Jonathan Cook, Middle East Eye, 6 February 2025

During Netanyahu’s visit, Trump dropped Washington’s sugar-coating of Israel’s 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. This was always about ethnic cleansing

US President Donald Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrive at the White House in Washington, DC, on 4 February, 2025 (AFP)

3.7k Shares

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media. 

United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar-coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza. 

This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now “take over” Gaza and be the one to develop it. 

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing. 

Palestinians, he said, would be “settled” in a place where they would not have to be “worried about dying every day” – that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs. 

New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch

Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the “Riviera of the Middle East”, with the “world’s people” – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead. 

If the US “owns” Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new “owner”. Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields. 

Trump may even have let slip inadvertently the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to “all of them – there’s 1.7 million or maybe 1.8 million people” being forced out of Gaza. 

The population count before 7 October 2023 was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. Where are the other half a million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by feral dogs? Vaporised by 2,000lb US bombs?

Wrecking spree

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. As if he was saving them from a disaster-prone earthquake zone, not from a genocidal neighbour he counts as Washington’s closest ally.

His comments were greeted with shock and horror in western and Arab capitals. Everyone is distancing themselves from his blatant backing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.

If Trump tries to take over Gaza, Palestinians will die where they stand

Read More »

But these are the same leaders who kept silent through 15 months of Israel’s levelling of Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries. 

Then, they spoke of Israel’s right to “defend itself” even as Israel caused so much damage the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory – that is, four generations.

What did they think would happen at the end of the wrecking spree they armed and fully supported? Did they imagine the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, or hospitals, or schools, or water systems, or electricity?

They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would either risk death in the ruins or be forced to move out. 

And western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was “proportionate”, it was necessary. They smeared anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who went on a protest march as an antisemite and a Jew hater. 

In the US and elsewhere, students – many of them Jewish – staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in the riot police, beating them. Afterwards, the universities expelled the student organisers and denied them their degrees. 

And yet western politicians and media outlets think now is the time to express shock at Trump’s statements?

Still dying

Trump’s appalling, savage honesty simply highlights the depths of mendacity over the preceding 16 months. After all, who did not understand that the three-phase Gaza ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, was a lie too.

It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page. 

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart

It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not just to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also supposed to allow for the mitigation of harm to the civilian population, bring the hostilities to an end, and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza. 

None of that will happen – at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.

Despite its claims, Israel has clearly not ceased firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued killing and maiming Palestinians, including children, even if the carpet bombing has ended for the time being. 

In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never referred to as what they are: violations of the ceasefire. Israeli snipers may no longer be shooting Palestinian children in the head, as happened routinely for 15 months. But the young are still dying. 

Without homes, without access to properly functioning hospitals and with only limited access to food and water, Gaza’s children are perishing – mostly out of view, mostly uncounted – from the cold, from disease, from starvation. 

Even Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, says it will likely take 10-15 years to rebuild Gaza. 

But the people of Gaza don’t have that much time.

This month Israel instituted a ban on the activities of the United Nation’s aid agency, Unrwa, in all of the Palestinian territories it occupies illegally.

Unrwa is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hellscape Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered – and more of Gaza’s people will die waiting for help.

A blind eye

But in truth, Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the “ceasefire” beyond the first stage, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has all but promised to restart the slaughter.

When Israel decides to “go back in”, there will be no price to pay from the Trump administration, any more than there was a price to pay from the previous Biden administration.

Gaza is a Palestinian homeland, not Trump’s luxury resort

Read More »

Even now, as Israel breaks the ceasefire, shooting at civilian vehicles because the inhabitants are unaware of the tripwire restrictions on their movements imposed by Israel, western politicians and media turn a blind eye. 

And when Israel finally tears up the agreement, as it will, the West will echo Israel in blaming Hamas for being the one to violate it.

The ceasefire is a lie too because, having made Gaza uninhabitable, a death camp, Israel has switched its primary genocidal focus to the Occupied West Bank, where it is gradually introducing the same tactics employed for 15 months in the tiny coastal enclave. 

At the weekend it blew up large parts of the refugee camp of Jenin, turning it into rubble, just as it has already done to most of Gaza and swaths of south Lebanon. 

Note that Israel is now targeting the West Bank even though it is run not by Hamas but by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who refers to his security forces’ collaboration with Israel in repressing all resistance to its illegal occupation as “sacred”. 

Note too that the West Bank had nothing to do with the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. But none of this should surprise us. These were only ever pretexts for the slaughter in Gaza. 

In turn, the ceasefire lie sits atop a mountain of past lies: from Hamas beheading babies and waging a campaign of systematic rape, for which there is precisely zero evidence. 

