was sold to private real estate companies. The law discriminates against the churches compared to other institutions or private citizens. (A relevant question is what Israel would say if such a move was taken in another country for synagogue-owned property.) Furthermore, it would be applied retroactively.
The law would force the churches to pay for the failures of the Jewish National Fund and the Israel Lands Administration. To understand their missteps, one must look no further than the land deal in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood, which was developed in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, churches leased lands in Rehavia and other neighborhoods to the JNF for 99 years.

A protest sign hangs outside of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, February 25, 2018.Mahmoud Illean/AP
In the Rehavia sale, which is rocking the lives of 1,300 families, a private company bought the lease rights to 500 dunams (125 acres) of land in the heart of Jerusalem for 200 years for only 78 million shekels ($22.3 million). If the government had acted in a smarter fashion, it could easily have bought the rights to this land for a similar amount – small change considering the size of the area and its importance. It could have made part of the money back from residents and businesses extending their leases. But those in charge didn’t act, paving the way for private developers to enter the picture.
Once the 99-year lease is over, instead of having the JNF renew it almost automatically for a symbolic fee, the land will be transferred to the private company. Residents who live in buildings affected by the sale will need negotiate with private developers over what will happen to their homes, which have already lost as much as half of their value.
If the law passes, no one will want to do business with the churches, because who wants to buy land that can be expropriated tomorrow?
Anyone dealing with this law – including those who drafted it – knows very well that it has no chance of passing at the Knesset in its present form. It violates so many constitutional principles that it is a perfect case for being annulled by the Supreme Court. The law is intended to be a threat for real estate developers and speculators, so they reach a deal with the government. But in the meantime, the question is whether this is the way Israel wants to communicate with the Christian world.

T-RACES: Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces (Marciano, McKeon, Hou & Goldberg) - Design and Violence ▻http://salt.umd.edu/T-RACES/demo/demo.html#
▻http://designandviolence.moma.org/t-races-testbed-for-the-redlining-archives-of-californias-ex

http://designandviolence.moma.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Screen-Shot-2015-04-16-at-10.31.43-AM.png

From the curators: T-RACES is a data visualization design that makes the history and effects of redlining newly tangible. Its focus is an interactive map that offers new access to archival documents from the National Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC). The federally sponsored HOLC was founded in 1933 to facilitate affordable mortgages as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal response to the troubled economic climate in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The HOLC worked in tandem with local and national banks to assess real estate, basing the credit-worthiness of potential homeowners, in part, on their zip codes. The HOLC’s systematic discrimination against neighborhoods in which non-whites predominated was absolute–less than 2% of the $120 billion in real estate they financed between the 1930s and the 1968 passing of the Fair Housing Act was available to non-white families. Dialogue around this practice of redlining–termed so because of the red lines drawn on maps by banks and government institutions around areas where they practiced discriminatory lending practices–is not new. Scholars, activists, homeowners, and architects have highlighted this spatial and social violence for decades. The T-RACE team of researchers, a curator, and Web developers from the universities of Maryland and North Carolina at Chapel Hill have geotagged the HOLC archival documents. This gives scholars and the public alike stark new insight, at a very granular level, into the violence done to hopes and dreams of non-white homeowners through the practice of redlining. The repercussions still echo loudly today, as articulated powerfully in writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.”

Enforced segregation by racial or ethnic origin and social status has a very old history. Not so long ago, slaves and servants occupied different spaces, oftentimes within the same household or estate. Violence was explicit and used to establish direct domination.

The advent of an industrial society and liberal democracy in Europe and the U.S. no doubt brought improvements to the conditions of minorities and the powerless. However, new forms of discrimination found their way around the formal public discourse of freedom and equality. Restrictive covenants made it all but impossible for minorities and immigrants to buy homes in specific neighborhoods. Yet, as decentralized mechanisms requiring coordination of all owners, covenants tended to achieve their intended segregating effect mostly in new subdivisions.

