Is this the writing on the wall for Netanyahu/Trump axis?
❗️First, Canada RECOGNIZES Palestinian state, to be followed by the UK and France.
PM Carney announces goal: ‘PEACEFUL future’ for 2 states, Palestine AND Israel.
Meanwhile Sumud Flotilla is closing in on Gaza. Watch the developments in the next few days.
The Trumpists seem very much on the defensive in Arizona while Putin’s majordomo, Kiril Dmitriev, is doing the rounds of homily to the would-be emperor of the world.
Lastly, brazen Orban is about to be bribed with 500 million euros to vote for the 19th round of sanctions against Russia.
Are we at a turning point for Trumpism?
via voltairenet
While the IDF has been massacring the civilian population of Gaza and colonizing the Gaza Strip for a year and a half, supposedly to fight Hamas, the West has only just become aware of what is going on. Unfortunately, there’s nothing honorable about this sudden burst of humanity: the European Union and the Israeli opposition are merely reacting to the MAGA U-turn in the United States [1]. They still don’t support South Africa’s complaint to the International Court of Justice and, for the most part, are still reluctant to recognize a Palestinian state.
• The only notable exception is Spain, which has been trying for a year to halt the massacre and torture. President of the Spanish government Pedro Sánchez called on 17 May to put pressure on Israel to stop the massacre of Gazan civilians. He mentioned all kinds of pressures, including symbolic ones such as exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Spanish Parliament adopted on 20 May a proposal tabled by left-wing and nationalist parties calling for a ban on the sale of arms to Israel, because of what they describe as a “genocidal war” against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.
The Madrid Group will meet on May 25. It has already met five times and includes Spain, Norway, Slovenia and Ireland on the European side, and Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Türkiye, Egypt, Qatar and Bahrain on the Arab-Islamic side.
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares described the situation in Gaza as “unsustainable, unbearable, inhumane. The EU must do everything possible to put an end to it. There are thousands of trucks stuck behind the borders waiting. It is European funds that have financed this humanitarian aid and it must reach the people.”
• The United Kingdom, which has consistently provided military support to the IDF and secretly received senior Israeli military leaders, suspended its free trade negotiations with Israel on May 20 and imposed sanctions on West Bank settlers, less than a day after promising “concrete actions” if Israel did not end its new military offensive in Gaza.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “History will judge them. Block help. Extend the war. Ignoring the concerns of your friends and partners. It’s indefensible. And this must stop.”
• Deputy Prime Minister of Luxembourg and Minister of Foreign Affairs Xavier Bettel told the European Council: “We must tell the Israelis that there are situations where there are no more words, no more justifications, no more excuses, and that is why we must analyze the association agreement, so that the European Commission can verify whether human rights are still respected. We can no longer close our eyes. We have humanitarian aid that is no longer coming in. If people don’t die from a bomb, they die of starvation or lack of care.”
• Vice-President of the European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas commented: “In the meantime, it is up to Israel to release humanitarian aid. Saving lives must be our top priority. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic; The aid provided is just a drop in the ocean. Humanitarian aid must arrive immediately. Urgent and sustained pressure is essential to bring about real change.”
• 17 EU Member States have called for the revision of the Association Agreement with Israel (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden), Latvia said it was neutral and 9 opposed (Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus).
• The European Council appointed Christophe Bigot of France to represent it in the Middle East peace process. Former France ambassador to Israel, Mr. Bigot was director of the French DGSE (General Directorate for External Security) during the war against Syria.
• Finally, in an interview on public radio on May 20, president of the Labour Party Yair Golan expressed concern about seeing Israel “become a pariah state among nations, like the South Africa of yesteryear, unless it backtracks and acts like a healthy country.” That is, a country that “does not engage in combat against civilians, does not consider it a hobby to kill babies, does not set itself the goal of expelling a population.”
While the IDF has been massacring the civilian population of Gaza and colonizing the Gaza Strip for a year and a half, supposedly to fight Hamas, the West has only just become aware of what is going on. Unfortunately, there’s nothing honorable about this sudden burst of humanity: the European Union and the Israeli opposition are merely reacting to the MAGA U-turn in the United States [1]. They still don’t support South Africa’s complaint to the International Court of Justice and, for the most part, are still reluctant to recognize a Palestinian state.
• The only notable exception is Spain, which has been trying for a year to halt the massacre and torture. President of the Spanish government Pedro Sánchez called on 17 May to put pressure on Israel to stop the massacre of Gazan civilians. He mentioned all kinds of pressures, including symbolic ones such as exclusion from the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Spanish Parliament adopted on 20 May a proposal tabled by left-wing and nationalist parties calling for a ban on the sale of arms to Israel, because of what they describe as a “genocidal war” against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.
The Madrid Group will meet on May 25. It has already met five times and includes Spain, Norway, Slovenia and Ireland on the European side, and Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Türkiye, Egypt, Qatar and Bahrain on the Arab-Islamic side.
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares described the situation in Gaza as “unsustainable, unbearable, inhumane. The EU must do everything possible to put an end to it. There are thousands of trucks stuck behind the borders waiting. It is European funds that have financed this humanitarian aid and it must reach the people.”
• The United Kingdom, which has consistently provided military support to the IDF and secretly received senior Israeli military leaders, suspended its free trade negotiations with Israel on May 20 and imposed sanctions on West Bank settlers, less than a day after promising “concrete actions” if Israel did not end its new military offensive in Gaza.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: “History will judge them. Block help. Extend the war. Ignoring the concerns of your friends and partners. It’s indefensible. And this must stop.”
• Deputy Prime Minister of Luxembourg and Minister of Foreign Affairs Xavier Bettel told the European Council: “We must tell the Israelis that there are situations where there are no more words, no more justifications, no more excuses, and that is why we must analyze the association agreement, so that the European Commission can verify whether human rights are still respected. We can no longer close our eyes. We have humanitarian aid that is no longer coming in. If people don’t die from a bomb, they die of starvation or lack of care.”
