Trump-Netanyahu deal: A new recipe for Palestinian subjugation

The utterly depraved and hallucinatory “press conference” that took place at the White House after “discussions” between US President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and other assorted co-conspirators, should finally make something perfectly clear: the question of Palestine has never really been about the Jewish people or creating a “safe haven” post-World War II. 

Initially a last-ditch effort to resuscitate the failing British Empire by keeping a foothold in the Middle East through the Balfour Declaration, the present iteration is now a US-led, imperial-colonialist project to impose a new order across the region. 

Using “Greater Israel” as its assault force, the US-led Sykes-Picot 2.0 extends even further, past Lebanon and Syria, and into Iran - with Jordan, Iraq, Yemen and other countries not far behind.

While the new plan seeks to “de-radicalise” and “re-educate” Palestinians - the people who have been displaced, occupied, tortured and continuously massacred -  Israelis continue to play the victim. 

With the requisite number of mentions of 7 October 2023, nary a word was said during the Trump-Netanyahu news conference about the genocide, as the destruction of Gaza - one of the world’s oldest cities - continued apace, with buildings detonated and rescue teams attacked.

The Israeli “victims” are not really being driven by so-called hardliners. They remain steadfast in their willingness and consensus to “follow orders”, no matter how criminal the assignment: raping prisoners, abducting and torturing doctors, assassinating journalists, or using starving children seeking food for target practice. 

Though we know the litany of crimes, having watched this unfold for close to two years, it will take many more years to fully document the extent of the atrocities committed by these “willing executioners”, to use author Daniel Goldhagen’s term, once controversially applied to Germans during the Third Reich.

Shifting the narrative

Trump began the news conference by going faux “native”, pronouncing his beloved Israel normalisation deals as the “Ahh-braham” (instead of “Ay-braham”) Accords. He then went fully off script to meander from years to decades to centuries, musing about unending war in the region, and entering the biblical, Disneyland-like, imaginary realm in which “Israel” exists in the American mind - or has largely, until quite recently.

The timing was everything: just days earlier, as Netanyahu gesticulated to an almost-empty hall at the United Nations General Assembly, replete with his usual props, the world’s population was demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands, while Italian unions held a general strike, and the Gaza Sumud Flotilla gained protection from Spanish, Italian and Turkish ships and aircraft. 

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Amid this backdrop - and with Iran’s recent trove of revelations about Israel’s nuclear programme - the narrative horizons opening up had to be reined in quickly. As Mohammed al-Farah, a member of the Yemeni Houthis’ political bureau, accurately put it, according to a report in Al Mayadeen: “Trump’s plan aims to absorb global outrage against ‘Israel’ and to undermine international solidarity with Palestine.” 

More ominously, in dismissing the plan, Ziyad al-Nakhalah, the secretary general of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, characterised it as a reflection of “the Israeli position in its most precise details” and “a recipe for the continuation of aggression against the Palestinian people”. 

Most notably, he said that it was “an attempt to impose new realities through the US after the occupation failed to achieve them through successive wars”, calling the proposal a “ready-made recipe to ignite the entire region and fuel further conflicts”.

It feels more like a continuation of using Gaza as testing ground for population control, under new means

This is in line with all negotiations Israel enters into, with US cover and control. Whether there are military failures, or simply the bravado of serial assassinations and state terrorism, terms must always be set in such a way that if the Palestinians, or the Lebanese, or whomever else - in this case Hamas - do not submit, they are to blame. 

As Hamas finds its back against the wall, no mention has been made of all the previous offers that were refused, subverted or simply ignored by Israel and the US - offers that would have seen most of the hostages returned. Israel itself has killed some of its own hostages.

Though many astute analysts see new policy elements in the plan announced on Monday, even given the lack of specifics, it feels more like a continuation of using Gaza as testing ground for population control, under new means. 

Rather than siege, genocide or the use of AI platforms like Lavender to create massive target banks, “de-radicalised” and fully “vetted” Palestinians are meant to constitute a cheap labour force in newly created “zones”. 

Here, we will see a new kind of slavery: the corporatisation of an entire traumatised people under the “leadership” of billionaires, viceroy Tony Blair, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with no autonomy, no self-determination, and no control over their own lives or their own land. 

Dystopian future

Soon enough, once this experiment “succeeds”, more and more humans will be considered fodder to be herded into such arrangements - simply by virtue of dispossession - in the dystopia of corporate techno-feudalism. 

We don’t need to imagine these things: just listen to businessmen like Peter Thiel, Alex Carp and so many others. No one is hiding their intentions. The “West”, whatever that purports to be at this stage of civilisational collapse, demands more and more extraction, and more and more control; the rest be damned.

Finally, though it is difficult to even measure such a thing given his career, Netanyahu might have sunk to ever-more unfathomable depths on two points. In the first, his apology to Qatar over the recent Doha strike essentially said: “Oops, sorry we hit your citizen instead of wiping out the whole Hamas negotiating team.” 

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He then praised the “bravery” of Israeli soldiers. As the world witnesses a constant live stream of almost unimaginable cowardice - of snipers taking precise aim, on different days, at children’s heads, hearts or abdomens; of remote-controlled robotic vehicles filled with explosives being sent into residential areas; of quad-copters assassinating people in their homes, and doctors in their hospitals - these “willing executioners” are anything but brave. 

During the last years of the war in Vietnam, Israeli soldiers were portrayed as “heroes”, in contrast to American “losers”, as a means of shifting the focus away from the truly heroic actions of those US soldiers who were insubordinate and refused orders - sometimes to the point of shooting their commanding officers. 

Some of that spirit has re-emerged on the American side, as we saw Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire to protest the genocide in Gaza, or Josephine Guilbeau arrested for disrupting a congressional hearing alongside Anthony Aguilar, the former Green Beret and whistleblower who exposed the atrocities of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 

But like the victims of the USS Liberty crew killed by Israeli fire in 1967, such soldiers will never get the honour they deserve from a treasonous government that long ago turned its back on the people it purports to serve.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.