Trump’s plan for Gaza rewards Israel’s genocide and punishes its victims
میدل-ایست-آی - 1404-07-15 15:25:18
Trump’s plan for Gaza rewards Israel’s genocide and punishes its victims
A few days ago, on the eve of the second anniversary of Israel's genocide in Gaza, the Trump administration issued its latest ultimatum to the Palestinian people, framed as a "peace plan".
It threatens Palestinians with more genocide unless they acquiesce in the US-Israeli project to continue to destroy their lives and homeland.
The Palestinian Authority (PA), along with European, Arab and Muslim-majority states such as Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia - and even the United Nations and the Vatican's American pope - joined the chorus of support for this genocidal American threat, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its ostensible co-author, agreed to under the guise of an Israeli "compromise".
Evidently, this international consensus on supporting, or at least accepting, Israel's right to be and remain a Jewish supremacist state agrees that Israel's genocide of the Palestinians is not only justified as a means of safeguarding Israel's Jewish supremacy but also deserves to be rewarded.
US President Donald Trump and the governments backing his latest plan to complete the genocide demand that the Palestinian resistance surrender to the genocidal state, sparing the Israeli military the arduous effort and cost of continuing the slaughter and the expulsion of survivors.
The Arab League, under US orders, had already called last July for the Palestinian resistance to disarm and leave Gaza.
Unsurprisingly, it is the victims of genocide who must surrender their few weapons, while the war criminals slaughtering them must continue to be armed to the teeth by the US and Europe - with the notable recent exception of Spain.
Divide and re-educate
For Israel's defenders, disarming the victims of genocide is not enough. The editors of The New York Times not only support Trump's genocidal threats but also insist that the Palestinian victims be sent to re-education camps to learn how to love their oppressors and accept their fate without the right to resist those who seek their annihilation.
To this end, The Times editors have endorsed a proposal prepared by the US government-founded Wilson Center, co-authored by a retired Israeli colonel and none other than retired American Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton.
The New York Times editors not only support Trump's genocidal threats but also insist that the Palestinian victims be sent to re-education camps to learn how to love their oppressors
This is the same Dayton who served as the US security coordinator for the PA from December 2005 to October 2010, and oversaw the training of its thuggish militias and the coup they staged against the democratically elected Hamas in 2007.
Before coming to the West Bank, Dayton was busy fighting America's war against the Iraqi people in 2003. Today, his war against the Palestinian people continues unabated, as he strives to ensure that only unelected thugs govern them.
As "experts at the Wilson Center in Washington have argued", the editors of The Times tell us, the Trump plan's proposed billionaires who would run post-genocide Gaza "should create a program in schools, the media and elsewhere 'to remove Hamas's pervasive radicalizing influence over Gazan society'".
Echoing Netanyahu's speech at the UN, the editors assure their readers that there are precedents for such re-education: "Deradicalization programs succeeded in Germany and Japan after World War II."
Both the authors of the report and The Times editors are certain, however, that there is no need to re-educate Israeli society not to commit genocide.
In addition to forcing Palestinian victims into re-education camps, the Trump plan seeks to further splinter the people by separating the survivors of the genocide in Gaza from the rest of the Palestinians.
Whereas the first chapter of the Oslo Accords in 1993 required the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to submit to Israel's will and surrender the vast majority of the internationally recognised rights of the Palestinian people, this latest chapter of the Oslo saga seeks the final separation of "Gazans" from the West Bank.
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza
It follows the Oslo strategy of dividing the Palestinians within the 1967 territories from those Israel expelled in 1948, who live in exile, and those inside Israel. For its part, Israel - later joined by Trump during his first term - isolated the Palestinians of East Jerusalem from the rest.
Meanwhile, the Netanyahu government is pressing ahead with plans to annex the West Bank, or at least 60 percent of it, encompassed by the so-called Area C outlined in the Oslo Accords.
The first step of this annexation would be to execute the Israeli E1 settlement project, which stipulates that Israel take over 36 percent of Area C.
Trump's pledge not to permit annexation is belied by his endorsement during his first term of Israel's illegal annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and characterisation of its illegal West Bank settlements as "not inconsistent with international law".
Blame reversal
Trump's plan was preceded by Netanyahu's speech to a nearly deserted UN General Assembly, in which he pledged to destroy Israel's "savage enemies".
Netanyahu lauded the genocide, which has killed and injured upwards of a quarter of a million Palestinians to date, as the work of "the brave men and women of the [Israeli military]".
Paving the way for Trump's post-genocide Gaza plan, Netanyahu deployed a familiar blame-reversal tactic, likening Palestinians to Nazis and insisting they be excluded from any role in Gaza's future.
He proclaimed: "Just imagine, for those who say Hamas has to stay, it has to be part of a post-war Gaza - imagine, in a post-war situation after World War II, allowing the defeated Nazis in 1945 to rebuild Germany? It's inconceivable. It's ridiculous. It didn't happen then, and it's not going to happen now."
