Trump is helping to make the region a crueler place

by ROBERT FISK

There really is no point any more in talking about Donald Trump or U.S. foreign policy. They do not exist.

Indeed, the Trump “presidency” is about as real as “Palestine”. Both deserve inverted commas although the first fantasy would clearly represent white and largely Christian Americans trying to make their country great again at the expense of lesser creatures, while the second – which is not even a state – obviously qualifies as a Trump “s***hole country”; its people are not exactly white, they are largely Muslim and many seek asylum from the enslavement of the longest military occupation of modern times. For Norway, of course, read Israel.

So in the crazed mind of the booby who thinks he’s running the United States, there’s not much point, surely, in peace between a modern and much loved ally and the third world people forced to live in the manure pits further east and south. Jerusalem is thus the capital of Israel, the Oslo of the Middle East, built on the “green hill far away” – though in the hymn it is supposed to be “without a city wall”. But what the hell? Trump likes walls, and Cecil Frances Alexander, the 19th century Irish hymnodist of “There is a Green Hill Far Away” also wrote “All Things Bright and Beautiful” which surely appeals to the crackpot in the White House who speaks so eloquently about “beautiful babies” (in Syria, when they are dead) and “beautiful weapons” (in Riyadh, before they have killed any babies).

A presidency built on such weak foundations will do little to help little to help any negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and has already made things worse.

In fact, to talk about Trump’s Middle East, it’s necessary to enter the lunatic asylum. After all, “Palestine” does not qualify as a state and Israel, which does, has not the slightest idea where its eastern border lies geographically. In the middle of Jerusalem? Halfway across the Palestinian West Bank? Along the entire length of the Jordan River? And what about poor Gaza? When the Israelis bombed the place to bits in 2008-2009 (they did the same again in 2012 and 2014), they dropped munitions on the Palestinian sewage system and contaminated both drinking water and the sea with … Oh well, yes, of course, they turned part of Gaza, quite literally, into a s***hole.

Not even Jared Kushner, the beloved son-in-law and real estate magnate and dealmaker supreme – a woeful Dickensian hero, if ever there was one – can work out the dimensions of this particular Middle East property or, for that matter, either part of it. Since, along with the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Kushner supports the Jewish colonization of the Arab West Bank – and, believe me, there are no s***holes on those hilltop settlements – even he will not be able to tell us exactly where the eastern border of Israel runs, or may run or will run, eternally and forever and ever, Amen.

And that’s the problem, I fear, for the crank in the Oval Office. Much of the world is a land of “vapours” – the kind that supposedly affected your brain (Trump might consult Caliban about this) – and apparitions. The Middle East, as we all know, is a place of djinns, ghosts, Crusaders, Saracens, Apocalypses, 12th Imams and Christ figures and bearded men in caves. But all of them have a greater chance of appearing or reappearing in the second year of Trump’s “presidency” than a peace between two states whose physical dimensions are way beyond the comprehension of Jared and his “Kushner Companies”.

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