Whether or not Netanyahu manages to cobble together a coalition, the Bahrain conference will still happen — and leaders in the region are getting ready for the publication of the plan’s economic chapter. That’s how Kushner’s arrival was interpreted in media reports on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump’s top Mideast advisers face skeptical audiences as they visit several locations in the region and in Europe starting Tuesday to rally support for what they have billed as a workshop on the economic foundations of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Before the “economic workshop” next month, it is worth reminding ourselves of a similar deal completed 100 years ago that would have far-reaching implications for the conflict – and which will foreshadow the failure of Kushner’s plan to secure a lasting peace.

“They are not even pretending anymore,” said Khaled Elgindy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. “Israel has won, the settlers have won, and now they are trying to give the ‘losers’ — the Palestinians — a consolation prize.”

An Israeli settler caught on camera by an Israeli human rights organization [B’Tselem] setting fire to a Palestinian-owned field in the northern West Bank was suspended from his combat unit in the Israel Defense Forces. The soldier was home on a weekend leave from the military earlier this month when the incident occurred near the Yitzhar settlement,

Israel lifted its military rule over the state’s Arab community in 1966 only after ascertaining that its members could not return to the villages they had fled or been expelled from, according to newly declassified archival documents…These records were made public as a result of a campaign launched against the state archives by the Akevot Institute, which researches the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dozens of extreme right-wing activists assaulted police on Saturday near the settlement of Yitzhar in the West Bank. According to the police, dozens of masked men from nearby settlements threw stones and other objects at the policemen and their van, puncturing the tires of two manned police vehicles. No one was arrested.

Dahlia Scheindlin argues, “Israel’s slide into illiberal democracy can only be understood as part of an attempt to go beyond military or physical control and establish a political and legal foundation for permanent annexation of both land and people.”

Israel is moving closer towards a fresh round of elections with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu racing to dissolve the parliament and opposition lawmakers vowing to prevent him from doing so with a Knesset filibuster.