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.
The rabbi then suggested the man take out the chickens. Feeling a slight relief but still frustrated with his living arrangements, the man headed back to the rabbi, who advised him to take out another animal. This back-and-forth repeated until the man had taken all animals out. The following day he went back to the rabbi with a big smile. « O Rabbi », he said, « we have such a good life now. The house is so quiet and we’ve got room to spare! »
The moral of the story is that when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. In this sense, the Trump trio (see Part 1 and 2 ) is trying to force the Palestinians to see that their reality is not so bad in comparison to how bad it could become.
But the truth is, changing your perspective does not change your reality. In fact, every time the Palestinians changed the way they viewed things at US insistence over the past quarter of a century, their situation has only gotten worse. Whichever way you look at it, Israel has been expanding at the expense of Palestine for decades.
Adapted from: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/logic-humiliation-palestinians-190423123902553.html
Distributed by PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity)
