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After two weird days as one of the few journalists inside the Four Seasons in Bahrain, I was left speechless by the Davos-esque Conflab on Palestinian Prosperousness, or “economic workshop,” hosted by Jared Kushner & co. Where do I begin? A thread.
1/ The tone was set before the event. Someone close to Jared sent me a strongly-worded email about this article, because I led with Pal reaction. A 1-on-1 was dependent on a fair hearing, I was told, ie ‘less Pal views please’. I work for an Arab paper. thenational.ae/world/mena/pal…
2/ In the lobby, I bumped into Richard Attias, the PR mogul named in the Panama Papers who tried to sue me 6 years ago over a story about his summits in West Africa. So that was a good start. He swanned around introducing VIP guests to each other as the organiser of the event.
3/ His thing is bringing together the rich and the powerful for these conflabs of prosperousness. He sat for a long time with FIFA President Gianni Infantino. Here’s my face when I realised he was stood two feet behind me. Thanks @MehulAtLarge for the snapshot. 
4/ There was an odd mix of people, many with no link to the conflict: billionaires, real estate developers, a 15-yo who had 40k Instagram followers & a banker who was confused as to why he was even there. Greenblatt's team couldn't say how guestlist was chosen (answer is Attias).
5/ One guy tried to pitch to me his vertical farming business. My obvious reaction was “Great! Please continue! I will write about this instead of Palestinian prosperity & the conflab that awaits!” This was a running theme. This was a networking opp. & not about the Palestinians.
6/ As the “conflab of prosperousness” as it shall now be known began, it instantly got weirder when Kushner opened with a speech that promised no politics, and then blamed the Palestinian leadership for all of the Palestinian people’s ills, which…err…made it political.
7/ The PA is many things, and has many problems, corruption being one of them. But economists are pretty much in agreement that the Israeli occupation is the number one hindrance to Palestinian development on their path to “prosperity,” Jared’s favourite word.
8/ He then spoke of imagining Gaza as a tourist hub, the West Bank flourishing, & goods and people moving freely. Oh to dream! Book me a flight to Gaza now! What are the visa requirements? Yet there was still no mention of the Israeli occupation, the settlements or the blockade.
9/ He then addressed Palestinians. “This workshop is for you!” You could hear wails of jubilation from Rafah to Nablus to East Jerusalem. “This is for us? Ya 'iilahi! Thank you so much Jared!” one resident of Beit Hanina is rumoured to have said. But no mention of EJ was allowed.
10/ Panelists appeared to know little about the Palestinians. Like the document, they did not dare steer towards the occupation, but rather from it, guided by British moderator Nik Gowing who only God knows how much he was paid. One banker spoke of “Ramawi” when he meant Rawabi.
11/ The panels were half-empty when a big speaker wasn’t on, when this was meant to be devoted to talking about helping the Palestinian people. And many of those in attendance here hadn’t even read the 140-page document. It was released just three days before the conflab started.
12/ There was a normalisation effort happening, too. A rabbi was unashamed to say why he & others from the US/Israel were there. “We’re here to break the stereotypes & to normalise contacts”. Trump’s team allowed Israeli journos into Jared’s speech, but no Pal journalists were.
13/ The big names included Tony Blair, deeply unpopular with Palestinians, & Infantino, President of Fifa, which protects Israel’s settlement teams against its own rulebook. At least Blair mentioned two-state solution, but I don’t even want to know how much he was paid to attend.
14/ Infantino and a FILMMAKER talked about how football could make people like Arabs more and how film could show Arabs in a better light. It was truly surreal to watch what was essentially one random TED talk after another. It had nothing to do with helping the Palestinians.
15/ I requested an interview with Infantino because the Palestinians feel he was taking sides by attending. His slick media guy told me he would need to see the questions first and I would even have to BRIEF Infantino about what I was going to ask him before I started recording.