• Vice-President of the European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas commented: “In the meantime, it is up to Israel to release humanitarian aid. Saving lives must be our top priority. The situation in Gaza is catastrophic; The aid provided is just a drop in the ocean. Humanitarian aid must arrive immediately. Urgent and sustained pressure is essential to bring about real change.”
• 17 EU Member States have called for the revision of the Association Agreement with Israel (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden), Latvia said it was neutral and 9 opposed (Croatia, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus).
• The European Council appointed Christophe Bigot of France to represent it in the Middle East peace process. Former France ambassador to Israel, Mr. Bigot was director of the French DGSE (General Directorate for External Security) during the war against Syria.
• Finally, in an interview on public radio on May 20, president of the Labour Party Yair Golan expressed concern about seeing Israel “become a pariah state among nations, like the South Africa of yesteryear, unless it backtracks and acts like a healthy country.” That is, a country that “does not engage in combat against civilians, does not consider it a hobby to kill babies, does not set itself the goal of expelling a population.”
[1] “Donald Trump Decouples the United States from Israel”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 13 May 2025.
Reagan’s insight is as applicable to Donald Trump in 2025 as it was to MLK in 1983. The popular image of Trump as an intrepid adversary of the Deep State holds powerful sway over the minds of many Americans but stands in contrast to the reality of him as a shabbos goy, operating primarily on behalf of his billionaire donors, Benjamin Netanyahu and the state of Israel.
I can think of no other political leader who could shut down the US economy, appoint a clown like Tony Fauci to spearhead a national pandemic response, give $500 billion to Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to produce AI-generated mRNA vaccines, and still receive historic levels of support from conservative Americans.
Again, as that other great paragon of conservatism Ronald Reagan said, “the perception of too many people is based on an image, not reality.” Few would know better than the former Hollywood actor-turned-politician who, as the 40th president of the United States, granted amnesty to over 3 million illegal aliens without suffering even the slightest damage to his stellar legacy.
https://t.me/AlgoraPublishing/772
Excerpt
. . . Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which he converted Queen Victoria, and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent to Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy … on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech to the House of Commons in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.”[9]
The Queen, like much of the British aristocracy, was already under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory had first appeared around Oliver Cromwell’s time, was revamped in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, and again in 1870 by Edward Hine in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, in which we learn that the word “Saxon” is derived from “Isaac’s sons.” This ludicrous theory offered cheap biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by the British Empire (new Israel).[10] Queen Victoria was happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, and had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There may be some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many marriages had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[11] But the Queen’s infatuation with Jewishness had also much to do with the influence of Disraeli, who once bragged about it to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[12]
The Disraeli case is illuminating because the question it raises is the same as the question that divides geopolitical analysts today on the relationship between the United States and Israel: which one wags the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, the “stupid mule” of Israel? Answering this question for the century preceding the Second World War (when “Israel” meant International Jewry), helps answer the same question today, when the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire has grown considerably.
Disraeli’s Russophobia, to which he converted Queen Victoria, and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres of the Serbs and Bulgarians were well known, gave rise to theories of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent to Disraeli and himself prime minister several times (1868–1874, 1880–1885, 1886, and 1892–1894), declared that Disraeli “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy … on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks.” It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech to the House of Commons in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe.”[9]
The Queen, like much of the British aristocracy, was already under the spell of a fashionable theory assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons. This theory had first appeared around Oliver Cromwell’s time, was revamped in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, and again in 1870 by Edward Hine in The English Nation Identified with the Lost Israel, in which we learn that the word “Saxon” is derived from “Isaac’s sons.” This ludicrous theory offered cheap biblical justification to British colonialism, and even to the genocide of colonized peoples (new Canaanites) by the British Empire (new Israel).[10] Queen Victoria was happy to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, and had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. There may be some truth in the British elite’s sense of their Jewishness, for during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many marriages had united rich Jewish families with the old destitute landed aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[11] But the Queen’s infatuation with Jewishness had also much to do with the influence of Disraeli, who once bragged about it to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[12]
The Disraeli case is illuminating because the question it raises is the same as the question that divides geopolitical analysts today on the relationship between the United States and Israel: which one wags the other? Is Israel the bridgehead of the United States in the Middle East, or is the United States, as Zbigniew Brzezinski once said, the “stupid mule” of Israel? Answering this question for the century preceding the Second World War (when “Israel” meant International Jewry), helps answer the same question today, when the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the empire has grown considerably.
The answer depends on one’s point of view. The Zionists naturally have an interest in promoting the view that Israel serves Anglo-American interests, rather than the reverse. Disraeli argued in front of the British Parliament that a Jewish Palestine would be in the interest of British colonialism. But Jewish Zionists have always seen things from the other end of the telescope, and one can hardly believe that Disraeli did not secretly share their view. When the hero of his novel Tancred (1847), a Jew who has been promoted Lord just like Disraeli, glorifies the British Empire in these words: “We wish to conquer the world, led by angels, in order to bring man to happiness, under divine sovereignty,” who lies behind this ambiguous “we”? Is it the same double-meaning “we” as PNAC neocons used for drawing America into wars for the benefit of Israel?
When a British Jew such as Disraeli said “we” to the British, there was a strategic ambiguity. He stroke a patriotic chord with the Anglo-Saxon elite, who shared a common belief in the British Empire’s mission to civilize the world — people like Lord Salisbury, member of Cecil Rhodes’s Round Table that worked for a world government by the “British race.”[13] British imperialism and Zionist nationalism were born around the same time, as the twins Esau and Jacob, and have been intimately intertwined from their birth. But two considerations help understand their true relationship. First, the ideological roots of the British Empire do not go back beyond the seventeenth century, whereas those of Zionism go back more than two millennia. Secondly, the British Empire died after WWI, whereas Zionism took off. For these two reasons, the theory that Zionism is a by-product of British imperialism (let’s call it the Chomsky-theory) is unsustainable.
Understanding the true relationship between Zion and Albion in Disraeli’s time requires a correct appraisal of the power of the Rothschild dynasty over British policy. Without the Rothschilds, Great Britain would never have gained control of the Suez Canal, which was the cornerstone of the British Empire in the Middle East. The Rothschilds didn’t run for political office themselves, although they sometimes married into it: Lord Archibald Primrose, secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1886 and from 1892 to 1894, and prime minister in 1894-1895, was Mayer Amschel de Rothschild’s son-in-law.
