by Mike Whitney, The Unz Review:
Imagine if Israel had taken a more restrained and reasonable approach to October 7. Imagine if their focus had been on rescuing the hostages and bringing the perpetrators to justice instead of reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble creating an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. Had Israel pursued that course of action instead of the one it chose; it would have garnered the empathy and support of people around the world. Instead, it obliterated an entire civilization inflicting irreversible reputational damage on itself while severely undermining its prospects for the future.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Donald Trump’s plan for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict contained two main elements:
- Allow Israel to annex more Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank (aka—The Trump Peace Plan)
- Assist Israel in forming alliances with Arab countries in the region to prevent them from supporting the Palestinian cause. (The Abraham Accords)
The combination of these two policies convinced Hamas’s leadership that the Palestinian people faced an existential crisis that could only be averted by launching a massive attack that would force the international community to get directly involved. This is the rationale that drove the October 7 attacks.
Bottom line: Trump’s makeshift “deal of the century”—which rejected 5 decades of official US policy and ignored a myriad of UN Resolutions, was the spark that ignited the October 7 attacks. According to the Financial Times: “Trump’s Israel-Palestine ‘deal’ has always been a fraud”.
It always looked like a smokescreen to mask the burial of the two-state solution — an independent Palestinian state on the occupied West Bank, and Gaza with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital living in peace alongside Israel — and greenlight the Israeli annexation of most of the West Bank.
The liberal Jewish group J Street drew the same conclusion as the conservative Financial Times:
It’s Not a Peace Plan, It’s an Annexation Smokescreen, “If there was ever any doubt that the Trump-Netanyahu ‘peace plan’ was anything other than a smokescreen for annexation, it was disabused just moments after the plan’s glitzy White House announcement.
Get the picture? Trump’s plan was so one-sided and so offensive that not one Palestinian participated in the White House’s unveiling on January 28, 2020. The only high-powered dignitary that attended was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who lavishly praised Trump for his efforts for peace.
The plan was authored by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who regarded it as the first part of a two-pronged strategy aimed at extinguishing any prospect of a viable Palestinian state. Not surprisingly, during the inaugural press conference, “Netanyahu announced that the Israeli government would immediately annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements….. U.S. Ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman claimed that the Trump administration had given permission for an immediate annexation, stating that “Israel does not have to wait at all” and “we will recognize it”. Wikipedia
How can we explain Trump’s bias in this matter other than to conclude that he was simply repaying his biggest supporters for their multi-million-dollar campaign donations? Is there a more compelling explanation?
The second prong in Kushner’s strategy was the Abraham Accords which were designed to throw the Palestinians under the bus by eliminating the support of their Arab neighbors. Ostensibly, the objective of the Accords was the “normalizing of relations” between Israel and other countries in the region. That sounds harmless enough, but the real goal was to integrate Israel into the broader region via bilateral agreements without making any concessions on issues related to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. That is a break with long-standing protocol that required Israel to comply with the demands of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 as a precondition for normalizing relations. The Abraham Accords allowed countries to ignore those requirements.