Netanyahu's reasonable position that perpetrators of major crimes should not be allowed to remain in power is not contested by Palestinians or their supporters.
But given that only one party has been accused of genocide at the highest levels - including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN, and human rights organisations - and has otherwise been the object of global condemnation, it is that party alone whose continued rule over its victims could be considered "inconceivable" and "ridiculous".
Yet it is this perverse inversion that underpins Trump's plan, which demands that the Palestinians, once stripped of whatever paltry weapons the resistance has, must submit to the very state seeking to annihilate them.
'Sonic torture'
Netanyahu's psychological assault was not confined to the UN stage. The indicted war criminal ordered his forces to use loudspeakers to broadcast his speech to the Palestinians, whom they are slaughtering and starving in Gaza.
In case the loudspeakers were not loud enough, the Israelis also seized their mobile phones to ensure that Netanyahu's threats of further genocide and vow to achieve "total victory" over the mostly defenceless population, half of whom are children, would reach them through a livestream.
Human rights monitors have gathered testimonies from Palestinians in Gaza on how Israel has weaponised sound itself in its ongoing genocide.
The report describes Israeli forces "broadcasting gunshots, [sounds of] armed conflicts, explosions, military vehicle movements, and occasionally songs in Hebrew and Arabic in order to psychologically intimidate civilians who live amid total darkness at night and total disconnection from the external world".
A particularly sadistic tactic involves Israeli quadcopters broadcasting recordings of women screaming and children crying for help, a ploy to lure people into the open as targets. When residents went out to investigate, they were met with gunfire.
Israeli drones are reported emitting sounds of crying children at al-Nuseirat camp in Gaza to target and shoot civilians searching for the source of the distress calls. pic.twitter.com/5w02CqYwqs
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 16, 2024
The weaponisation of loudspeakers against captive populations is an old tradition among aggressors and racial supremacists. The Nazis might have pioneered the use of sonic torture to psychologically "manipulate, intimidate and indoctrinate" prisoners.
In the summer of 1933, work at Dachau was deliberately halted so prisoners could be forced to listen to broadcasts from the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, including "Nazi speeches and the menacing music that accompanied them".
Walter Hornung, a former inmate, testified: "When the first sounds came from the speakers, we were sure that the modest amount of rest and quiet normally brought by the evening was gone forever."
Blaring across the concentration camp were "parade marches and jingoistic music by Wagner", along with speeches of the Fuhrer, which the prisoners endured "with great difficulty". In November 1933, the loudspeaker system was deployed again during the parliamentary elections, playing hours of Hitler's speeches and march music.
In subsequent years, loudspeakers continued to be used to demoralise prisoners and, as Nazi commanders themselves described, to "re-educate" them by instilling the values of the racial state.
During World War Two, "victory announcements from the German radio station were designed to break the inner resistance of the inmates". This eventually became routine practice in the death camps, where broadcasts were carried across the barracks to drown out the screams of those tortured and killed.
A Zionist tradition
Netanyahu's use of loudspeakers also follows a long-standing Zionist tradition.
In 1948, as Zionist militias carried out massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, they adopted loudspeakers as tools of psychological warfare.
Alongside Arabic-language radio broadcasts that spread propaganda and rumours of disease to provoke panic and flight, Zionist forces deployed loudspeaker trucks.
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe describes their use: "These would be used in the villages and towns to urge the Palestinians to flee before they were all killed, to warn that the Jews were using poison gas and atomic weapons, or to play recorded 'horror sounds' - shrieking and moaning, the wail of sirens, and the clang of fire-alarm bells."
Throughout the 1948 war, the Haganah continued to use Arabic-language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Their radio announced that 'the day of judgement had arrived'
The Haganah Zionist militias also "rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population".
In Acre, where the Zionists poisoned the aqueduct with typhoid germs, infecting scores of Palestinians as well as British soldiers, loudspeakers blared, "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man" - a call not unlike the one that Netanyahu trumpeted at the UN last week.
Throughout the war, the Haganah continued to use Arabic-language broadcasts and loudspeaker vans. Their radio announced that "the day of judgement had arrived".
Even anti-Palestinian right-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris acknowledges that "the mortar barrages and the psychological warfare broadcasts and announcements, and the tactics employed by the infantry companies, advancing from house to house, were all geared to this goal. The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with fire-bombs' all objectives that can be set alight. I am sending you posters in Arabic; disperse on route'".
During the mass expulsions in Lydda and Ramleh on 11 July 1948, led by Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, "all Arab men of military age were rounded up and penned into special enclosures. Israeli loudspeaker vans then toured the two towns announcing that neither food nor water would be provided and that the Arabs had 48 hours to get out to Transjordan. Israeli troops then began sacking both towns. On July 13, the loudspeakers gave final orders, naming the Kubah and the Hinda bridges as the exodus routes for Ramleh and Lydda respectively".
The tactic resurfaced during Israel's 1967 conquest of the rest of Palestine. In Bethlehem, Israeli jeeps drove through the city with loudspeakers, threatening and terrifying the population: "You have two hours to leave your homes and flee to Jericho or Amman. If you don't your houses will be shelled."
