Donald Trump took to social media on Thursday, 30th July, 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 fifteen 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, 9th August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet: “I want to clarify this: Israel rejects the 15-point document.”

Rather than call out Israel for sabotaging his own plan, Trump waved away Netanyahu’s rejection as mere election posturing, as if that was 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 percent 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 percent among the ultra-Orthodox and 67 percent among........

© Middle East Monitor