It is noteworthy that Theodor Herzl envisioned the future Jewish state as an “aristocratic republic” with, at its head, “the first Prince Rothschild.” In a long tirade in his diary he exhorted the Rothschilds to redeem their evil souls by financing Zionism instead of wars:
I don’t know whether all governments already realize what an international menace your World House constitutes. Without you no wars can be waged, and if peace is to be concluded, people are all the more dependent on you. For the year 1895 the military expenses of the five Great Powers have been estimated at four billion francs, and their actual peacetime military strength at 2,800,000 men. And these military forces, which are unparalleled in history, you command financially, regardless of the conflicting desires of the nations. … And your accursed wealth is still growing. … But if you do go with us, … we shall take our first elected ruler from your House. That is the shining beacon which we shall place atop the finished Eiffel Tower of your fortune. In history it will seem as though that had been the object of the entire edifice.[14]
However, as Richard Wagner once said (Judaism in Music, 1850), the Rothschilds preferred to remain “the Jews of the Kings” rather than “the Kings of the Jews.”
If the time was not yet ripe for the creation of the Jewish state in Disraeli’s day, it was mostly because the Jews of Russia were no more attracted to Palestine than the Jews of Europe; they hardly knew where it was. Just recently emancipated by Tsar Alexander II, they aspired only to emigrate to Europe or the United States. It was only after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (one month before Disraeli’s death) that the pogroms made some of them sensitive to Leon Pinsker’s proto-Zionist appeal, published in 1882: “We must reconcile ourselves once and for all to the idea that the other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonIsm will forever reject us.”[15] It was also in 1881 that Baron Edmond de Rothschild, of the Paris branch, began buying land in Palestine and financing the installation of Jewish settlers, notably in Tel Aviv, under the auspices of his Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA). But most existing international Jewish organizations, such as B’nai B’rith (founded in New York in 1843) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle (founded in Paris in 1860), felt that Israel was doing just fine as a dispersed nation, and had no designs on Palestine.
This changed during the First World War, when an extremely efficient network was set up linking both sides of the Atlantic.[16] Theodor Herlz first concentrated his diplomatic efforts on Germany, but it was in England that things started to look promising (“The center of gravity has shifted to England,” he wrote in his diary in 1895), thanks in part to the recruiting of Israel Zangwill, who, according to Benzion Netanyahu, “was the first to speak in a direct manner about Zionism to the upper circles of British politics,” and to Lloyd George in particular, “a close acquaintance of Zangwill’s from the start of his Zionist activity to the end of his days.”[17] Recall that Zangwill was the successful author of The Melting Pot, a play extolling mixed marriages for Americans. No contradiction here, for “the mixed persecuting races disappear, the pure persecuted race remains”, as said Sidonia.
Notes:
[10] André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, pp. 124–143, 319.
[11] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.
[12] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.
[13] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, From Rhodes to Cliveden (1949), Books In Focus, 1981.
[14] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1 , pp. 163–170.
[15] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Balfour Books, 2012 ,kindle l. 761-775.
[16] Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle l. 387-475.
[17] Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, l. 2536-59.
Read more; Unz Review
by Mike Whitney via Unz Review
No one is more responsible for the attacks of October 7 than Donald Trump. It was Trump who initiated the Abraham Accords that were designed to “disappear” the Palestinian issue and drive a stake into the heart of the two-state solution. By seducing Arab leaders into bilateral agreements that shrugged off earlier commitments to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, Trump moved to crush Palestinian aspirations and eliminate the issue forever. Facing deepening isolation and irrelevance, Hamas lashed out hoping that the international community would take notice and come to its aid. In short, the primary cause of October 7 was Trump’s Abraham Accords, the fake peace initiative that paved the way for genocide.
It’s worth noting, that Joe Biden confirmed much of this analysis when he opined on October 25:
“I’m convinced one of the reasons Hamas attacked when they did… is because of the progress we were making towards regional integration for Israel and regional integration overall… ”
By “regional integration”, Biden is referring to the Abraham Accords which were promoted as a way for Arab countries to “normalize” relations with Israel and “to advance the peace process in the Middle East”. But don’t be fooled by the hype. The Accords were merely Phase 2 of Trump’s lopsided giveaway to Israel. As some readers might recall, Phase 1 of Trump’s so called Middle East Peace Plan “provided for a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and the principal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, amounting to annexation of roughly 30% of the territory. The Palestinians were given some desert areas near the Egyptian border, limited sovereignty, and a non-contiguous state with numerous Israeli enclaves…. ”
So, with a wave of his hand, Trump broke with all of his presidential predecessors, all the applicable UN Resolutions, and with traditional US foreign policy dating back five decades. And this was just the beginning because—as we know now—the Abraham Accords set the dominoes in motion leading inexorably to the flattening of Gaza and the displacement of two million civilians. As author of the Accords, Trump is largely responsible for the unfolding catastrophe.
Keep in mind, the Accords really had nothing to do with peace or normalization. As senior fellow at the Arab Center Dana El Kurd said, “to frame the Abraham Accords as a “peace”(agreement) that increased stability between signatories is deliberately misleading….To be sure, Arab-Israeli normalization cannot be considered “peace,” but should rather be understood as authoritarian conflict management. Through this lens, it is possible to understand more clearly how the accords have changed the landscape of the region, and why pursuing such a policy makes for an unsustainable future…
“Authoritarian conflict management”?? What does that mean?
It means that the inducements for participation in the Accords had more to do with strengthening domestic repression than promoting regional peace. Here’s more:
For example, the UAE has expanded the scope of its engagement with Israeli companies specializing in repressive technologies and has invested in the Israeli defense industry. The Moroccan government has similarly taken advantage of normalization to acquire similar capacities. The impact was felt very directly in some cases, with journalists, activists, and intellectuals targeted and often imprisoned.This is a win-win for Israel and the signatory countries. Arab regimes can crack down on any remaining vestiges of dissent in the region and Israel can facilitate investment in its defense and cybersecurity industries while helping to minimize spaces critical of its role in the region and its ongoing oppression of the Palestinians.
