By Michael Karadjis

The UN central school bombed by Israel

So it’s back to the plan, Israel and Hamas will be, for this weekend anyway, sticking to the plan after all. But an interesting train of events leading to Israel’s backflip. Let’s see. First Hamas said the hostage release scheduled for Saturday would be delayed due to massive Israeli violations of the ceasefire, including continuing to kill – Israel has killed 110 Palestinians in Gaza since the “truce” began – holding up aid delivery, and attempting to change the terms of Phase 1 to get more captives released before Israel has to carry out withdrawals in Phase 2 and so on. Trump’s threat to drive the entire population out of Gaza, and Israel’s enthusiastic embrace of the idea, also poisoned the atmosphere of supposed ‘ceasefire’ as well, to say the least.

In response, Trump lashed out and declared that if Hamas had not released “all” the hostages by Saturday noon, Israel should re-start the war and let “all hell break loose” with US support. Trump was deliberately evasive about whether “all” meant all remaining hostages, all remaining for Phase 1, or all scheduled for that week, but “all” definitely implied the first, meaning the entire process was to be ripped up. Netanyahu then declared his enthusiastic support for Trump’s threat, and said if all were not released by Saturday the war would begin again. However, as the day went on, he whittled it down from “all” to “all three” due to be released on Saturday. The whole thing was back on track, for now.

Why did Netanyahu “cave”, as people are asking? Since the conventional wisdom had been that the correlation between the onset of the truce and Trump’s inauguration meant that Trump, unlike Biden, had “pressured” Netanyahu into the truce, a view I believe is not based on any clear facts, how then do we explain the fact that in this case, Trump was openly giving Israel the go-ahead to tear up the whole 3-stage process and re-start the war (alongside his promises to completely ethnically “clean out” Gaza), but Netanyahu did not take what was being offered?

Of course, one might say that Trump is “unpredictable,” so he may well have wanted a truce then, for spectacle at inauguration (indeed, I believe it was only brief spectacle at best he may have wanted), whereas now he is drunk on his latest plan so prefers war. Yes, but that does not explain why Netanyahu “caved” if the first time it was only due to “Trump pressure” whereas this time

Israelis heckle Netanyahu, demand a deal to release Israeli hostages.

the only “Trump pressure” was for war. The reality is, it was internal Israeli reasons (as I believe it also was the first time, just that it corresponded to Trump’s desire for an inauguration gift/spectacle). Above all, there was massive public pressure to continue with the hostage releases; but there was also dissension within the military high command, which probably reflects large-scale exhaustion among troops, and the impact of increasing casualties (even in the last couple of weeks before the truce, there were a dozen or two casualties from Palestinian attacks in the north from the rubble which had been almost completely “cleansed” of people).

It was an Israeli, not an American, decision.

Now, in the bigger picture, Israeli leaders know they can go ahead with the truce for now, get all live hostages back and even most dead ones (mostly killed by Israeli bombing), and then find an excuse to re-start the war, which Trump, as shown this week, would almost certainly fully back. Besides, Trump has laid down the line: there will be no Palestinians left in Gaza, if he can help it, and in the end the best way to do that without US troops is with troops from the 51st state. Trump would prefer Israeli cannon fodder “securing” the place for US (and Israeli and other global) investors to set up his Riviera.

And even if that does not happen, ‘Phase 3’, reconstruction, is the phase with zero detail. The US and Israel literally hold the sword over Gaza’s head at that stage – who will pour in the money and on what conditions. If little happens, there may well be much voluntary exile from impossible conditions, though that would depend on any country opening to Trump’s plan. Other than that, Trump has declared he is fully on board with there being no Hamas in Gaza any more, whatever exactly that means – no military organisation? No political presence? Not ruling in any way? While Israel has also made clear there will be no Palestinian Authority there. Mind you, there is nothing in the ‘ceasefire’ agreement that says any of this, but US/Israel will use this as a lever for permanent Israeli bombing raids and intervention (much like the US-Israeli side agreement to the Lebanese ceasefire in which the US allows Israeli intervention whenever it sees fit).

