Trump set the wheels for further Israeli conquests in motion and there is little most of us outside of the notoriously risk averse Gulf States can or will do about it.
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Although the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine made some recent noises about how Europe will continue (?) to bat for Palestine against both Israel and POTUS Trump, we can safely ignore their protestations. The fact of the matter is, because Israel’s ethnic cleansing program is the only game in town, we have to factor all worthwhile analysis around their ongoing plans of reshaping that part of the world in their image.Before zooming in on Israel’s plans for Gaza, which Trump has recently rubber stamped, let’s look at what else is happening in that neck of the woods. Israel currently controls the skies over Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and especially Lebanon, whose citizens they insulted by flying over the funeral of former Hezbollah religious leader Hassan Nasrallah. Not only was that the same sort of two finger Israeli salute to the world that Netanyahu gave when he presented POTUS Trump with pagers to mock the victims of Israel’s recent murder campaign in Syria and Lebanon, but it shows that the Israelis don’t care what anyone anywhere thinks of them and their crimes.
Skip over to the old city of Jerusalem and the Israelis are cleansing it of Armenians, in particular but they are also inching the Greek Orthodox Church out with a blank cheque book in one hand and their pliable planning laws in the other. The Orthodox Church has been there since the time of Jesus and, as for the Armenians, as they were famously the first nation to convert to Christianity, unlike their Israeli persecutors, they are not Johnny Come Latelys to the Holy Land.
Not that the Israelis worry about squatters’ rights or any rights but their own. They have decided that God gave them the right to this land and that He threw in oodles of German and American military, logistical and financial aid to sweeten the deal and that is that. The fact that the native Palestinians can produce land title deeds from Ottoman times testifying they own the land is neither here nor there, as God, America and their own kangaroo courts have decreed otherwise.
When I stayed in a refugee camp in Bethlehem. I asked some kids shooting the breeze along the Wall what they did to pass the time; they said nothing, as there was nothing to do. When the young child of the family I stayed with saw a chicken in a cage in Hebron, he was delighted, like a child going to see a zoo would be. The ironic thing there is we passed zoos in Israeli compounds as we drove from Bethlehem to Hebron. Although those compounds are called settlements, they more resemble Manhattan than they do some lonely outpost and the idea of leaving Palestinian kids in to look at their monkeys, giraffes and kangaroos would not cross their minds in a million years as the Palestinians, even to the youngest settler children, are untermensch to be systematically abused as one pleases.
Although the Latin Catholic, Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches devote considerable resources to tending to their Palestinian flocks, because it seems very much like a lost cause, their young emigrate in droves to countries like Chile which has a vibrant Palestinian diaspora. It is either that or eke out a barren existence in their occupied homeland.
And occupied it is, with every Palestinian from the richest to the poorest being in no doubt who calls the shots and who cracks the real as well as the metaphorical whip. As regards the Palestinian National Security Forces, whom I have seen stand side by side with their Israeli counterparts, though they are a fine and healthy bunch of youngsters, they are totally outgunned by the Israelis, who could obliterate them in seconds flat, just like they did when they attacked Arafat in his Ramallah compound. There is nothing they or anyone else can do about the situation.
Well, not quite. Although Jenin and other towns I visited are restless, the Israelis call the shots and they don’t now or have they ever felt bound by any rules of war known to either God or man. Although we can commend the bravery of the Palestinians, it also plays into the hands of the Israelis, who never tire of telling the world how hard and unfair a time the Palestinian natives, whom Netanyahu blames for Hitler’s holocaust, give them.
Moving over towards Gaza, we pass Israel proper, where ethnic cleansing has been a foundational building block even before Israel was established. Not only are they trying to erase all footprints of recent Palestinians but they have demolished the churches by the Jordan River where John the Baptist baptised Jesus. To the Israelis, there is only one narrative that must survive and it is their make believe narrative.
Finally getting to Gaza, we see that it is an open air prison camp for untermensch, so much so that the Israelis who attended that October 7th 2023 rock festival were more oblivious to the inmates than they might have been had a zoo or safari park been at the other side of the fence.
Be that as it may, Trump is right to say that Gaza is uninhabitable, even if he omitted details on why that is the case. How, if given a choice, can you live in a compound that Israel bombs in the manner the Germans bombed the Warsaw Ghetto? How can you hope to have a normal life when the Israelis rob your wife’s lingerie and dress up in them to intimidate her and her children? How, in short, can you live in an Israeli made hell?
That, of course, is the dilemma the Israelis have set for the Gazans, and one does not have to spend too much time remembering how the Americans used poisoned blankets, poisoned water and wide scale buffalo culls to kill off their own braves, who stood in the way of progress.
But there are no prizes for bravery and, as things currently stand, the Gazans will have to vacate either sooner or later. That was Trump’s core message.
And, as for Gaza being prime real estate, not only is that a fact but Israelis have been harping on about that for decades, saying that the Palestinians could build a Las Vegas or Cancun, complete with red light district there, if only they would lie down like Danes.
This line of approach is important for a number of key reasons, the chief political one being that the core of the argument has changed to further marginalise the Palestinians and to say that their mere existence, never mind their legal right to the return of their land in Israel proper, is a roadblock to peace. As three card tricks go, it is an amazing sleight of hand by Israel and her White House enablers.
Although the Gazans are no more onboard with this plan than Geronimo, Cochise and Sitting Bull were onboard to exterminate them, that is of lesser account than it once was because, with the collapse of Syria and the pummeling of Hezbollah, the various paramilitary outfits operating in Gaza are less formidable than they were only a few short years ago. Although Gaza would still not top the list of holiday destinations for most ordinary Israelis, there are sufficient settlers in Hebron, who would be happy to return to Gaza to once again stir the pot.
Whatever about those extremists, we can be sure that the IDF will be back to Gaza again and again until they finally wear down the locals and make them refugees once again. We know this because Israel has been down this very road that Trump has charted before, in 1937, to be precise when the Palestine Royal Commission not only proposed the forced displacement of over 200,000 Palestinians from the Galilee as part of its partition plan but gave supposed precedents from Greece/Turkey and Burma/British India to show how such a system could work.
Although this was seen as unrealistic at the time, Polish-Palestinian warlord David Ben-Gurion was delighted with it as it gave legitimacy to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, “population exchanges” as he called the permanent expulsion and dispossession of two-thirds of Palestinians, in the Nakba of 1948.
As in 1948 with the Nakba, so also with Gaza today, where the locals will have to and go with a vengeance unless Israel and their collaborators, who include Trump’s immediate family and Trump’s major Zionist donors can be stopped.
But, just as with the 1937 Peel Commission, so also has Trump today set the wheels for further Israeli conquests in motion and there is little most of us outside of the notoriously risk averse Gulf States can or will do about it, especially if we do not keep our eye on the onward march of the Zionist cause to transforming their Auschwitz by the sea into the world’s seediest and sleaziest Las Vegas.
