Jared Kushner, former White Home adviser and prized son-in-law of Twitter ban sufferer and ex-US President Donald Trump, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Harvard Legislation College Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz.
The nomination relies on Kushner’s function in negotiating final yr the “Abraham Accords”, the normalisation offers between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
In fact, of all of the folks to be operating round making Nobel Peace Prize nominations, Dershowitz’s credentials are slightly doubtful. His observe report contains advocating for the legalisation of torture and psychopathically arguing within the Wall Road Journal on behalf of a “continuum of civilianality” – in keeping with which it’s OK for Israel to kill Arab civilians as a result of, nicely, a lot of them are simply not that civilian-like.
It isn’t troublesome to see why celeb lawyer Dershowitz, who additionally defended Trump throughout his first impeachment trial, would have fun the “peace” efforts of nepotism’s favorite poster boy. In spite of everything, Kushner’s method to Center East peace is to definitively dispossess the Palestinians and thereby finalise Israel’s venture of territorial domination based mostly on ethnic cleaning and apartheid.
The thrust of Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan – unveiled in 2019 as a part of Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” – was to inflict on the Palestinians “private-sector development”, “overseas direct funding”, “free commerce agreements”, and all these different neoliberal catch-phrases that magically endow company tyranny and mass financial struggling with a veneer of vital and thrilling progress.
By no means thoughts that it’s unimaginable to prosper when you’re being bombed frequently by Israel, whose insurance policies of slaughter and different types of human rights obliteration are by no means seen by the likes of Kushner and Dershowitz as an obstacle both to peace or peace prizes.
When “Peace to Prosperity” didn’t be shoved down Palestinian throats, the next-best answer was devised, and Kushner set about working to successfully disappear the Palestinian trigger from the worldwide agenda by orchestrating normalisation between Israel and opportunistic Arab regimes – all of them equally peaceful.
The UAE, for instance, has performed a starring function within the Saudi-led devastation of Yemen. Dershowitz has to this point avoided calculating the diploma of “civilianality” of Yemeni schoolchildren massacred by the coalition with the assistance of US-made bombs.
And whereas the Israeli-Emirati love affair lengthy predated the Abraham Accords – in 2016, as an illustration, an Israeli agency accomplished the set up of a super-creepy mass surveillance system in Abu Dhabi – official normalisation can solely deliver extra nice issues. One want solely contemplate an evaluation showing final yr within the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “The actual deal for Israel and the UAE is weapons”, which specifies that the Emirates spend billions of {dollars} yearly on arms procurement and that “now Israel stands to get in on the motion”.
Anyway, nothing says Center East peace like extra weapons.
By the way, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed have additionally been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for normalising relations, however the obscene amount of blood on their respective fingers.
Granted, such nominations are lower than stunning if we recall that former Nobel recipient Barack Obama would go on to drop 26,171 bombs on seven nations in simply his ultimate yr as US president.
Then there’s the Nobel Peace Prize that went to former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos who, due to a earlier stint as defence minister, bears partial accountability for the infamous “false positives” scandal that noticed reportedly greater than 10,000 civilians killed by members of the Colombian army, who disguised the corpses as leftist guerrillas.
And there may be late Nobel winner Shimon Peres, whose CV in the end comprised such episodes because the 1996 bloodbath of 106 refugees – half of them youngsters – sheltering on the United Nations compound within the southern Lebanese village of Qana.
In Kushner’s case, he’s chargeable for loads of not-so-peaceable machinations on the home scene, as nicely. When Trump put him accountable for a “shadow job drive” to cope with the coronavirus pandemic – one in all an array of management positions assigned to the presidential son-in-law regardless of his possession of zero {qualifications} in any related area – even the New York Occasions ran the headline: Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed (the wording was subsequently sanitised).
There’s additionally the matter of Kushner’s household’s actual property firm and his skilled practices on that entrance, which as housing lawyer and CUNY Legislation College Professor John Whitlow commented to me are “predatory and extractive, and depend upon weaponising the regulation towards poor and working-class tenants”.
In New York Metropolis, he stated, Kushner has “benefited from beneficiant tax incentives and exploited loopholes within the state’s hire legal guidelines to take away residences from hire regulation”. Within the Baltimore space, in the meantime, his tenants “reside amid chronically poor circumstances and are subjected to a relentless sample of petty and meritless litigation”.
Kushner’s enterprise mannequin, Whitlow harassed, is based on the “intensification of inequalities”.
And simply as there isn’t any peace in inequality, there must be no prizes both.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.