Maroc - NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 02/Nov 06:56

The greatest Trump test

WAYNE KUBLALSINGH DONALD TRUMP’S immediate test after his victory in the American presidential election on November 5 will be Israel. Its wars in Palestinian Gaza and the West Bank, in Lebanon, against Hezbollah and Hamas; and its chronic pathological animosity and military scraps with Iran. This is his greatest test, not because the current dirty war in Gaza and the West Bank is genocidal, but because Israel is Trump’s greatest weakness. Following the October 7, 2023, outbreak of war in the region, when Palestinians in Gaza, led by the military wing of Hamas, tried to break out of their “open-air prison,” their “concentration camp,” within which they were ruled by Israeli military law, and swarmed into Israel in an attempt to change the status quo of their nation’s beleaguered Western and Israeli-controlled history, Trump has stood solidly behind Israel. Yet recently his language has generalised. He speaks about ending that “bloody chaos in the Middle East.” And recently he held a comradely meeting with Muslim clerics and citizens off and on stage at one of his rallies in Michigan, lauding them for their love of peace, and they endorsing and lauding him for his promise to bring peace to Ukraine and the Middle East. Will Trump really be able to bring peace to the current mayhem, roguery and war criminality in the Israel war? In Trump’s first term, he sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner to make peace in the Middle East. On September 15, 2020, just three weeks before the US general election, Trump and Kushner appeared on the Truman Balcony of the White House all smiles. With them were the foreign ministers of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bilateral agreements had been signed with these two Arab states enabling the establishment of full diplomatic relations with Israel. But the Palestinians had been left out. All other nations of significant military or political consequence in the region had been left out. It was a Netanyahu, smiling like a cheeky cherub on the balcony, plan. No Palestine: the people at the heart of modern military and political embroilment in the Middle East. The name Abraham (Jewish) Accords said it all. Trump is a close buddy of Netanyahu. Netanyahu has visited the Trump household and spent night/s there. Trump himself hailed the agreement with much aplomb and self-congratulation. Will Trump be able to detach himself from Netanyahu, Israel, his Jewish following in the US, Zionist extremism and his former anti-Iran tirades, and see and treat with this propaganda-driven war fairly, objectively? Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed more than 43,000 people in Gaza. This includes 17,000 children. At least 53 children have been killed every single day, and 72 men and women every day. At least 10,000 people are missing, mostly likely the bulk of them buried under war rubble. Israel has also bombed shelters, schools, hospitals, markets, universities, housing complexes, and burnt refugee camps. It has driven the people in labyrinthine exoduses up and down Gaza and the West Bank in line with their war aims, and policy of ethnic riddance. Some 134 journalists and media workers have been killed as well as over 500 health workers. The UN has been attacked, disbanded and declared institution non grata. And this is in Gaza alone. In May, the International Criminal Court of Justice, in a case brought by the former apartheid nation of South Africa, ruled that there was a plausible case to be made that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. In a July 19 ruling, it accused Israel, and by extension its military and intelligence supporters, of unlawfulness, forced segregation, apartheid, annexation and racial segregation. The fork-tongued US and British Labour governments, recently installed, are fully behind their proxy Israel. Since October 7 last year, these governments have built an air bridge between their airports and Israel, supplying over 1,200 cargo planes of lethal arms to Israel. They also supply technical, military, intelligence and surveillance support. They have provided intelligence which contributed to the assassinations of top Hamas, Hezbollah leaders including a Hamas leader invited to an Iranian government inauguration, in Iran. Yet, despite its brutal, five-pronged war campaign, Gaza, the West Bank, Hamas, Hezbollah, and its Gestapo tactics against journalists, the media, international institutions such as the UN, the ICC, the International Red Cross, Israel’s war goals have escaped them. The US, the UK and other Western European countries talk ceasefire, but continue providing diplomatic and logistical support to Israel. Liberal democracies, with their cries of freedom, human rights, democracy, war against terror and despots, have always walked fist in glove with genocide. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Iran will not be defeated. All that the Western democracies and Netanyahu and his war cabinet are doing is fuelling a future swarming of Israel by Arabs and Iranians. America is weakening relative to other emerging nations; its dystopian politics, its economy, its education systems, its military capacity and technology, its healthcare and casual use of narcotics, and its “fake” mainstream media (who Trump calls the most dishonest people in the world). As soon as it blinks, wilts, Israel will suffer an existential Al-Aqsa flood. Israelis will have to be airlifted, like Saigon 1975, or Afghanistan 2021, and taken to the US to rebuild a nation there, with its characteristic paranoia, enemy-ridden Talmud and kibbutz ethics. 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