The Arab states are left in a dilemma. Egypt and Jordan are rightly rejecting Trump’s threat to drive Gazans into their

Muhammed bin Salman and Trump.
He cares as much about the Palestinians as does Trump.

countries, the Arab League as a whole rejects it, Saudi Arabia has yet again declared, as forcefully as ever, that there will be no normalisation with Israel without a Palestinian state on all of ’67 with Jerusalem as its capital, and used language that savages the Israeli occupation and the Trump scheme. That’s a strange group of “front-line” Arab states, but for them it is existential. Yet it is the Gulf, and especially the Saudis, who are expected to pick up the tab for reconstruction. But as the Saudis have also noted, why would they spend billions on reconstruction without an internationally recognised and protected Palestinian state, when otherwise Israel could just blow everything up again?

Yet if the Saudis and other Arab states don’t pay for reconstruction without a Palestinian state, and the US doesn’t pay without its own opposite conditions being met, then the Palestinians still lose because they will remain in tents among ruins, among rubble, cement, steel, asbestos, silica, dust with no houses, hospitals, schools, power plants, water plants etc. There is only so much that can be done by hand. So the pressure will be on the Saudis and Arabs to carry out reconstruction so that Israel/US does not win the ethnic cleansing battle via the back door of no reconstruction; as well as the simple human pressure on them to do something about the Palestinians who they profess to support.

But do they get to “own” Gaza if they do spend the money? And if they “own” it without a Palestinian state being established, then they become the security force policing Gaza to “protect Israel’s borders,” while the latter maintains its blockade! They then become the occupiers. They really don’t want Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan, and they really do want a weak Palestinian mini-state “solution” (let’s remember that this “radical” Saudi stance is in favour of what is an absolute minimalist “solution” if at all), but that does not mean they give a stuff about the Palestinian people – they care about their power, and whether they collaborate with Israel or (somewhat) fight Israel it is all about their power, their interests, that’s all.

Trump and Netanyahu agree on ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. Is this the future of humanity?

In any case, even if they took over Gaza with the “best” of intentions about creating a Palestinian state and two-state solution, they would have no power to do it, because Gaza is only 6% of legally occupied Palestine (it is about 1% of Palestine as a whole). Most is the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. And right now Israel’s main war has moved from Gaza to the West Bank, where 40,000 have already been displaced, while the Trump regime is supportive of Israel’s plans to further colonise and to fully annex the West Bank, the big prize – part of the Trump-Netanyahu deal that gifted Israel for providing the truce/spectacle gift on Trump’s inauguration.

Trump believes in “peace through strength” – meaning, in his case, those who are strong – Israel, Russia, and of course the US itself – should get whatever they want, because it is only natural for the strong to rule. It is the ideology of naked ruling class power, without all the niceties usually tacked on.

Michael Karadjis teaches at Sydney University and Western Sydney University. His articles on Syria among other things exposed US collaboration with Assad (contrary to what the “anti-imperialist left” was claiming.) He also has commented on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on the overthrow of Assad and on Israel/Palestine. Here he comments on what is happening beneath the surface in the diplomatic machinations surrounding the “peace deal” between Hamas and Israel. Also see his blog site, theirantiimperialismandours.com

Oaklandsocialist comments: There was enormous pressure on Netanyahu to agree to the deal for a long time. We agree that that is why he “caved”, but we think that the particular timing was due to not wanting to help Biden get reelected.

More central is this: The entire disaster in Gaza and the West Bank is a symptom of the absence of the global working class as an independent force. It is absent in South West Asia North Africa (SWANA). It is absent in the United States. And it is absent in Israel, whose entire history and very existence as the “Jewish state” is premised on that absence. The massive crime against humanity that Israel is carrying out is a warning of things to come unless and until the working class finds its feet and intervenes on a world scale. In the case of SWANA in particular, this means a revival of the Arab Spring, but one led by the Arab (and also Iranian) working class, an Arab/Iranian Spring with a powerful socialist tendency.

Trump and Netanyahu agree on ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. Is this the future of humanity?