In the new American suburbs of the early 20th century, real estate developers could play an active role in establishing and coordinating “racial cartels.” However, it is hard to completely enforce segregation in an urbanized society of anonymous mobile citizens. Thus, the state came to the rescue of the established racialized notions of human nature that peoples of European origin fervently espoused prior to WWII. In the view of a “decent,” church-going, law-abiding white citizen, peoples of African descent were oftentimes seen as inferior, and immigrants often thought of as brutish, alcoholic, noisy, and quarrelsome.

Of course, overt population resettlement policies could not be implemented by elected governments in a society that wanted to see itself as fully democratic. Enter institutionalized redlining.

The housing mortgage is one of the greatest financial inventions, allowing non-wealthy families to access comfortable housing under a repayment schedule that suits their income levels. Mortgages have long been an instrumental facilitator of the “American Dream” of homeownership and comfortable living.

The T-RACES maps show how such a dream was turned into a nightmare for many families of African and foreign-born descent in the 1930s and beyond. Neighborhoods occupied by immigrants and minorities, or transitional mixed-income neighborhoods, were deemed “high risk” for lenders by the Home Owners Loan Corporation. This made it very hard for minorities to access loans, but also all but impossible for the white middle class to move into these neighborhoods, due to lack of credit. The language used in the maps and associated archival documents is violently demeaning and dehumanizing, including sentences such as “undesirable racial concentration,” “undesirables,” and “subservient racial elements.” These were sad times for humanism: across the Atlantic, fascist parties and the Nazis were infusing European intellectual thought with their notions of racial and national superiority.

In the U.S., redlining deeply affected housing markets. With poor access to credit, homeownership was harder in the neighborhoods designated as dangerous by the regulator. More importantly, this had a negative impact on housing prices in some of these neighborhoods: the lack of a stable source of financing made it very difficult for their neighbors to pay as much for housing. With declining housing prices, neighborhoods become imperiled. Often times, housing prices would go to a point below the replacement cost of the housing structures; no new development can be expected in neighborhoods where the price of a new home does not even cover its construction costs. Similarly, it does not make sense to invest large amounts of money in homes with very low market values: how can we expect a family to spend $15,000 on a roof on a house that may not be worth much more?

Therefore discriminatory institutional decisions had negative moral, social, and economic impacts on immigrants and minorities, but also deleterious physical impacts on their neighborhoods.

Acknowledging past wrongs and understanding the roots of current racial and economic segregation are very important to allow us to move forward. Another important lesson from these maps: the definition of violence should be construed by analyzing actual behavior—and perhaps intention—rather than by appealing to discrete, prescribed categories. Governments, markets, civil society, family structures, financial institutions, nongovernmental organizations, local communities, science, and the collection of current intellectual memes are all simply tools that can be used for alternate purposes. Social tools are only as good as their actual contemporary use.

The financial system can be used for bad purposes, but so too can governments, as the case of HOLC regulations sorely illustrates. It is the job of us all (institutions, architects and designers, scholars, homeowners, and beyond) to practically select all the tools at our disposal and change them or use them adroitly–in a humanistic fashion–to improve housing, economic, and social conditions for everyone.

Design and Violence ▻http://designandviolence.moma.org

Rami Levy’s new real estate venture in the West Bank | Who Profits
▻http://www.whoprofits.org/content/rami-levys-new-real-estate-venture-west-bank

Israeli supermarket tycoon Rami Levy appears intent on becoming a real estate developer in the occupied West Bank by building new shopping centers in illegal settlements.

Sacramento Developer with Ties to UC Davis MIND Institute Embroiled in New Controversy

In the midst of the growing controversy over the alleged embezzlement of public funds by California Democratic Party operatives associated with OBAMA FOR AMERICA, a Sacramento real estate developer once accused of defrauding an Indian tribe out of millions of dollars while conspiring with the tribe’s attorney (Howard Dickstein), is now embroiled in a separate controversy dealing with the alleged embezzlement of public funds through and by means of fraud while conspiring with the wife of Howard Dickstein — Sacramento-based lobbyist Jeannine English.

