Yossi Alpher is a former Israeli intelligence professional whose highly-classified intelligence-gathering and analyses were delivered to the Israeli leadership. How does he explain ex-President Trump’s obsessive hoarding of so many sensitive government secrets?
Exclusive access to secrets empowers a head of state. Trump left office insisting he still was the legitimate head of state in the United States. Apparently, in his warped psyche, those boxes of documents–“my boxes”–ratified and confirmed his self-image as president. Note that after leaving office, Trump reportedly moved the boxes around and examined their contents with the help of an aide, in his own ‘presidential’ manner.
Add to this that he came to the presidency with no background in reading and absorbing classified intelligence assessments. Apparently, he is also not endowed intellectually to process sensitive strategic intelligence. Conceivably, Trump does not really comprehend the significance for the nation of what he has hoarded.
Sadly, at least one aspect of this description, lack of intelligence background, fits most recent American presidents and, indeed, many world leaders. For what it is worth, Israeli leaders usually enjoy an advantage here. Sadly, that does not necessarily improve their strategic decision-making.
This is my own personal theory about Trump and the documents he hoarded. The boxes show better than anything else just how unfit for office this man is.
Originally found in Palestine, The Legitimacy of Home, by Richard Falk. Read more at his website:
An acute problem with extremism, whether of the Likud or Tea Party variety, is that it subordinates interests and rationality to the dictates of an obsessive and emotive vision that is incapable of calculating the balance of gains and losses in conflict situations, being preoccupied with all or nothing outcomes, which is the antithesis of diplomacy
There are a lot of advantages of a big city like New York City. It’s multicultural with culture of any kind going on all the time. There’s a history which both tourists and life-long residents can connect to. There’s a possibility to do anything, and to be anyone.
The problem with big cities is that they can be depressing. There are too many people, and that there’s too much going on. There are too many people rushing around. The problem with cities is that to add more people they either have to expand outwards – to suburbs – or upwards to add more people. As cities expand upwards the people have very little space to live.
One thing I noticed about being in NYC recently is that there are no trees. It’s very depressing that everything is concrete. A park here or there, or a tree growing in the cemented sidewalk hardly counts as having any greenery.
My guess is that a lot of people in cities are depressed. Surrounded by concrete with little space to call their own, and little space to find privacy or alone-time hardly sounds idyllic.
When Israel elected a far-right government last year people began to write about Kahanism. Based on the ideology of Meir Kahane, Kahanism calls for annexation of Judea and Samaria – the ancient kingdoms of that comprised biblical Israel – and an immediate expulsion of all Palestinians.
Twenty-nine years ago, a disciple of Kahane entered the Cave of the Forefathers, in Hebron, where biblical Abraham and his family are said to be buried, and killed almost thirty Palestinians and wounded hundred more while they were at prayer. Baruch Goldstein, the settler from Brooklyn that lived in Kiryat Arba, just outside Hebron., used a machine to indiscriminately kill dozens of defenseless Palestinians.
In Hebron about 800Jews live in tiny fortified urban settlements at the center of a city inhabited by 180,000 Palestinians. After the massacre in the mosque the response from Israel was to subject the Palestinians of Hebron to collective punishment. The doors of business on the main street were welded shut, and they remain that way twenty-nine years later.
Baruch Goldstein was beaten to death by survivors of hist massacre that killed dozens and injured more than a hundred. His ideas and his worldview did not die. His gravestone calls him a martyr with a pure heart.
More recently, the name Itamar Ben-Gvir has been in the news. A member of Netanyahu’s most recent, noticeably-right-wing, government Ben-Gvir worships both Goldstein and Kahane.
The massacre in the Cave of the Forefathers was neither an accident nor a solitary event. It’s a sad continuum in the oppression and murder of Palestinians .
Sitting in a chair is a great opportunity to think.
I don’t just refer to sitting in a char while at the computer, or while eating. It occurred to me, as I was getting my hair cut, that my thoughts while sitting in a barber’s chair is quite different than the thoughts I had while sitting in a dentist’s chair.
