Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US expects President Trump to supply Israel with a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs that President Biden paused, Axios reported on Monday.
Biden put a hold on a 2,000-pound bomb shipment and a 500-pound bomb shipment back in April as part of a public relations stunt to make it seem like he was putting pressure on Israel over its plans to invade the southern city of Rafah.
Israel ended up invading Rafah, capturing its border crossing with Egypt, and now the city lies in ruin. Other US weapons continued to flow to Israel, and the pause on the 500-pound bombs was lifted in July, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the pause on the 2,000-pound bombs to complain that Biden was restricting military aid.
Republicans in the US also claimed Biden was restricting military aid to Israel even though he supplied more weapons to Israel in a single year than any other president in history.
“We believe that Trump is going to release, at the beginning of his term, the munitions that haven’t been released until now by the Biden administration,” Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog told Axios.
The release of the bombs is part of a series of agreements the Trump administration reached with Israel to get Netanyahu to agree to the hostage ceasefire deal.
“The Trump team played a major role. They were resolved to get a deal but were very cognizant of our security concerns,” Herzog said. “They got some things from the Israeli side that allowed the deal to go through, and they gave us some things and will give more going forward.”
Netanyahu has said he received assurances from Trump that he could resume military operations in Gaza if he chooses to do so, something Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has confirmed. But there are signs the Trump administration will push for the deal to stick.
Herzog also said he expects Trump to take action against the International Criminal Court (ICC) for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
The Israeli rulers had many objectives to pursue in their genocidal war against Gaza. They declared openly some, but they didn’t disclose all in this way. Despite the 15-month duration of one of the most devastating bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century they launched on the besieged Palestine of Gaza, they were unable to eradicate Hamas, despite killing some of their prominent leaders and members.
Among the undisclosed objectives was to cause maximum damage to the infrastructure, such as buildings, houses, factories, shops, towns, shopping malls, mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, colleges and other civic amenities of the people in Gaza and kill as many civilians as they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced and tormented by constant violence and destruction. Indeed, they have done this with the full support of America, Britain, Germany, and others. Israel has succeeded in all these infamies, barbarian acts and crimes against humanity.
They hope to carry on with the policy of annihilation of Palestinians after the negotiated ceasefire is over, if it is ever allowed to work. However, they are certain to cause as many difficulties and ambiguities as they desire during the implementation of the ceasefire agreement. Their ability to accomplish this task is not a secret. They’re masters of trickery, manipulation, and propaganda.
Mr. Dave Sheldon, I’m sorry to have missed replying to your first comment, which you mentioned. The MSM usually doesn’t give much or no information about the situation in the Gaza Strip (and also in the West Bank) where Israel is killing innocent civilians, including patients in hospitals, by indiscriminate aerial bombardments, missiles, and a marauding army.
But luckily, there are some people in the alternative media doing what the MSM, should also have paid due attention to. We know how the BBC under a Zionist has suppressed news and hid the facts as much as he could. The Zionist-dominated media and political establishment in Britain and other powerful Western nations operate this way.
This hapless situation forces me to share these facts with people. I believe, no person with human conscience and humane feelings can ignore what the Western-backed colonial-settler state has been doing, not only from September 2023, but for decades, starting from 1948.
I know, many people are indifferent to what has been happening in Gaza. There is also open support for Zionist ethnic cleansing in Palestine by some people; the process of ethnic cleansing is systematic to advance a long-term strategy of the Zionists. However, I concur with you that the Sudan war needs more attention. I will be pleased to see if people in this group start highlighting and finding the causes of the tragic civil war and the suffering of people there.
The problems of Zionist ideology and its ramifications are because of its political goals. It has nothing to do with religion, even though Israeli leaders have fully exploited the religious identities of Jews for their political ends.
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
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“Children have reportedly been killed in several mass casualty events, including nighttime attacks in Gaza City, Khan Younis, and al-Mawasi, a unilaterally designated ‘safe zone’ in the south,” UNICEF said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, an Israeli strike on al-Mawasi in south Gaza killed five displaced children who were sheltering in tents. The IDF has repeatedly bombed al-Mawasi despite designating it as a so-called “humanitarian safe zone.”