And it breathes life into a new round of lies such as Biden’s suggestion last month that the ceasefire would allow the people of Gaza to “return to their neighbourhoods”. Except those neighbourhoods are gone. They don’t exist because the Biden administration sent billions of dollars worth of munitions to level Gaza. 

Why, one might wonder, is the Trump administration seeking to send an additional $1bn worth of munitions to Israel, if not so it can continue the destruction and slaughter? 

Blushes spared

The ceasefire is a lie because everything about the past 16 months has been a lie. It is the latest lie in a chain of lies, each meant to support the other lies to create a mendacious overarching narrative: the giant lie.

The giant lie tells of a decades-old “conflict” with the Palestinians, of Israel’s “war of survival” in the region. The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s last settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East.

The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s last settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East

According to that giant lie, Hamas “started a war” on 7 October 2023 when it broke out of the concentration camp Palestinians in Gaza had been living in for at least 16 years, deprived of the essentials of life by their Israeli oppressors.

According to that giant lie, Hamas are the terrorists – not Israel, which has been illegally occupying, settling and besieging the Palestinians’ homeland for three-quarters of a century. According to that giant lie, Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of men, women and children and its maiming of many times that figure were necessary to “eliminate Hamas” rather than evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, as every major human rights organisation has concluded. 

Even Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, admitted – only, of course, as he was stepping down – that Israel’s extended killing spree had been entirely self-sabotaging. “We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost,” he said. “That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war.”

This week officials in Gaza used the lull in Israeli attacks to reassess the death toll. They have revised it to nearly 62,000 after adding the names of those missing, presumed dead under the oceans of rubble. Many more deaths have doubtless still not been identified. 

In the giant lie, the International Court of Justice’s ruling more than a year ago that there were “plausible” grounds for believing Israel was carrying out a genocide were airbrushed out of the picture by western politicians and media. 

Not only that, but the West hurried to supply Israel with the bombs needed to carry out the very massacres that has led the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide.

In that giant lie, Britain’s now-prime minister Keir Starmer presented Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population as lawful – as “self-defence”. 

Meanwhile, journalists and other politicians collude in avoiding mention of Starmer’s comments to spare his blushes, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, with crimes against humanity for that very same starvation policy. 

Supine media

According to the giant lie, Hamas is holding hostages, while the many thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel to be used as bargaining chips in the current swaps – including hundreds of doctors, aid workers and children – are “prisoners”, legitimately “arrested” as terror suspects. 

According to the same giant lie, Israel’s government had to destroy Gaza to bring home the hostages, even as it spent the last days before the ceasefire went into effect intensifying its bombardment of the enclave, clearly indifferent as to whether it killed the hostages in the process. 

How the West hides its Gaza genocide guilt behind Holocaust Day remembrance

Read More »

In the giant lie, Israel’s levelling of Gaza, the aid blockade and starvation of 2.3 million people were somehow justified and “proportionate” rather intended to make the enclave uninhabitable, with the goal of forcing Palestinians out and into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai or other parts of the Arab world. 

The “ceasefire” lie is perfectly of a piece with this giant lie.

The giant lie that claimed Biden had “worked tirelessly” for a ceasefire that he could have got days after 7 October 2023 with one call to Netanyahu. The “hard won” ceasefire that was available in exactly the same format last May, but had to be delayed because Israel needed longer to carry out its genocide. 

The giant lie that hailed Biden and Trump for pulling off a diplomatic coup with the ceasefire when for more than a year millions of protesters in the West have been smeared, beaten by police and arrested as Jew haters for demanding precisely the same.

The giant lie that for decades has presented Washington as an “honest broker” when it is Israel’s biggest arms dealer, its most vociferous apologist, its most terrifying enforcer. 

The grand lie that required physically hauling two reporters out of Blinken’s farewell press conference last month. Each tried to remind us that Emperor Biden had been naked all along. 

For anyone wondering why the media have been so supine through the past 15 months – failing in the case of Gaza to summon up any of the passion and indignation they so readily evoked over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – here was the answer. 

The other journalists kept their heads down or looked away sheepishly, fearful that they might lose their access should they be tainted by any association with these rule-breakers. Decorum had to be maintained inside the royal court, even in the midst of a genocide.

The giant lie needed to be protected at all costs.

Snake-oil salesman

Whatever western politicians and the media claim, the ceasefire has brought nothing to an end. It offers only brief respite to the Palestinian people from their most immediate pain and misery. 

We must not allow it to bolster the narrative of the giant lie. Which is exactly what Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister and the oiliest of snake-oil salesmen, sought to do. 

