I heard that America’s largest hummus producer is introducing a new product: a dessert chocolate “hummus.”

And on the web, you will find recipes for brownie batter “hummus,” sweet potato “hummus,” as well as “hummus” cake and “hummus” milkshake.

Now listen, I know from hummus. Real hummus. My physique reflects it. I make my own, and I’m happy to share my tested recipe. So, let me tell you something: you don’t make hummus by calling your crazy concoction “hummus.” It doesn’t work that way.

And you don’t make peace by slapping a “peace plan” title on a cynical set of one-sided diktats, an exercise that is bound to escalate and deepen a complicated conflict. That’s not how you broker Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Unless you are Donald Trump.

Trump is the king of mendacity, the master of duplicity, the maestro of deceit. Trump’s world is a tapestry of lies masquerading as truth, falsehoods masquerading as facts, conspiracy theories dressed as realities, conflict-escalation posing as conflict-resolution, endless occupation spun as liberation, and national subjugation masked as sovereignty and statehood.

Trump is the essence of Purim’s topsy-turvy tradition.

Look at his appointees. He appointed an enemy of public education as his Secretary of Education, a climate change skeptic and a former coal industry lobbyist as EPA Administrators. And who did he appoint as his ambassador to Israel? Trump tapped his former bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, a national-religious zealot who called President Obama an anti-Semite, referred to pro-peace American Jews as "far worse than kapos," and vehemently opposed the two-state solution.

Friedman, the chief architect of Trump’s recently unveiled “vision” for future Israeli-Palestinian relations, is now the Trump administration’s front man in a joint US-Israeli committee that will carve out chunks of occupied territory – over 30 percent of the West Bank – for Israel to unilaterally annex, irrespective of any negotiations with the Palestinians.

Peace, Trump style. That’s his idea of brokering peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

On Purim, according to the Talmud, we are supposed to get drunk to the point in which we cannot tell the difference between “Blessed is Mordechai” and “Cursed is Haman.”

Trump and his aides need neither Purim nor alcohol to dress up war as peace and occupation as liberation. Their deception is not in jest. Trump, Friedman and Kushner’s tactics of chaos and confusion are deliberate. They serve a purpose, an agenda, the settlers’ agenda of perpetuating the occupation and denying Palestinians sovereignty and statehood.

Peacemaking is serious business. It’s neither Purim nor hummus. Trump’s White House turned it into a travesty. We must not normalize it.

We at APN and our colleagues at Israel’s Peace Now movement, are pulling the mask off Trump’s sham. We will continue to advocate and educate for real peace, for a serious approach to resolving the conflict that plagues the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Enjoy the holiday, and please support us.

Ori Nir
APN Director of Communications and Public Engagement

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