To be clear…. Israel is not the only source of surveillance or other repressive technologies, and Arab governments have certainly sought out other sources. Nevertheless, Arab-Israeli normalization exacerbates these dynamics and increases the capacities of these regimes by diversifying their sources of support….Assessing the Abraham Accords, Three Years On, The Arab Center
So, the Abraham Accords are not an attempt to “advance the peace process in the Middle East” but a plan to reinforce the tyrannical dictatorships the US and Israel need to promote their regional agenda, which means that the only normalization that is going on, is the normalizing of the 75-year-long occupation and the ongoing slaughter of Palestinian women and children. Here’s more:
Labeling Arab-Israeli normalization as a form of “peace” is therefore inaccurate. Rather, it is a process that rejects genuine negotiations and deeper reflections on the reasons for conflict, instead using state-level coercion and power to achieve various aims. In other words, the Abraham Accords and everything that has followed since can only be seen as authoritarian conflict management….(because) any normalization of ties with Israel entails repression, as regimes begin to proactively crack down on those who would oppose this development… Assessing the Abraham Accords, Three Years On, The Arab Center
And who would oppose the normalization of relations with Israel?
Just about every Arab in the Middle East, that’s who.
And that brings us to our next point…
As everyone who has followed developments in the region knows, Israel never had any intention of implementing UN Resolution 242 or allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Abraham Accords were conjured up by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who wanted to sidestep UN resolutions while vanishing the Palestinian issue once and for all This was Trump’s basic strategy and it forced Hamas to take drastic action to disrupt the normalization process while refocusing attention on Palestine.
We’ve already mentioned that Trump’s cynically named “The Deal of the Century” convinced Hamas that the Palestinian people faced an existential crisis that could only be averted by launching a massive attack that would force other countries to get directly involved. That was the rationale that drove the October 7 attacks. Even so, few analysts have seen through the ruse and revealed the truth of what has actually transpired. Branko Marcetic is one such journalist who revealed the details of Trump’s fraud in a riveting article at Responsible Statecraft. Here’s an excerpt from his piece:
… the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed…. (DHS) pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors… The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of “genius.” Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it….
The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government’s Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world’s program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.
The new normalization agreements’ foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region’s governments and the broader international community… As Arab states began gradually deepening ties with Israel, they increasingly backed away from their historic positions…
the normalization process continued despite what would earlier have been viewed as an unacceptable provocation against both Palestinians and Islam itself was celebrated by the accords’ supporters, as proof that ongoing repression of Palestinians could indeed be safely ignored. But the Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7.
Palestinians themselves, across opinion surveys, with both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calling it a “betrayal,” a “treacherous stab,” and “grave harm.” Hamas also called for “an integrated plan to bring down normalization.” …….
while Hamas had reportedly planned this operation for two years, and claimed it was motivated by years of violence at Al-Aqsa, its attack also can’t be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians’ expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.
What is clear — from Hamas’s extraordinary violence, the wider regional war it threatens to spark, as well as the major pro-Palestinian protests across Arab countries in response to Israel’s bombing campaign — is that almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East. Forget ‘peace,’ did Abraham Accords set stage for Israel-Gaza conflict?, Responsible Statecraft
Excellent summary, but let’s recap:
One Last Thought:
There is another intriguing aspect of the October attacks that has been largely ignored by mainstream pundits, and it is linked to this one short question: What was the strategic objective of the October 7 attacks?
What was Hamas trying to achieve?
The media would like us to believe that Hamas had no strategic objective at all, that they simply wanted to “kill or capture Jews” to satisfy some deeply racist urge. But that’s nonsense. We’ve already shown that Trump had approved the seizure of more Palestinian land while—at the same time—he was actively sabotaging Palestinian relations with its Arab neighbors. What that proves is that it was Hamas’s ‘back that was against the wall’, not Israel’s. Palestinian statehood faced certain obliteration if steps were not taken to reverse the course of events and prevent the Palestinians from being further isolated, marginalized and “disappeared”.
But how could a small, poorly-armed militia do anything that could significantly change the outcome sought by both Israel and its superpower friend?
That was the conundrum Hamas faced, and that is why they settled on a desperate strategy that involved goading Israel into an overreaction that would allow the rest of the world to see the inhumanity and viciousness of the Zionist state. That was the goal, and we know it was the goal because the plan was presented in great detail by Hamas’s political and military leader, Yahya Sinwar, who released the following statement in a short video on Twitter. Here’s what he said:
“Within a limited period of months—which I estimate will not exceed one year—we will force the occupation to face two options: Either we force it to implement international law, respect international resolutions, withdraw from the West Bank and Jerusalem, dismantle the settlements, release the prisoners, and ensure the return of refugees, achieving the establishment of a Palestinian state on the lands occupied in 1967, including Jerusalem; or we place this occupation in a state of contradiction and collision with the entire international order, isolate it in an extreme and powerful manner, and end its integration in the region and the entire world, addressing the state of collapse that has occurred on all fronts of resistance over the past years.” SuppressedNews
The statement above lays out Sinwar’s strategy in lucid, unambiguous prose. October 7 was a clear provocation aimed at taking advantage of Israel’s insatiable appetite for violence and bloodshed. Sinwar not only knew that Israel would overreact; he was counting on it. He expected that they would do precisely what they have been doing for the last 15 months; destroying everything in their path, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and reducing the entire Gaza Strip to rubble. Israel’s overreaction was the only way that Hamas could breathe new life into the Palestinian cause, because it was the only way they could attract the sympathy and support of the international community. That was Sinwar’s strategy in a nutshell; provoke Israel and hope that other nations would feel a moral obligation to intervene and stop the slaughter. It was a risky gambit, but it was the only option available.