The truth is everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be repaired, nothing can heal, until the lies stop

In a statement on the prospect of the ceasefire last month, Starmer suggested that it would allow the people of Gaza what he called “a better future”, including the creation of “a sovereign and viable Palestinian state”. 

Really?

No one wants to think through what the very best-case scenario for Gaza would mean – Starmer’s claim is based on the entirely fanciful notion that Israel actually wants a permanent ceasefire . 

The reality is that it would take us back to 6 October 2023, when Israel was blockading Gaza, holding its 2.3 million people hostage. It was denying them the import of essential items while keeping them on a privation diet. 

It was refusing the sick an exit to life-saving treatments they could only receive abroad. It was crushing the economy by denying businesses an export market. It was allowing the people of Gaza only a few hours of power a day, and surveilling them 24/7 through an army of airborne drones.

‘Banality of evil’: Artist turns Gaza settler dream into disturbing installation

Read More »

On the very best-case scenario, Gaza would return to this – plus all the devastation wrought by Israel since: no homes, schools, universities, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, churches, homes; oceans of rubble to traverse; wrecked water and sewage systems; and vast swaths of the population needing medical treatment for serious injuries and disease; and nearly 40,000 orphans to care for. 

Is that the “better future” Starmer was referring to? 

What are the chances that Gaza will receive even this best-case scenario from hell when Israel is losing no time extending its genocidal policies to the West Bank? 

The ceasefire is a lie because everything else we have been told is a lie: that Israel is a normal western liberal democracy, that Israel wants peace with its neighbours, that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world.

Israel is not just a standard-issue settler-colonial state – the kind that seeks to eradicate the native population whose lands it covets. Israel is the most lavishly armed, the most indulged settler-colonial state in history, and one addicted to its scorched-earth approach to the region it inhabits.

The truth is everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be repaired, nothing can heal, until the lies stop.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at http://www.jonathan-cook.net

by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, February 6, 2025

President Trump on Thursday continued to push his idea of a US takeover of Gaza, claiming Israel would hand over the territory to the US at the “conclusion of fighting” and insisting the occupation wouldn’t require US troops.

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The president’s comments suggest he expects Israel’s genocidal war to restart, which would be supported with US military aid.

After 15 months of heavy bombing and a ground campaign in Gaza, Israel failed to dismantle Hamas, and US intelligence believes the Palestinian group had even replaced most of the fighters it had lost in that time. That means even though Gaza has been reduced to rubble, Israel would still face stiff resistance if it attempts to conquer and ethnically cleanse the Strip.

In his post, Trump also called for the “resettlement” of Palestinians in Gaza and referred to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as a “Palestinian,” something he first did while on the campaign trail over Schumer’s calls for elections in Israel.

“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free,” the president wrote.

“The US, working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the US would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”

Trump’s post again suggests that his idea is for the permanent expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, although the White House said the idea was a “temporary” relocation. But even a temporary displacement would be resisted since Palestinians wouldn’t expect Israel to let them return.

Trump’s proposal has been resoundingly rejected by the Arab states in the region and the Palestinians themselves, who don’t want to give up their homes even as they lie in ruin.

Sami Al-Arian, MEE, 17 December 2024

Desperate to stay relevant, the faithful US-Israeli ‘handpicked leader’ has intensified his crackdown on Palestinians in the West Bank and pledged to work with Trump

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas speaks during the United Nations General Assembly at the UN headquarters in New York City on 26 September 2024 (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images/AFP)

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to stay relevant as events in Gaza, the West Bank and across the region have been moving at a much faster pace than the octogenarian politician is able to cope with.

This week, amid an Israeli genocide that has been unceasingly raging in Gaza for 14 months, Abbas’s security forces brazenly killed several prominent resistance fighters in Jenin in an attempt to appease the Israelis and their American benefactors.

When then-US President Donald Trump announced in January 2020 the so-called “deal of the century“, a proposal that was wholly aligned with Israel on all issues of contention, Abbas said: “I want to say to the duo – Trump and [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu – that Jerusalem is not for sale, and all of our rights are not for sale or bargaining. Your deal, the conspiracy, will not happen…we say a thousand times no, no, no to the deal of the century.”

Yet, when Trump was re-elected on 5 November, Abbas called to congratulate him and vowed to work with him on a political settlement that he himself rejected out of hand five years earlier.

This was followed by a deal the Egyptians struck two weeks ago between Hamas and Fatah, the Palestinian faction headed by Abbas. The agreement was to appoint an independent committee of prominent and professional Palestinians in Gaza to run its affairs and reconstruction after the war.

New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch

Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

It was a demand by the Zionist regime and the Biden administration in order to dislodge Hamas from any future role in ruling Gaza.

