Elon Musk: End X members banning access to themselves

X offered me the opportunity to publicly maintain contact with Ali Shihabi – until he denied me access.

Elon Musk needs to end X members banning other members from engaging with, following or messaging them – what I define as “X Member Censorship”

I am currently a victim of X Member Censorship - having received this notice when I sought to access the X site of Ali Shihabi – an advisor to Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed Bin Salman and author of the Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine solution (HKOPS) published 8 June 2022:

I had contacted Ali Shihabi by email on 8 August 2022 informing him:

· I was a retired lawyer living in Australia and in 1979 founded the "Jordan is Palestine" Committee (JIP) which was proposing a similar plan to Shihabi’s - the allocation of sovereignty in the West Bank between Israel and Jordan in direct negotiations. Gaza was put aside at that time - but later it was proposed that Egypt join the negotiations and decisions be made by the three existing States on the allocation of sovereignty in Gaza as well as the West Bank

· JIP went international very quickly as it was a solution that resonated with lots of people who saw it as a solution to end the conflict. JIP soon had branches operating in many countries and held international seminars on the proposal in London, New York and Israel.

· JIP went into hibernation with the 1993 Oslo Accords - but I continued to call for it as still the solution to end the conflict whilst the two-state solution continued to flounder and other proposals had also gone nowhere in 29 years.

· I was therefore pleasantly surprised when Shihabi released his plan on 8 June. It was very brave of Shihabi to propose, well-articulated and mostly balanced in the circumstances. I immediately took it up and had written eight articles since. It was indeed - as I had written on numerous occasions since - the best plan released by anyone since 1967. It was time to end 100 years of conflict during which hundreds of thousands of Jews and Arabs had been killed and wounded in fighting for ancestral land as Shihabi had described it so eloquently.

· I offered to do whatever I could to help Shihabi progress his plan with the end objective of Jordanian and Israeli negotiating teams sitting down and hopefully reaching agreement on its final terms. I hoped this was Shihabi’s objective too.

· What I found incomprehensible at that time was the veil of media silence that had followed the publication of Shihabi’s plan. I could find no record of it having been reported in the NYT, Washington Post, Jerusalem Post or Times of Israel for example. Was I right in so concluding that it had received very little coverage and analysis?

· Jordan, Israel, the PLO, Hamas, and the Arab League were all silent.

· Could the Security Council not say one word of encouragement for Shihabi’s plan in the past 2 months and have it analysed by the bureaucrats there for consideration as a replacement for their tired worn out plan that was never going to eventuate and was only serving to perpetuate the conflict - not resolve it?

Ali Shihabi responded and together we – a Saudi influencer and a retired Australian lawyer proposing similar solutions 40 years apart - then co-operated in the publication of an article on 14 August 2022 that failed to make any impression on the international community.

When I suggested Shihabi write another article on HKOPS in his name - he broke off email contact.

X offered me the opportunity to publicly maintain contact with Shihabi – until Shihabi denied me access.

Is that how you want X to function Mr Musk ?

Please join my Facebook Page: “Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine supporters”

Author’s note: The cartoon — commissioned exclusively by the author — is by Yaakov Kirschen aka “Dry Bones”- one of Israel’s foremost political and social commentators — whose cartoons have graced the columns of Israeli and international media publications for decades