As it happens, Sinwar’s strategy has largely succeeded except for the fact that Washington has blocked all efforts by the international community to resolve the crisis, deploy peacekeepers, or implement the relevant UN Resolutions. Even so, Israel remains (as Sinwar predicted) “in a state of contradiction and collision with the entire international order, (and) isolated in an extreme and powerful manner.” Recent surveys indicate a significant decline in global support for Israel…. (A Morning Consult poll showed that favorable views of Israel decreased in 42 out of 43 countries polled since the war.) and the reputational damage (to Israel) gets worse by the day. If there is an attempt to “clean out” Gaza (as Trump put it), then Israel will be branded as a global pariah for decades to come, perhaps, forever. And while that designation may not bother Israelis today, eventually they will see how it undermines their broader interests and their collective sense of self-esteem. Eventually, Israel will either comply with international resolutions and humanitarian law or face a painful future of hardship, isolation and disgrace.
In any event, Sinwar clearly pursued the only strategy that had any chance of succeeding, in fact, he might have pulled it off had Washington withheld its voluminous provision of 2,000 lb. bombs and other lethal weaponry. But now that the US has become a party to the genocide, the struggle for statehood is bound to take longer. It will require the same grit and determination the Palestinian people have shown since the conflict began 76 years ago. Eventually, they will prevail.
by Philip Giraldi via Unz Review
The big news over the past week has been the record breaking California fires, which have destroyed more than 9,000 homes. There have been the usual slick denials from the politicians over who was responsible for the promised but not executed clearing of brush in forested areas. I particularly enjoyed the comment by actor Mel Gibson, who lost his home, when discussing the disaster with podcaster Joe Rogan. Rogan, a former Californian said, “They spent $24 billion last year on the homeless, and what did they spend on preventing these wildfires?” Rogan asked and answered: “Zip.” “Zip,” Gibson agreed. “And in 2019, [Governor Gavin] Newsom said, you know, that he would take care of the forest, maintain the forest and do all that kinda stuff. He didn’t do anything.” “On top of that, they cut the water off,” Rogan responded and Gibson then joked, “All our tax dollars probably went for Gavin’s hair gel.”
Also coming from the bad news file is the report that the fire has caused President Joe Biden to call off his trip to Rome, where he was supposed to have an Audience with Pope Francis on January 10th. What Biden expects to accomplish in Washington to help mitigate the effects of the fire is not clear as he has sent all the available money in the Treasury to sustain the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Plus, Genocide Joe’s aides would have to explain to him that California is regarded as part of the United States. Many of us traditional Catholics who have been lobbying the Vatican would have preferred that Biden travel to Italy in hopes that the Pope just might be willing to reestablish some moral authority coming out of the Papacy by doing the right thing, which would be to excommunicate Biden for his active support of abortion, gay marriage and genocide of Christian Arabs being carried out by the Israelis in Palestine. It has always been assumed that the Pope would not under any circumstances excommunicate an American president, but it was clearly worth making the effort to demonstrate that there might actually be some accountability in the US government even if it has to come from a foreign source. Alas, that hope was perhaps delusional.
One anticipates that the truly big story will surface next week when someone will undoubtedly misbehave at the Inauguration in Washington. Even as the transfer of presidential authority from Joe Biden to Donald Trump is being prepared, there have been the usual mixed signals combined with questionable narratives coming out of the two political parties. Donald Trump has led the way with a flurry of foreign policy proposals that have boggled the mind as a response to the correct belief that the Biden Administration has bungled badly its responsibility to keep the US safe and to engage in a foreign policy that would benefit the American people.
That means that Trump’s call for a dramatic change of direction among the deeply entrenched political class in our country in order to avoid repeating the calamitous Afghanistan experience in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and over Taiwan is sound. But unfortunately, the MAGA remedy might well be as bad or even worse than the mess left behind by the Biden gaggle of policy makers, starting with the worst Secretary of State within living memory in the person of Israel’s latest lawyer Antony Blinken. Indeed, the utter failure of the past four years suggests looking ahead that the real danger that confronts Americans is that the often ignorant cabinet-level placeholders who proliferated under Biden appear to be largely duplicated under the incoming regime of President-elect Donald Trump. Given the culture that produces top-level political appointees, White House advisers are rarely selected for their experience or knowledge and instead are all too often acquired due to racial or ethnic profiling or as a reward for their personal loyalty to the head of state.
The irony is that Donald Trump has been correct in understanding that Americans are tired of war in places that they cannot find on a map. In fact, Trump might well have obtained his margin of victory over Biden through voters who were attracted by his verbal rejection of the “stupid wars” that have proliferated in the past twenty-five years. But now that he has won, Trump is unrestrained and his darker side has been unleashed. His nominees for cabinet posts are nearly all aggressively Zionist and pro-Israel while also combative regarding both Russia and China. Trump himself has muddied the waters in the past several weeks by calling for resuming control of the Panama Canal to counter claimed gouging on tolls and Chinese engagement in its operations, has threatened “hell to pay” on the Gazans if they do not release the Israeli hostages by inauguration day, has called for annexing Greenland to improve US security, has not rejected recent Biden troop increases in Syria, has called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico, has proposed that Canada become the 51st state, and is reported to be discussing with the Israelis an attack on Iran. He and his spokesmen have also warned Russia that the US will provide more arms to Ukraine if Vladimir Putin does not agree to negotiations to end the Ukraine war “in one day” after Donald Trump is in office, though the president-to-be is now conceding that it might take longer. Trump has also repeatedly self-identified as the “most pro-Israel” candidate for public office, similar to the claims made by country club Catholic Joe Biden that he is a Zionist, as being close to Israel and American Jews currently serves as a sine qua non for those who are active in American politics.
The new GOP dominance of both the House and Senate means that the Congress will be on board to provide backup for the new Administration and it will also mean doubling down on the near total current submission to Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The new Republican dominated 119th Congress’s House of Representatives as one of its first official acts, one which has nothing to do with the United States, has just passed a bill by a 243 to 140 vote, with 45 Democrats joining the majority of Republicans. Representative Thomas Massie was the only member of the GOP caucus having sufficient integrity to refuse to vote in favor of the bill.
