In the video below, David Hearst, the editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye, provides an excellent overview and analysis of US President Donald Trump’s agenda.
When Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement just prior to Trump’s inauguration, the media acknowledged his team’s role in the negotiations but claimed that Trump “pressured” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire.
That narrative is completely false. It was not a stick but a carrot that Trump used. It is now clear that Trump basically promised to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the wake of Israel’s genocidal military assault on the strip’s civilian infrastructure and population, which forced the International Criminal Court (ICC) into a position of issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu or demonstrating its own irrelevance.
We can also deduce that Trump essentially green-lighted the occupation and settlement regime in the West Bank and effective annexation of Palestinian land, notwithstanding the July 2024 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel’s occupation violates international law and amounts to the crime of apartheid.
While sitting alongside Netanyahu in Washington, DC, Trump effectively proclaimed that Israel had succeeded in rendering Gaza uninhabitable, which was an aim that of course the genocide apologists long denied was being implemented on the ground despite this intent being literally observable on the ground well over a year ago.
Israel has systematically targeted and destroyed Palestinians’ homes, schools, hospitals, agricultural land, greenhouses, etc.
However, if Trump believed that the Palestinians would agree to be dislocated from Gaza because of Israel’s destruction, and that Israel’s Arab neighbors would be delighted to assist in the plan to complete the ethnic cleansing that Israel started in 1948, he sorely miscalculated.
Watch Hearst’s video for a spot-on analysis of the present situation:
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
