President Donald Trump took to social media Thursday, July 30 to announce what he called a breakthrough: a phased agreement under the Board of Peace requiring the Palestinian Resistance to disarm and Israel to withdraw. The optics were of a president closing out a genocide he, and his predecessor, enabled for two years.

The Palestinian Resistance agreed to the plan. Israel rejected it.

Imagine if the Resistance had rejected the 15 points by reasonably conditioning disarmament on an end to Israeli occupation. We don't have to imagine Trump's reaction. He'd have condemned them by nightfall and held them responsible for killing the peace plan.

Israel gets a different standard. On Sunday, August 9, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet, “I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document.”

Trump's Gaza legacy does not differ from his predecessor former President Joe Biden's. Both stood impotent before Netanyahu's rejection.

Rather than call out Israel for sabotaging his own plan, Trump waved away Netanyahu's rejection as mere election posturing, as if that were acceptable. Trump’s dismissal didn't go unnoticed. Three days later, Israel's Defense Minister, Israel Katz, doubled down declaring that Israel will not withdraw, not from Gaza, not from Lebanon, and not from Syria

Last May, I wrote an article: “Stop blaming Netanyahu, stupid,” where I argued, it was never one man. It's the Zionist Project itself, and the Israeli public that keeps ratifying it. A poll released last summer found 76% of Israelis believe the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. Half of all Israelis now say they'd support renewing Jewish settlement inside Gaza itself—a figure that climbs to 83% among the ultra-Orthodox and 67% among religious Jews. And in a finding that goes to the heart of how Israelis have rewritten their own history, 56% now believe that if the 2005 disengagement had never happened, October 7 would have been far less likely.

Withdrawal, in other words, has been recast in the Israeli imagination as the original sin, not occupation, and not Israel’s pre-October 7 starvation siege.

In rejecting Trump’s plan, Netanyahu is pandering to his voting base. He is giving the Israeli Jewish majority exactly what they've told pollsters they want. He's competing against political challengers who reject any withdrawal from Gaza. Trump excuses this as political “posturing,” as if it's temporary, when in fact, it is creating a status quo to be normalized after the election.

As usual, Israel responded to Trump’s plan in two days of intensive strikes across Gaza, murdering 26 Palestinians and wounding 76. The single ugliest strike hit medicine warehouses attached to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, one of the last facilities in central Gaza still able to treat large numbers of patients. Two of four storage buildings were destroyed and two more badly damaged. The........

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