Trump, The Proposed Ceasefire & the Coen Brothers' "Fargo"

 

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, President-elect Trump's Mid-East Envoy called Netanyahu's people from Qatar saying he was coming over to meet with Netanyahu:

It only took a few hours and some brashness from Donald Trump to push Netanyahoo towards concessions.

As Haaretz writes (archived):

Last Friday evening, Steven Witkoff, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Middle East envoy, called from Qatar to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's aides that he would be coming to Israel the following afternoon. The aides politely explained that was in the middle of the Sabbath but that the prime minister would gladly meet him Saturday night.

Witkoff's blunt reaction took them by surprise. He explained to them in salty English that Shabbat was of no interest to him. His message was loud and clear. Thus in an unusual departure from official practice, the prime minister showed up at his office for an official meeting with Witkoff, who then returned to Qatar to seal the deal.

Other Israeli media add:

Two officials familiar with the latest ceasefire push told The Times of Israel on Monday that Trump’s Mideast envoy held a “tense” meeting with Netanyahu on Saturday, during which the former leaned hard on the Israeli premier to accept compromises necessary to secure a hostage deal by the January 20 US presidential inauguration.

Witkoff’s pressure on Netanyahu appeared to have had an effect, with the two officials familiar with the negotiations saying that key gaps were filled in the talks over the weekend.

Should the deal go through the members of the Biden administration will falsely claim that it was their achievement. It was not. It was them who had for over a year enabled Netanyahoo to proceed with the genocide.

"b" at "Moon of Alabama" and Caitlin Johnstone (and others) are concluding that this is yet further direct confirmation that Biden could have gotten a ceasefire or simply stopped the genocide anytime he wanted to.  People are also speculating what this means given Trump's unequivocal hatred of Muslims and Arabs and his numerous connections with extremist zionists.  Nobody is sure that this is a guaranteed end to the genocide in any case.

But for myself, for some reason, I started thinking about the Coen Brothers' masterpiece "Fargo."  Towards the end of the movie, Minnesota police chief Marge Gunderson realizes that the story that former high school friend Mike Yanagita told her about his life was a complete fabrication.  She had believed it because she'd had no reason to think that he would be lying to her.  He was an old friend and he seemed convincing and she just reflexively believed him.  

Realizing that sometimes people just assume everything is fine when it isn't, she returns to Gustafson Motors.  I'll paraphrase: "They were driving a car with 'dealer' plates and they called someone from your dealership, so it'd be a real coincidence if they weren't, you know, CONNECTED!"

The first time she spoke with Jerry Lundegaard, the assistant manager, he said they'd had no cars go missing from the lot.  Not knowing that Lundegaard is behind everything, Marge Gunderson just thinks it possible that maybe nobody there noticed a car going missing, or someone else stole it and nobody told him.  But Lundegaard gets very upset, angrily says he'll do a lot count and then uses it as an opportunity to try to escape.

That's when Marge realizes how fragile our conceptions of "reality" are.  How much we trust people.

Of course, the icing on the cake is that the Coen Brothers start the film with a title or whatever saying that it's based on a true story when the whole thing is fiction.

Anyway, ... we don't know how much of what Haaretz is saying about the Trump Envoy/Netanyahu meeting is true or not.