It may have come to your attention that recently President Trump of the USA met with PM Netanyahu of Israel at the White House, and the outcome was some statements to the press that seemed to surprise and shock many commentators. He said, in short, that Gaza should be run and owned by the US. He suggested Gaza had potentially some good real estate and it could be a nice place if so, a kind of new Riviera. But the Palestinian indigenous residents should leave and go to other countries, Egypt and Jordan were mentioned.
This mooted war crime of
ethnic cleansing was softened a little by his apparent concern that Gaza was now
a pile of rubble (no mention of the extensive bombing by Israel which caused
this or the bombs being from the US, and no mention of the thousands killed,
with many bodies still under this rubble) in which people unfortunately could
not have a nice time and it needed to be flattened and building start afresh,
which the US could do.
Later ‘interpretations’
of what Trump meant said his idea was temporary displacement of
Palestinians. Most of Trump’s comments fulfilled Netanyahu’s every dream and he
could not help smiling throughout the meeting, that is, except when Trump said
the bit about the US and not Israel running Gaza. This must have irked him. Should
he not be wondering whether the war was actually supported so enthusiastically
by the US just to allow the US to fulfil certain imperialist ambitions in the
Middle East? Was Irael only being used
as a tool in this respect? Who knows, but that little moment was perhaps
revealing.
The problem that lies
at the heart of all this conflict and strife is the founding of Israel not as
such, but as an exclusively Jewish state in a land that had a mixed religious population.
The reason for this was the US support for the project of the religious
extremist Zionists to get a western orientated foothold in the Middle East near
to the oil fields and the Suez Canal. This new state could function as a police
and security presence for its interests in the region.
To have this work, and
for its presence to be able to expand, it was necessary for there to be some
friction inbuilt to the state that would cause continual strife, terror, and
wars in which the US, which was after all a country a long way away, could
interfere profitably. Fundamentalist Islamists obliged, countering one fascism
with another from a different religion.
All these shenanigans
were just continuing the old imperialism of the earlier European powers, but
now the US was the main superpower.
Trump’s comments were
therefore not really a surprise in their content and meaning, but only in that
the aims were said so openly and brazenly, not shrouded and cushioned by pseudo
humanist caring waffle as the earlier president Biden often did.
As the media digested
and reported Trump’s remarks, they tried various framing tactics, and the one
the liberal ‘progressive’ bourgeois press settled on was to report them in a
matter-of-factual manner as if they were quite normal, like the Guardian:
“…Donald Trump’s controversial idea, which has sparked anger
around the Middle East, comes as Israel and militant group Hamas are
expected to begin talks on the second round of a fragile ceasefire plan to end
almost 16 months of fighting in Gaza….” *
These remarks did not
just spark anger in the Middle East, this is misinformation, they sparked
condemnation around the world, and calling them merely controversial ideas was just
trolling the Left on behalf of the leader of the free world, just as they and
other members of the ‘free press’ had done while looking on at the genocidal
bombing campaign in Israel’s retaliation for Hamas’s 7 October massacre of Israelis,
an escapade by Hamas of adventurist terrorism that could not have been better
designed to achieve this exact response. Who suffers? - Ordinary working class
people on both sides, and also in the US, whose vast amounts of wealth which
are being spent on weapons for foreign regimes are not being spent on them,
they will have to deal with another rise in their cost of living.