Specifically, Mark Friedman of Sacramento-based Fulcrum Property Group — an Electoral for Barack Obama — has recently been identified as a potential player in the financial scheme known as CaliforniaALL following the fortuitous discovery of evidence relating to his accountant, Alison Turner of Alison Turner & Associates.

As relevant to this matter, in 2007, various members of the State Bar of California Board of Governors with ties to the Democratic Party/OBAMA FOR AMERICA are accused of knowingly agreeing to establish a non-profit entity (known as CaliforniaALL) which was later misused as a vehicle to absorb funds from utility companies, as well as close to $800,000 from the California Bar Foundation (an entity controlled by the State Bar of California Board of Governors).

As matters presently stand, suspicions exist that Morrison & Foerster attorneys James Brosnahan (the self-proclaimed “mastermind” behind the Democratic Party and member of OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s California Finance Committee), Tony West (OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s Chair of California’s Finance Committee), Chris Young (OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s Northern California Deputy Finance Director), Annette Carnegie (former director of the California Bar Foundation), Kamala Harris (Co-Chair, OBAMA FOR AMERICA and member of CaliforniaALL), Jeffrey Bleich of Munger Tolles (president of the State Bar of California, director of the California Bar Foundation, and founding member and Chair of OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s National Finance Committee), Brad Phillips of Munger Tolles (2007- 2008 Director of the California Bar Foundation which served as a “financial sponsor” to CaliforniaALL on behalf of Verizon Wireless and Southern California Edison, both clients of Munger Tolles & Olson), Mark Parnes of Wilson Sonsini (2007-2008 director and Secretary of the California Bar Foundation), John Roos of Wilson Sonsini (former CEO of Wilson Sonsini and member of OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s National Finance Committee), Steven Churchwell of DLA Piper in Sacramento (Treasurer, draft committee of OBAMA FOR AMERICA; firm where CaliforniaALL resided free of charge), Laura Chick (member of the State Bar of California Board of Governors and OBAMA FOR AMERICA), and Freada Klein Kapor (member of the board of directors of CaliforniaALL; OBAMA FOR AMERICA’s phone bank was located at The Kapor Center) all participated in a sophisticated financial scheme to misuse all or part of the “hush-hush” $780,000 originating from the California Bar Foundation to improperly benefit OBAMA FOR AMERICA via a separate foundation created ad hoc by Susan Mac Cormac and Eric Tate of Morrison & Foerster known as CaliforniaALL.

In 2007, Ruthe Catolico Ashley served as member of the State Bar of California Board of Governors alongside Jeffrey Bleich, and came up with the idea to create CaliforniaALL during a meeting with Sarah Redfield and Peter Arth, (the assistant to CPUC President Michael Peevey).

CaliforniaALL was conveniently housed free of charge at the offices of DLA Piper in Sacramento, alongside the draft committee of OBAMA FOR AMERICA, where Steve Churchwell of DLA Piper in Sacramento served as Treasurer of the draft committee of OBAMA FOR AMERICA.

Subsequent to the election of Barack Obama, CaliforniaALL was dissolved.

Other then collecting close to $2 million directly from utility companies (including the “hush-hush” transfer of $774,247, comprised of one installment of $5000 and another contribution of $769,247 from the Foundation which was never mentioned in the Foundation’s “newsroom” or by any other of its publications such as the California Bar Journal or by any of the newsletters and alerts published by CaliforniaALL), CaliforniaALL appears to have been be a sham, phantom entity from its inception in 2008 to the day it began to slowly be dissolved in approximately 2009, subsequent to the election of Barack Obama as president of the U.S. Its only alleged achievement was providing some money for the creation of the Saturday Academy of Law at UC Irvine ("SALUCI") in approximately 2008-2009. Here too vast and intense suspicious circumstances exist as the funds from CaliforniaALL actually went to the UC Irvine Foundation, where the present executive director of the State Bar of California (Senator Joe Dunn) serves as a member of the audit committee, and it turns out that the SALUCI was actually already created in 2005 and was fully operational before CaliforniaALL arrived on the scene. In addition, some records seem to indicate that Verizon Wireless funneled the money directly to SALUCI , while CaliforniaALL took the credit.