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2017, or Year One as U.S. president, Donald Trump may prefer, was by turns a bizarre and watershed year for American politics; and because what happens in the United States doesn’t stay just there, reverberations of the Trump Doctrine’s inaugaral year are still being felt around the World. Nowhere is this more true than in Occupied Palestine, where the announcement of plans to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and relocate the US Embassy there, has predictably enough spurred a backlash that now threatens a renewed Intifada.
It’s ironic, or perhaps karmanic, that the country most keenly affected by US domestic policy, Israel, itself exerts the greatest influence on American life. From the massive transfers of wealth in the form of “aid” and the hugely influential Israel Lobby in Washington, to millitarized police training and the construction of president Trump’s ‘Great Wall’ immigration policies, Israel and America are fellow travellers engaged in a true, two-way partnership. It is however, according to my second guest, a toxic relationship bringing hardship and injustice, especially to those, “…already socio-economically disadvantaged and marginalized.”
Zarefah Baroud is a freelance social and political commentator whose writing addresses human rights and environmental issues. A Media and Communications student at the University of Washington, her articles can be found at CounterPunch, Scoop, and Foreign Policy Journal among others.