Colonial confrontations
As is clear from these precedents, Netanyahu is in good company with his loudspeakers terrorising the Palestinians of the Gaza death camp. One could even imagine Trump himself arranging for loudspeakers in Gaza to broadcast his ultimatums and harangues to the subjugated population.
Two years into Israel's genocide, its slaughter has not only precipitated a showdown between the West and the Global South at the UN and in myriad international forums, but more recently pitted the US against its European subordinates over the theatrics of recognising a non-existent Palestinian state.
Yet the confrontation between western colonial powers and the Global South over Palestine dates back to 1947, during the vote to partition the land between the Zionist colonists and the indigenous Palestinians.
It further intensified amid decolonisation and the rise of the PLO in the 1970s. It was in that decade that the UN recognised the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, affirmed the PLO as their sole legitimate representative, and in November 1975 passed Resolution 3379, condemning Zionism as a "form of racism and racial discrimination".
Israel's UN ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog - who, eight years earlier, in 1967, had bulldozed Palestinian homes in the Magharibah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem and expelled thousands of residents - feigned horror: "Hitler would have felt at home... in this forum," he pontificated, adding that the UN had become the "world center of antisemitism".
This refrain has been a constant of Israeli diplomacy at the UN, echoed last week when Netanyahu denounced the body as a "house of darkness" and a "swamp of antisemitic bile".
In a theatrical move for which Israeli diplomats would become known at the UN, Herzog tore the "Zionism is racism" resolution in half - an act applauded by then US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, himself notorious for the racist 1965 report he authored on "The Negro Family".
Israel also retaliated by renaming every street and avenue originally named after the United Nations "Zionism".
Born in Ireland, Herzog went on to become Israel's president in 1983. Today, his son Isaac Herzog holds the same office. True to his father's legacy, President Herzog Junior announced to the world Israel's plans for genocide, declaring: "It is an entire nation out there that is responsible… It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It's absolutely not true."
He went further, insisting that Israel's genocidal war against the Palestinian people "is not only between Israel and Hamas. It's a war that is intended, really, truly, to save western civilisation, to save the values of western civilisation".
Rewarding genocide
The recent Trump plan, which continues the US tradition of denying the Palestinian people's right to self-determination, is engineered to undo the uninterrupted global condemnation of Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Extending from rulings at The Hague and UN findings to the belated declaration of genocide by the UN Office of Human Rights, as well as charges from groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and B'Tselem, Trump hopes to erase these condemnations.
His aim is to quash the growing public furor in the US and Western Europe over their governments' complicity in the genocide by rewarding Israel and lining up the US's Arab client regimes to do the same.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro's call last week to liberate the Palestinians demanded "a powerful army of the countries that do not accept genocide". He added: "That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples more than anything, as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies. We must liberate Palestine. I invite the armies of Asia, the great Slavic people who defeated Hitler with great heroism, and the Latin American armies of Bolivar."
Rather than join his proposed army of liberation, the Arab client regimes, including the PA, are lining up behind the Trump plan to deepen the suffering of the Palestinians.
That the same European and Arab countries, which have abetted Israel's campaign recently, recognised a phantom Palestinian state, demonstrates that their gesture is an act of support for Israel and its right to be and remain a Jewish supremacist state.
It is also, as I have written here, recognition of the unelected, collaborator PA and its role in repressing Palestinians. Their endorsement of Trump's plan simply adds yet another band of billionaires - the so-called "Gaza International Transitional Authority" - to preside over future Israeli and PA brutality and the destruction of what remains of Palestinian life and livelihood.
Hamas has decided to cleverly play the American game. Since the US floated ceasefire and prisoner-exchange proposals in May 2024, Hamas has invariably responded positively but with modifications, while Israel rejected each offer.
Hamas insisted that the future of Gaza and the choice of its leaders must be decided by Palestinians themselves, not by foreign overseers
This time around, Hamas also agreed to a ceasefire, a prisoner exchange, Israeli withdrawal, the entry of food and provisions, and the creation of a committee of Palestinian technocratic administrators to run Gaza after the genocide.
It also said it would hand over its arms, but only to a future Palestinian government in an independent Palestinian state.
Crucially, and contrary to Trump's demands, Hamas insisted that the future of Gaza and the choice of its leaders must be decided by Palestinians themselves, not by foreign overseers, and that it could not negotiate those questions on their behalf. This unexpected stance has spoiled Israel's plans.
For now, Trump appears to have accepted Hamas's response, but his threats remain operative, and he could still backtrack, as he did in January.
Those who support the Palestinian people's right to resist Israeli settler-colonialism and genocide should not waver in opposing Trump and Israel's threats and ultimatums, which aim to prolong Palestinian suffering for the foreseeable future.
They should instead support Petro's call for the liberation of Palestine and the Palestinians. That is the only path that offers even the possibility of a lasting peace.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