16/ He told me to keep Gianni out of the politics. “If this was being held in Palestine, he would've been there too.” Yes, the Occupied Economic Nablus Conflab 2020, I can see it now. The interview wasn’t granted. Pal officials told me Fifa’s ethics committee should investigate.
17/ Back to the event, one panel host said “the Arabs have always been bad at selling their own propaganda,” in front of an audience littered with Arabs! Myself and others' mouths were left agape. I could go on for days about the panels, but see @glcarlstrom’s thread for more.
18/ Steven Mnuchin thanked “Palestinian business leaders” for attending, insulting the intelligence of everybody watching. Mainstream business leaders outright rejected the event & the business delegation led by a pro-settler guy on the fringes of Palestinian society.
19/ Their token Palestinian was Ashraf Jabari, a guy who works with settlers in Hebron & is supported by David Friedman, US ambassador to Israel and settlement donor. He came with 19 others who didn’t want to speak in case they ended up in a ditch back at home for being here.
20/ Even Jabari, for all of his cooperation with settlers & the Trump administration, said the occupation needs to be lifted for Palestinian business to thrive, while being pushed on the PA being terrible and awful, an apparent U-turn that nearly made Gowing choke and keel over.
21/ Mnuchin also said Gaza could become like “a hot IPO”. Yeh, totally man, Palestinian prosperity is so in right now. Gazans struggle to even feed themselves and officials here were talking about it like it’s the New York Stock Exchange. You really couldn’t make it up.
22/ “Oh yeh, we could so be a hot IPO,” a 22-year Gazan purportedly said. “Give me some shares in that! We’re about to rocket to the moon and we’re not talking Katushyas, babay!” There was, of course, no mention that thousands of Gazans protested the conflab of prosperousness.
23/ To end it all, Kushner thanked Blair for his efforts on making “the world a better place,” making it hard not to laugh out loud and wonder “where in Zeus’ beard am I?”
24/ He then gave a huddle to the media, a final PR gambit of optimism. He said the English-language document had been downloaded 500,000 times. If true, barely any Palestinians will have since..well..they speak Arabic, Jared. Again, this document and workshop was not for them.
25/ The usually unflappable, made-of-stone, ivy league princeling became agitated when asked why the doc never says "occupation". He said “people just have to listen” & “they have to be more thoughtful” about politics being excluded. Ok, so reading it is not good enough?
26/ Silly people, wondering why a 52-year creeping occupation is not mentioned once in 140 pages of consultant speak about the Palestinian economy and why it’s not succeeding. The insults to intelligence continued.
27/ The only people giddy with optimism here were Kushner, Greenblatt and Hook (who told me he likes the design of ‘The Nation’), businessmen who stood to gain, rabbis on a normalisation mission & Israeli journalists as it was their first time being allowed into the country.
28/ Both sides weren’t here, zero pledges, no big decisions, rare mentions of the realities, it was totally shaped to the pro-Israeli message the US team wanted to deliver (the PA is awful) to create a new framing of the conflict & to blame the Pals more for rejecting a non-plan.
29/ One member of the US delegation told me, proudly, that this was the biggest meeting on the conflict in years. It seemed like they were happy to just to appear to be doing something, whether it has any credibility or not, or if it fails totally or not, doesn't seem to matter.
30/ All that this conflab of prosperousness told us is that the Palestinians have the ability to prosper if allowed to, ignoring the main reason why they can't. We already knew that, but the Trump administration is patting itself on the back for telling us all.
31/ I have a feeling there will be another one of these conflabs of prosperousness after they roll out the political portion, which Greenblatt said Trump hasn't read and is dozens of pages long. After what I witnessed, there's no chance it will call for a Pal state on 1967 lines.
32/ This totally surreal event left me feeling like I was working in a parallel universe. Signing out from Manama, bring on the US-sponsored ‘Israeli-Palestinian Real Estate Economic Conflab of Prosperousness’ 2020 in Djibouti, where we will do it all again. See you there, Jared.