Displaced Palestinian children sheltering at a school in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza, on January 7, 2025 (IMAGO/APAimages via Reuters Connect)
Palestinian children are also dying due to the conditions caused by the Israeli siege and relentless bombing campaign. UNICEF said that since December 26, “eight infants and newborns have reportedly died from hypothermia – a major threat to young children who are unable to regulate their body temperature.”
Gaza health officials said in December 2023 that 17,000 children had been killed in the genocidal war, a number that does not include those missing and presumed dead under the rubble or indirect deaths caused by the siege.
Newborn babies are especially vulnerable since many have been born prematurely due to the health conditions of their mothers. Palestinian mothers in Gaza also struggle to make milk, and there have been shortages of formula and other baby products.
In October, The New York Times published accounts from American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza, including many who worked with babies. “I worked in a neonatal ICU. Several infants died every day due to lack of medical supplies and appropriate nutrition,” said Dr. Amen Odeh, a pediatrician from Texas.
“We had to make tough decisions about which very sick baby would be on the ventilator due to lack of equipment. I saw a family bringing in their dead 3-day-old infant who had been living in a tent,” Odeh added.
Despite the slaughter of children and death of so many newborns under the siege, the Biden administration has continued to provide military aid and political support to Israel. President Biden is reportedly planning to approve one more major arms deal worth $8 billion before he leaves office.
Before President Joe Biden leaves office, he will approve one more massive arms sale to Israel. The $8 billion sale of missiles and artillery shells comes as human rights groups have labeled Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide.
Axios reported on Friday, “The State Department has notified Congress “informally” of an $8 billion proposed arms deal with Israel that will include munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells.”
Author Barak Ravid did not define what it means to “informally” notify Congress of the sale or if it fulfills the White House’s requirement to notify Congress of arms deals.
The massive arms sale to Tel Aviv comes after Amnesty International declared Israel’s onslaught in Gaza a genocide. “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today,” the report released in early December explained.
The sale includes AIM-120C-8 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 155 MM artillery rounds, small-diameter bombs, JDAM kits, and 500-pound bombs. Many of these munitions have been used by Israel during its campaign of extermination in Gaza, including in attacks on civilian targets.
In June, CNN reported that Israel used US small-diameter bombs in an attack on a school that killed 40 civilians. In October, The Washington Post noted, “The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Amnesty International is calling on the US and other states that provide Israel with arms to cut off the flow of weapons to stop the genocide. “States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of the organization.
“All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end,” she added.
Israel receives most of its weapons, 78%, from the US, and officials in Tel Aviv have acknowledged it would not be able to sustain its military operations with continued US support for more than a few months. Since the October 7 attack, the US has provided Israel with $22 billion in military aid.
Still, Biden has been routinely criticized by Republicans in Washington and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not providing Israel with enough military support.
The Axios reports that some of the munitions will come directly from US stockpiles. However, many of the weapons will be delivered years into the future. The goal of the deal is “supporting Israel’s long-term security by resupplying stocks of critical munitions and air defense capabilities,” one official explained.
Several rights groups have warned there are “alarming indications” of torture and abuse of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, after he was abducted by Israeli forces in late December.
Safiya, who oversaw north Gaza’s last functioning hospital, is reportedly being held at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison, where abuse – including torture, murder and rape – is rife.
According to information received by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the doctor’s health has deteriorated following his detainment.
“Euro-Med Monitor warns of the grave risk to [Safiya’s] life, following patterns of deliberate killings and deaths under torture previously suffered by other doctors and medical staff,” the Geneva-based NGO said.
Testimonies gathered by the group indicate that Abu Safiya has endured abuse after Israeli forces stormed the bombed-out Kamal Adwan Hospital.
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Examples of these abusive acts include being ordered to strip off his clothing and being physically assaulted and whipped with a thick wire.