I’ve always found that the being at the dentist is a great time to try to remember monologues from Shakespeare I’d memorized. Although I’m not really inclined to talk there’s also no opportunity to talk, as the dentist technician monotonously says “open” “shut”. My mind wanders away from Shakespeare, however to contemplate the ceiling light. There used to be a big off-white light that dangled in the air to help the technician see; no they have a giant spotlight on their forehead. I don’t even know the technician’s name. What inspired her to take up the career of cleaning people’s teeth? These are my thoughts.
Not long after this I was sitting a barber shop. I’m not sure it should actually be called a barber shop – are mass-franchised places that hire “hire stylists” actually barber shops? A barber shop (even a mass-franchised one) is a place where talking seems to be expected. I’ve always dreaded the idea of getting a haircut for this reason. I don’t go there for conversation, and I don’t know what to talk about. I don’t need to ask why the “hair stylist” chose that career – or line of work – it seems more obvious than a someone who cleans teeth, for some reason. Although I didn’t talk about it, I remember thinking about how sitting in a chair getting a haircut (somehow I don’t feel like the phrase “sitting in a barber’s chair is right) is different than reclining in a chair while having teeth cleaned.
Thirteen years ago Israel launched what has been politely referred to as a “major military offensive” against the Gaza Strip. The offensive, called Operation Cast Lead, was not the first time or the last time Israel assaulted the Palestinians of Gaza. The Operation was merely a continuation, and a punctuation (almost an exclamation), of Israel’s policy toward Palestinians and to Gazans in particular.
It’s not clear how many people died during those three weeks; Robert Fisk lists the number of Palestinians killed at 1,417, including 313 children, and more than 5,500 injured Palestinians – many permanently. B’tselem, a human rights group in Israel differs, saying that 1,387 Palestinians died, of which 773 were civilians. B’tselem also reminds us that nine Israelis died, of which three were civilians. It’s clear that during the twenty-two days of the Operation that Israeli soldiers followed the rabbinical injunction to inflict “cruelty to the…
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On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly issued Resolution 181 “to partition Palestine into two states.” The Resolution was a result of the UNSCOP (UN Special Committee On Palestine), a committee that “had little or no knowledge of conflict resolution, and even less about Palestine and it’s history.”
Thirty years after resolving to do something about an issue the United Nations didn’t understand it created – through another resolution – the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, to be observed on November 29 each year. Seventy-five years later the facts are clear and indisputable in one of the most contentious conflicts of the 20th and 21st Centuries.
There are people of all religious persuasions who support solidarity with the Palestinians but no international power has ever provided actual solidarity with Palestinians. Britain rejected the civil, political, and social needs of Palestinians during the First World War and during the Mandate period. The United States, which has been (for lack of a better term) taking care of the needs of Israel since World War II, has continued the British role of providing “even-handed” support to make sure Israelis and Zionists receive more moral and political support than the Palestinians.
It’s also a fact, although few agencies and fewer government recognize it, that there is no two-state solution. The support, financial, political, and moral, that the United States continues to provide Israel has allowed and encouraged Israel to become a segregated political entity that many now call and an apartheid state.
True solidarity would be to listen to the Palestinians, whose view and needs have been rejected for as there has been a colonial power involved in something they know little or nothing about.
The attitudes of policy-makers (often elected) still have the same attitudes toward resources and people that lead to mad-made disasters like these.
Policy decisions have effects on people that often last a long time.
On November 15, 1884 “an international conference was opened by the chancellor of the newly-created German Empire at his official residence on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin,” Patrick Gathara tells us. The purpose of the conference was to determine the future of Africa.
The West Africa Conference began on November 15, 1884. Gathered in Berlin, capitol of the newly-created German Empire, the conference lasted 104 days, Patrick Gathara tells us in “Berlin 1884: Remembering the conference that divided Africa.”
The Conference (also referred to as the Berlin Conference) “established the rules for the conquest and partition of Africa, in the process legitimising the ideas of Africa as a playground for outsiders, its mineral wealth as a resource for the outside world not for Africans and its fate as a matter not to be left to Africans.”