However, Abbas’s Fatah quickly retracted its approval as the Israelis rejected any role for or input from Hamas in the future of Gaza. It seems that such a deal would not play well in Netanyahu’s vow for a “total victory” over Hamas and the resistance.

So what’s Abbas’s end game, and where is he headed in his twilight years?

Hand-picked ‘leader’

In his 20th year of a four-year term, Abbas announced in late November, a few days after he turned 89, his succession plan.

He issued a decree that called for the appointment of the unambitious, uncharismatic and feeble Fatah leader, Rawhi Fattouh, as an interim president after Abbas.

Condoleezza Rice recounted how a handful of people in 2003 hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people

The 75-year-old Fattouh is currently serving as the chairman of the Palestine National Council, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) parliament in exile.

In 28 years, the PNC met only once in 2018.

Interestingly enough, Fattouh is also the same person who served as an interim president after the death of former PA President Yasser Arafat in November 2004 until Abbas was elected to replace him in January 2005.

For over a year, Abbas has been under American pressure to appoint a successor who will be as compliant and amenable to Israel and the US as he has been during his long tenure.

As recalled in her 2011 memoir, No Higher Honor, Condoleezza Rice, who served as US President George W Bush’s national security advisor, recounted how a handful of people in 2003, including her, Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, hand-picked Abbas to become the leader of the Palestinian people.

For much of 2002, Sharon refused to deal with Arafat but was eventually able to convince Bush to sideline the PLO leader in favour of Abbas as the more submissive and yielding Fatah leader.

---

Follow Middle East Eye’s live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war

---

Before he was appointed as a prime minister in 2003 as a result of American and European pressures, Abbas was publicly ridiculed by Arafat, who called him the “Karzai of Palestine”, a reference to Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, who was widely considered in the Arab world as a US puppet.

Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, had risen to the leadership of Fatah and the PLO almost by default.

Even though he was considered among the first generation of Fatah founders as he joined the movement in the early 1960s, he was not distinguished or appointed to senior positions until decades later.

‘Strategic asset’

It was not until most of the early founders and senior leaders of Fatah and the PLO, such as Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), Sa’ad Sayel, Abu Yusuf al-Najjar, and many others, had been assassinated by Israel between the 1970s and early 1990s that Abu Mazen started to hold more significant positions within Fatah and the PLO.

When the PLO adopted its 10-point plan in 1974, paving the way towards a political settlement based on recognising Israel in exchange for a truncated Palestinian state, Abbas was known to favour abandoning any form of armed resistance to the Israeli occupation.

Why the Palestinian Authority’s biggest claim is a lie

Read More »

Regarding this political ideology, Abu Iyad, who was considered to be next in line in the Palestinian movement after Arafat before his assassination in 1991 by the Zionist regime, quipped: “The thing that I fear the most is that treason would one day just become (normalised as) an opinion.”

When Israel failed to crush the First Intifada (1987-1991), it adopted a political track that would preserve its expansionist and settlement policies. This path culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Abbas was not only one of the few Palestinian interlocutors in this process but also the person who actually signed the accords on the White House lawn on behalf of the Palestinians.

Needless to say, the Oslo process was nothing short of a disaster that was doomed to fail from the start.

The Palestinian negotiators led by Arafat and Abbas surrendered their main card and strongest leverage at the outset, which was the recognition of the Zionist regime on 78 percent of the historical land of Palestine.

In exchange, Israel only pledged to engage in a vain political process that should have ended with an independent Palestinian state by 1999, or so thought the PLO leaders.

Yet, more than three decades after Oslo, the Zionist regime has not only killed the so-called two-state solution but consolidated its plans for a “Greater Israel”, including a more than six-fold increase of illegal settlers in the West Bank from about 115,000 in 1993 to over 750,000 today.

According to a 2015 International Crisis Group report, most Israeli officials consider Abbas their most important “strategic asset”.

The reason is quite clear.

It has been mainly through a political philosophy championed by Abbas that rejected decades of Palestinian resistance, prompting one expert to remark: “Abbas not once in his life did he adopt armed resistance, nor did he support it.”

He often mocked any notion of armed resistance by any group, including his own, even when Israel had killed scores of Palestinians unprovoked.

Brutal security force

His leadership style turned a relatively vibrant Palestinian national movement into a subsidiary of the Israeli occupation, often referred to as a “five-star occupation” since it had relieved the Zionist regime from appearing as the occupying power, while carrying out aggressive and domineering settler-colonial policies worse than South Africa’s apartheid regime.  