“The Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act” sanctions the International Criminal Court (ICC) over its attempt to serve arrest warrants on Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for the crime of genocide. Travel to the US by members of the court will be banned and their personal property will be subject to confiscation. Any court officials attempting to arrest or investigate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are covered by the Act. The bill is now likely to pass through the Senate before being signed by Trump. Representative Brian Mast of Florida, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and co-sponsor of the legislation, commented that “America is passing this law because a kangaroo court is seeking to arrest the prime minister of our great ally.” Mast, a legless Israeli army veteran who sometimes wears his IDF uniform to Congressional sessions, accused the court of antisemitism. He added that “This bill sends an incredibly important message across the globe… Do not get in the way of America or our allies trying to bring our people home. You will be given no quarter, and again, you will certainly not be welcome on American soil.” One assumes that there will be additional legislation to carry out the deportation of pro-Palestinian protesters, as Trump has several times promised, as well as further steps to criminalize all criticism of the Jewish state, making Israel yet again the big winner in the recent election.
Will the US invade Greenland, Mexico, Canada, Iran and Panama? Who knows? But for sure the incoming administration sounds a lot like Joe Biden’s wars on demand or possibly even worse, maybe including even a doubling down on the use of force majeure as a poorly conceived kneejerk response to policies that have manifestly and quite visibly failed for the past twenty years. Americans today are less secure, more troubled by internal dissent and poorer than they were in 2001. It is time for both parties to stop trying to save face by coming out with the same old shibboleths based on fear and threats that have been used by the political animals to keep a cowed public in line. Trump must understand that if genuine change does not come, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement will become a short footnote in a future history book, seen as little more than the first step in a great upheaval and revolutionary reordering that will surely follow when the American people realize that they have been had and rise-up just like in 1776 to regain their freedom.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
by Thierry Meyssan via Voltairnet.
The first consequence of the Israeli massacres in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen is not what we expected. To this day, the criminals in power in Tel Aviv continue their conquest with the weapons they are given. The transformation was first in Israel itself and in the Jewish diaspora, forcing the IDF to accept an unwritten ceasefire in Lebanon, while benefiting from Washington’s help to move the fighting to Syria. The Ukrainian and Lebanese fronts merged and moved to Syria.
In recent years, the Israeli peace movement has been dismantled, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism have been confused, and the narrative of a clash of civilizations has been spread. These three errors prevent us from seeing and understanding what is happening in the Middle East.
The peace movement of Nahum Goldman, president of the World Zionist Organization, no longer exists. Its goal was to make Israel the spiritual and moral center of all Jews, a neutral state on the model of Switzerland, with international security guarantees, and a permanent symbolic international presence. Goldman, who had denounced the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and not by an international tribunal (which allowed the revisionist Zionists to mask their relations with him), negotiated a just and lasting peaceful coexistence with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and with that of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, and was even arrested in Israel.
The historian Bernard Lewis, who was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu when he was Israeli ambassador to the UN, invented, in 1957, for the National Security Council of the United States of which he was a member, the strategy of the “Clash of Civilizations”. It was a question of presenting as inevitable the confrontation between Western and Islamic civilizations, then Chinese and so on in order to justify the successive Western wars. His assistant, Samuel Huntington, a former collaborator of the South African apartheid secret services, popularized this strategy, in 1993, by giving it the appearance of an academic observation. He was paid by the CIA for this propaganda work. Although his work is an intellectual mishmash that does not stand up to analysis, it has penetrated our minds. This stupid theory is used today by Benjamin Netanyahu to justify his wars on “seven fronts” in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Yemen. Yet the same Netanyahu had himself photographed, in September 2014, at the Ziv Medical Center in Zefat visiting 500 Al-Qaeda officers being treated in Israel [1]. Thus, it is possible to come to an agreement with jihadists when they massacre civilians in Syria, but not to come to an agreement with Palestinians when they demand a state.
Nathan Sharansky [2], who was deputy prime minister under General Ariel Sharon, conceived the narrative according to which it is the Palestinians as a whole and not certain Israeli leaders who refuse peace. Then, he invented that Iranian revolutionaries wanted to throw all Israeli Jews into the sea (while Jews live peacefully in Iran and are represented in Parliament). Finally, he organized international media campaigns to create confusion between “nationalism”, “Zionism” and “revisionist Zionism”, then to equate “anti-Semitism” and “anti-Zionism” (in this game the Israeli daily Haaretz would be anti-Semitic).
In 2004, Sharansky wrote with Ron Dermer, a binary book, The Cause of Democracy, to assure us that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Dermer became Israel’s ambassador to the United States (2013-2021), then Minister of Strategic Affairs (from 2023 to today), a position in which he organizes the fight against the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) in the world.
Nathan Sharansky continues his work discreetly today, both in the United States and in Ukraine where he was born, through the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGASP). This American association is abundantly funded by Ron Dermer’s ministry. It was the organization, for example, that organized the congressional hearings of the rectors of the major universities to force them to repress the manifestations of anti-Semitism on the grounds of anti-Semitism.
It goes without saying that Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Nathan Sharansky and Ron Dermer are not “Zionists”, but “revisionist Zionists”.
In this atmosphere of generalized lies, the positions of each community in the Middle East are changing. This is a consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to conquer the north of the Gaza Strip and the south of Lebanon. Gradually, all political actors, including Israeli Jews, have realized that Israeli military operations have nothing to do with the stated goals: the liberation of Hamas hostages and the return of Israelis from the north of the country to their homes. The Netanyahu coalition is continuing the colonial project of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940): the creation of an empire in the Levant, from the Nile to the Euphrates.
This project has no connection with the ancient Kingdom of Jerusalem, which included only the holy city and its immediate suburbs, but aims to restore the ancient Assyrian empire as Jabotinsky’s patron, Benito Mussolini, wanted to restore the ancient Roman empire.
Responding to the challenge of a new fascist wave of conquest of the Levant was the meaning of both the words of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, at the joint summit of the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, on November 11 in Riyadh, and those of the editor of the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos Schocken, at the conference Israel After October 7th: Allied or Alone?, on November 27 in London.
All the protagonists agree on this observation, even if most avoid referring to the links of Jabotinsky and his disciples with the fascists and the Nazis. However, Westerners still refuse to open their eyes and treat this conflict as if it were not political, but ethnic, as if it pitted some Jews against Arabs, or even all Jews against all Arabs.