The Powers at the Conference – which…
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Happy Armistice Day. This is a day to remember peace and to strive to end all war.
On a day that should have ended the war to end all wars “early on November 11th [1918], the Germans met the Allies near Paris to sign an Armistice ending the fighting. The agreement set 11:00am Paris time as the moment the truce would begin – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.”
But, as the World War I Centennial Commission adds:
The fighting continued until the last possible moment. As a result, there were 10,944 casualties, including 2,738 deaths, on the war’s last day. Most occurred within a period of three hours. The last soldier to be killed in World War I was Henry Gunther, an American of German descent, who was killed just sixty seconds before the guns fell silent.
The agreement between the armies to stop fighting – the armistice – lasted long enough to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
It sounds…
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Foreign Office
November 2nd, 1917Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you. on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours,
Arthur James Balfour
This Declaration, since it was issued a hundred five years ago, has been one of the most influential, and in some ways, the most destructive statement and issue since these few words were written.
The British government facilitated the “Jewish Zionist aspirations” of establishing “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. It doesn’t matter that at the time of the Declaration that the land of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, and neither Britain nor the Zionists had any control over the land of Palestine. It doesn’t matter that Britain – at the time in the middle of the Great War (WWI) – had already negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement to bifurcate the Middle East between itself and France, or that Britain had already agreed through the McMahon Correspondents to help establish a pan-Arab national movement that would have encompassed the land of Palestine. At the time of the Declaration more than 90% of the inhabitants of Palestine were Arab Muslims who had good relations would the Jewish community that lived in Palestine (this community did not consider itself Zionist).
The Declaration helped create a mass movement of European Jews to the land of Palestine. As more European Zionist Jews took land from the Arabs and violated long-standing customs between Muslims and Jews in the land signs of conflict emerged. Despite Britain’s effort, during the Mandate period, to please both the Jews and the Muslim Arabs by issuing the Balfour Declaration and “endvouring to facilitate the achievement of this object” guaranteed that there would be an unending conflict.
Between 1947 and 1949 the Zionist Jews of Israel by force, or by fear or force, forced about 750,000 Palestinians to permanently flee from their homes. They were forced into refugee camps into which they, and their decedents, still live as refugees under international law. During this time Britain ended its Mandate over Palestine, and a day later, in May 1948 Israel declared itself a state. Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, like the Balfour Declaration, promised equality for all of Israel’s citizens and assurance that everyone could participate in democracy.
Britain issued the Balfour Declaration at a time when the sun never set on the British Empire. By the time Britain ended the Mandate in 1948 the United States was the English-speaking superpower. The United States took on the role of protectorate of the Zionist cause – to have a state in Palestine. The political and financial support the U.S. provides Israel is rarely questioned. Under Obama, the U.S. has committed $3.8 billion each year to Israel, no questions asked through 2026. (about $1million per day). Israel is sometimes, especially in times of increased violence, provided millions of dollars more.
It’s an irony that today happens to be election day in Israel. Approximately 80% of the Palestinians live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and can’t vote in Israeli elections, and of the 20% that are Israeli citizens and can vote many are inclined not to vote, because the choice is oppression. The indications from the polls suggest that Netanyahu – under investigation for fraud – might be back in office as Prime Minister, and that the extreme religious right (yelling “death to Arabs”) did fairly well. Regardless of who’s in office, the oppression and military occupation of the Palestinians will continue and the judicial system will praise members of the military, or settlers, who harm or kill Palestinians.
If Britain wanted to live up to the full commitment of the Balfour it’s time that “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” remain part of the what we remember about the Declaration. The United States has taken the lead in providing the political and financial support for Israel and any facilitation for the achievement of this object by the United States would be useful. Israel once said that everyone in Israel would be equal, and that everyone could participate in democracy. As Israel continues to expand and annex the land Palestinians hope would comprise a Palestinian state Israel should commit itself to creating a true democracy. The Balfour Declaration, without which Israel would exist, calls for protecting “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Israel should be what it claims to be, not what it is.
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