During his tenure, he embraced the American dictate to change the security doctrine of the Palestinian security forces from policing and protecting Palestinian population centres into a brutal security force acting as the first line of defence of Israeli settlements and the occupation army against any form of resistance, including passive popular forms.

Why western plans for another Palestinian client regime will fail

Read More »

Since his rise to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2005, he adopted the American plan under Lieutenant General Keith Dayton to train PA security forces, which engaged in suppression and silencing of dissent, as well as illegal arrests and torture, many times leading to death as in the case of Nizar Banat in 2021.

In coordination with the US and the Zionist regime, Abbas created a bloated security force whose primary mission was security coordination with the Israeli army to thwart any resistance or operations against the occupation.

He called this mission sacred and for decades refused to stop it even though Palestinian public opinion overwhelmingly condemns it.

Scores of Palestinian political bodies and factions have called on him to halt such disgraceful practices.

A detailed 2017 report found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget, and receives around 30 percent of total international aid given to the Palestinians, including most of the funds coming from the US.

The study further found that the Palestinian security sector spent more of the PA’s budget than the education, health, and agriculture sectors combined. It included more than 80,000 individuals, where the ratio of security personnel to the population is as high as 1 to 48 – one of the highest in the world.

In Abbas’s first encounter with Donald Trump in 2017, the US president bragged about the PA’s continued security coordination with Israel, as he praised its effectiveness in protecting the Israeli occupation, in which he said: “They get along unbelievably well. I was actually very impressed and somewhat surprised at how well they got along. They work together beautifully.”

‘Small-time dictator’

When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, Abbas coordinated with the Americans and Israelis, as laid out in detail in Rice’s account in her book, to obstruct the Hamas-led government from being able to serve as the democratically elected party.

In fact, it was Abbas’s security forces, again in coordination with the Americans, that tried in 2007 to topple Hamas’s government in Gaza, only to be outmanoeuvred by Hamas, which took over Gaza, effectively resulting in two separate Palestinian governments.

Palestinian resistance can always survive without outside support. Can Israel?

Read More »

David Wurmser, a Bush administration official at the time, commented in a Vanity Fair article in 2008 that the Bush administration was engaged “in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory”.

He added that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand.

Wurmser further observed: “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.”

Ever since this internal strife, Gaza has been living under a crippling Israeli siege with little interference from Abbas.

With the support of the Americans, Israelis and regional actors, Abbas took total control of the Palestinian political life. He started to unilaterally issue decrees like any small-time dictator of a banana republic.

His unconstitutional and unlawful decrees would dismiss governments, install prime ministers, cancel elections, spend billions, cover corruption by his cronies, family members and sons, and appoint a constitutional court in order to dismiss the Hamas-led legislative council.

But perhaps the behaviour that shocked most Palestinians was Abbas’s deafening silence during the early days of Israel’s genocidal war.

As the Israeli war of extermination and ethnic cleansing campaign intensified, Abbas would voice his strong but empty opposition to the Israeli brutality on the one hand, while continuing to have security coordination with the same vigour as if no genocide in Gaza, daily settler attacks across the West Bank, or routine Al-Aqsa compound incursions had been taking place for over a year.

With the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza entering its 15th month with no end in sight, and while Israel prepares its long-term occupation of Gaza, as well as aggressively pushing its policy of effective annexation of Area C in the West Bank, it appears that the current fascist Israeli government is on the verge of dumping Abbas in favour of a new security arrangement that would favour local Palestinian collaborators to govern the Palestinian populations.

A 2017 study found that the Palestinian security sector employed around half of all civil servants, accounting for nearly $1bn of the PA budget

It’s clear that the current Zionist regime, with its grand design to impose the Greater Israel project, wants to resolve its demographic Palestinian problem and decisively end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in its favour once and for all.

Hence, part of Israel’s grand strategy to realise this objective is not merely to be content with banning Unrwa, killing the two-state solution, or establishing Israeli hegemony in the region.

But in essence, it’s moving aggressively to redesign all the Palestinian institutions and sources of power that have defined the Palestinian struggle over decades.

Regardless of Abbas’s decree or what happens to him in the near term as he enters the twilight of his life, Israel will make sure that he is the last Palestinian leader who combines all the titles that define the Palestinian institutions – the PA president, the PLO chairman, the Fatah leader, and the president of the “State of Palestine”.

From an Israeli perspective, he has served his purpose, and it is now time for the final solution.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Sami Al-Arian is the Director of the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. Originally from Palestine, he lived in the US for four decades (1975-2015) where he was a tenured academic, prominent speaker and human rights activist before relocating to Turkey. He is the author of several studies and books. He can be contacted at: nolandsman1948@gmail.com.

Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found her.