Three elements play a particular role in the change underway:
• The victory of Jacksonian Donald Trump in the United States over the Straussian coalition of Kamala Harris. The former intend to substitute trade wars for military wars, while the latter wish to provoke Armageddon.
• The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which have unquestionable control of their neighbors’ airspace, are incapable of the slightest victory on the ground. They have no discipline and many of their men behave like thugs. In the context of the defeat of the Straussians in the United States, they no longer have as many weapons and are probably running out of many of them. Finally, several of its units, which witnessed the crimes of others, are now on the verge of rebellion.
• The Jewish diaspora, which until now supported Benjamin Netanyahu without flinching, has finally managed to distinguish its support for Israeli Jews from the crimes of their government. Since Netanyahu was indicted by the International Criminal Court on November 21, the solidarity between Jews, acquired during centuries of persecution by the goyim, no longer applies. Many Jewish personalities, who until now had kept quiet, are publicly distancing themselves from the crimes committed on the “seven fronts” and against the UN.
Iran has abandoned General Qassem Soleimani’s strategy of the “Axis of Resistance,” according to which Tehran helps and coordinates all the independent armed groups fighting against the colonization of the region. It refused to help Lebanon during the Israeli invasion, then a faction in power transmitted to Israel the coordinates of the main military leaders of Hezbollah so that they could be assassinated.
Simultaneously, Tehran and Tel Aviv staged their antagonism, both pretending to be ready for a decisive fight. However, the two Iranian attacks (Operation “Honest Promise” of April 13 and October 1) and the two Israeli attacks (of April 19 and October 26) caused almost no human damage, even if the military of both sides took advantage of it to test the defenses of the adversary [3]. A secret agreement between Washington, Tehran and Tel Aviv became evident.
On the other hand, Tehran renewed ties with the Iraqi Kurds. President Masoud Pezeshkian visited Iraq in September to meet not only with the Talabani tribe, but also with the Barzani (pro-Israeli).
In Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, spiritual leader of the Shiite community, spoke out to deliver a confused message showing that he no longer knew what to expect from the Islamic Republic.
n Yemen, Ansar Allah, convinced of the Iranian turnaround, has taken steps to protect its leader, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, from the fate of Hassan Nasrallah.
In Turkey, as usual, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is exploring the various options available to him, without committing himself here or there. He, who was slowly getting closer to his Syrian counterpart, has authorized arms deliveries to the jihadists of Idlib so that they can resume the fight against the Syrian Arab Republic. At the same time, he has sent emissaries to discuss with Abdullah Öcalan, the founder of the PKK imprisoned since 1999. Whatever the talks, it is unlikely that “Apo” will support NATO and Israel as his movement does today.
Iran’s U-turn and Turkey’s double game suddenly put an end to the euphoria of the BRICS summit in Kazan a month ago [4].
In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad immediately supported the Lebanese and its Hezbollah allies when they were abandoned by Iran. Historically, Lebanon is only a governorate of Syria, and from his point of view, Syria is responsible for the security of the Lebanese. He therefore both gave asylum to hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Israeli bombings and transferred the few weapons he had to Hezbollah.
In response, the IDF destroyed all the roads and bridges providing access to Lebanon, then with NATO, they unleashed the jihadists of Idlib on Aleppo, of which they took and occupied a large part. The city was defended by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who withdrew without fighting.
To everyone’s surprise, the jihadists in Idlib have the latest weapons, financed by Qatar, and a host of drones operated by Ukrainian operators.
A constant in the behavior of the revisionist Zionists is to destroy the material evidence of their lies. Thus, Benjamin Netanyahu had the schedules of his meeting records changed on October 7, 2023. He hoped that this would make it easier to deny that he had helped carry out the attack on his own citizens.
The Israelis know that he helped Hamas, from his appointment as Prime Minister in 2009 until October 7. He maintained that his strategy was to favor Hamas in order to fight against Yasser Arafat’s PLO. His first official decision was to cancel the extradition request for Moussa Abu Marzouk, at the time the highest leader of Hamas, who was detained in the United States. Other events have shown that his goal was not to destroy the PLO, but to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. So in 2018, when the Palestinian Authority stopped paying civil servants in Gaza, he made a deal with Yahyah Sinwar, the Hamas military leader in Gaza who was then imprisoned in Israel. He gave money first secretly, then officially through Qatar. Over four years, he paid Hamas $2.5 billion so that it could build its tunnel network and arm itself.
Audrey Azoulay, former French Minister of Culture and current Director-General of UNESCO, delayed the meeting of the Committee for the Preservation of Historic Sites to allow the IDF to destroy Lebanese archaeological sites.
In doing so, Netanyahu and Hamas obtained the support of the Anglo-Saxon secret services, faithful to the strategy set out in 1916 by Lord Herbert Samuel, whose son Edwin was a companion of Jabotinsky: to ensure that neither the Jewish State nor the future Palestinian State could ensure their security alone.
Another constant in the behavior of the revisionist Zionists is to destroy the archaeological evidence of their imposture. Thus, still in 2009, the second decision of Netanyahu, who became Prime Minister, was to dig tunnels under the Temple Mount in order to be able to dynamite the Al-Aqsa Mosque. In recent months, he has destroyed all the archaeological remains in southern Lebanon, Crusader or Ottoman, and even tried to destroy the temples of Baalbeck, the greatest sanctuary of the Roman Empire. In doing so, he continued the destruction carried out during the Gulf War on the site of Babylon, or during the Syrian war on the remains of Aleppo and Palmyra. Everything must be done to ensure that the claim to the land, from the Nile to the Euphrates, appears legitimate.
Translation
Roger Lagassé
by Robert Inlakesh via The Cradle
Photo Credit: The Cradle
Despite Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and military aggression against Lebanon, Tel Aviv is preparing to unleash its fanatical Jewish settlers in a coordinated war against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, aiming to ethnically cleanse what remains of the territory and pave the way for further annexation.
Adding fuel to the fire, billionaire Miriam Adelson, the wealthiest Israeli in the world, bankrolledDonald Trump’s “huge victory” in his successful presidential campaign with one clear condition: support for annexing the West Bank.
Last month The Times of Israel noted that the wealthy widow “is carrying on a legacy she built with her late husband, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson,” and that “The Adelson family has long been one of the largest sources of campaign money for Republican candidates and has backed Trump during each of the last three general elections.”
The complete consolidation of the West Bank
Speaking to The Cradle, Ubai al-Aboudi, executive director of Palestinian rights group ‘Bisan Center,’ says that “the Israeli settlers are preparing to carry out a major attack, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population,” adding that this attack will be particularly focused on completely erasing Palestinians from what is known as Area C, which constitutes roughly 60 percent of the West Bank.
That escalation has already begun. On 4 November, armed settlers launched a brazen assault on the Palestinian city of Al-Bireh, marking a surge in the violence that has gripped the West Bank. In October alone, settlers carried out at least 1,490 attacks against Palestinians, their property, and their land – often under the supervision and protection of occupation soldiers.
In the past, extremist settler attacks against Palestinians were characterized by their spontaneous nature and uncoordinated thuggery, but this has begun to change. During a recent interview with Israel’s Channel 7 News, West Bank Settlement Council leader Israel Gantz commented on a meeting he had with the recently sacked Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant:
“We asked that the West Bank be treated as Jabalia, Rafah, and the villages of southern Lebanon were treated, which means displacing the residents, killing the terrorists in these villages, cleansing the terrorist infrastructure, confiscating the weapons and then returning them to their villages.”
While the statement includes the idea of returning Palestinians to their villages, if such an operation replicated Gaza and southern Lebanon, there would be no village to return to. Gantz also requested that Palestinian villages bordering illegal Jewish settlements be ‘cleansed’ due to the potential security threat posed to Israelis living there – both ideas reportedly opposed by Gallant.
On 5 November, however, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replaced Gallant and handed the defense minister position to long-time ally Israel Katz. While serving in his previous role as Israel’s foreign minister, Katz openly called for expelling Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank, unlike his predecessor.
‘Organized militias’
Last November, it was revealed that National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir had ordered the police to stop enforcing the law against West Bank settlers.
This is why the armed settler assault on Al-Bireh was seen as so significant. As Netanyahu reshuffles his cabinet to include a full deck of right-wingers, many of whom are themselves West Bank settlers, these groups are becoming even more brazen.
The assault on Al-Bireh was particularly alarming – a “pogrom-style attack,“ according to Aboudi, as “they feel emboldened by the impunity they enjoy.” Rampaging settlers burned 18 vehicles and two apartments while Israeli soldiers looked on.
One West Bank Palestinian described to The Cradle how settlers showed up outside her home armed with Molotov cocktails, but “were luckily scared off” prior to assaulting family members:
“I had just left my home prior to the attack, but I knew something was wrong because the soldiers were acting very violently at all the checkpoints as I was leaving … you have to understand that these kinds of attacks don’t happen without the soldiers participating in some way.”
“The settlers are acting more and more like organized militias; they are an extension of the Israeli army working towards an agenda of ethnic cleansing,” insists Aboudi, affirming that this year’s attacks have been dramatically increasing. According to statistics, settler violence has been escalating every year since 2021, reaching an unprecedented number of attacks in 2024.
Through the use of state-backed settler ‘defense squads,’ Israel has managed to ethnically cleanse 16 Palestinian communities in the southern hills of Al-Khalil (Hebron). In 2023, it was discovered that the Israeli army had established the ‘Desert Frontier’ unit, comprised of the most extremist Jewish settlers from the notorious ‘Hilltop Youth’ group. Human rights groups have also documented the use of Israeli standard-issue rifles by West Bank settlers attacking Palestinians, all pointing toward state complicity in these attacks.
According to Aboudi, “around 700 [Israeli] roadblocks cut off Palestinian villages from each other.” Set up by occupation forces, the roadblocks provide cover for “attacks from violent settlers who target Palestinians passing by … greatly affecting the ability to even travel safely across the West Bank.” The attackers can rely on unconditional impunity from Tel Aviv, he explains:
“They feel that they have enough resources, weapons, arms, political backing, to commit whatever crime they choose.”
Trump and West Bank annexation
Yossi Dagan, the settler leader of Samaria Regional Council, recently purchased some 500 rifles to arm and prepare “emergency security teams” in anticipation of a war in the West Bank. In September, Israel declared the West Bank a “combat zone,” and created closed military zones as buffers surrounding the illegal Jewish settlements.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister who was recently gifted control of settlement affairs for the occupied Palestinian territories, issued a public call for annexation in late October. As a longtime West Bank settler himself, Smotrich openly works on behalf of a 2017 settler movement proposal, outlined in a document entitled ‘Decisive Plan,’ which seeks to double the settler population of the West Bank.
If this is combined with Israel’s decision to begin transferring the Israeli settler population from military to civil control, it becomes clear that the process of annexation is already underway.
With the victory of Donald Trump in the recent US elections, it is more than likely that Netanyahu views annexation of the West Bank to suddenly be a very viable option, despite the historic opinion delivered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July that declared Israel’s occupation of the territories to be a violation of international law and demanded that Tel Aviv end its occupation, dismantle all settlements, pay reparations for damages to Palestinians, and facilitate the return of all displaced natives.
But Trump’s sweeping electoral victory was aided by uber-Zionist Adelson’s contribution of $100 million to his campaign, with the single request that the Republican leader permit Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
Recall too that the Adelsons financed Trump’s first presidential bid, in 2016, with the quid pro quo that the Republican leader move the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognize the Holy City as Israel’s undivided Capital – a promise that Trump implemented in 2018.
Now, Miriam Adelson is pushing for the annexation of the West Bank. Combined with the surge in settler violence, the formation of Jewish militias, military training programs for settler civilians, and the distribution of 120,000 rifles, a calculated strategy is taking shape. This is not just about sporadic attacks – it is a deliberate, state-backed campaign to alter the demographics of the West Bank permanently in line with the expansionist, settler-colonial ideology of the most extremist coalition government in Israel’s history.