The NGO also said that he was subjected to humiliation in front of other detainees and was transfered to several other locations before being finally held in Sde Teiman.
Despite mainstream media and rights groups locating Abu Safiya’s whereabouts to Sde Teiman, Israel claims it has ‘no indication’ of his arrest. That is despite a previous announcement confirming his arrest last week.
On Saturday, an Israeli army spokesman said Abu Safiya was transferred for interrogation after a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Israel ignores WHO appeals and attacks another hospital in northern Gaza
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHR) submitted an official request earlier this week on behalf of the doctor’s family, but was denied information about his whereabouts.
An email by the army informed the group on Thursday that “Based on a search, we have no indication of the arrest or detention of the subject of the request.”
However, according to Israeli Channel 24, an Israeli army spokesperson alleged that Abu Safiyeh is under investigation by internal security agency Shin Bet for purported connections to Hamas, though no evidence has been presented.
Euro-Med Monitor has warned of the “severe implications of Israel’s denial of Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention”, adding that this reflects a “blatant disregard for binding legal standards.”
Torture, rape and murder at Sde Teiman
Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians since the 7 October attacks, with most being held and interrogated at Sde Teiman, even if they are non-combatants.
Torture, rape and murder are widespread at the facility, with investigations by MEE, CNN and the New York Times finding examples of abuse.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a recent statement that the risks to the fate of Kamal Adwan Hospital director are increasing as time goes by, especially as Israel has denied the existence of a record proving his arrest.
Sde Teiman: What abuses are alleged to have taken place in the Israeli prison?
“The case of Dr. Abu Safiya is one of thousands of detainees in Gaza who are facing the crime of enforced disappearance,” the group said.
“Despite the existence of clear evidence of the arrest of Dr Abu Safiya on 27 December, 2024, the occupation denies what it previously stated, as well as the existence of evidence such as the videos and photos it published.”
Over the past three months, Abu Safiya, a paediatrician, published dozens of videos and sent out pleas to the international community to act against the Israeli attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital.
He repeatedly warned that the lives of patients and medical staff were at risk amid constant Israeli bombings and a siege preventing the entry of aid and food.
“Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks… which are shelling the [hospital] building,” he said in a video two months ago.
In late October, Abu Safiya’s son died as a result of an earlier Israeli raid on the hospital, according to health officials. A month later, the doctor was wounded in an Israeli air strike on the hospital complex.
The Israeli military has been accused of deliberately targeting Gaza’s health system through constant attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
Israel intensified its offensive on Kamal Adwan and northern Gaza in early October when a controversial proposal to ethnically cleanse the area, known as the “Generals’ Plan”, was presented to the Israeli government.
Under the plan, anyone who chose to stay in the north would be considered a Hamas operative and could be killed.
Thick smoke billows from a residential building in Bureij refugee camp after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Deir al-Balah, Palestinian Territories, on June 3, 2024.
The Israeli military has announced that it carried out over 1,400 air strikes on Gaza in December alone, amounting to dozens of strikes a day on average on Palestinians also suffering under famine conditions due to Israel’s enduring aid blockade.
This is the equivalent of over 45 airstrikes a day, with the attacks carried out by Israeli aircraft like fighter jets and drones, the Israeli Air Force said on social media.
This is a staggering amount of strikes in such a small period of time, coming after Israel has already destroyed roughly 70 percent of infrastructure in Gaza.
The military did not specify the firepower of the strikes. But rights groups noted that, within the first months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces had already dropped the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip — a territory spanning only 25 miles long and with roughly the same land area as Las Vegas.
Israeli forces have claimed that they were striking military targets within Gaza, but many of the strikes documented by journalists and human rights groups have targeted civilian areas, including many children.
The population has declined by 160,000 people since October 2023, with at least 45,000 people killed by Israeli attacks. By Sharon Zhang , Truthout
January 2, 2025
These strikes have been carried out on Palestinians, adults and children alike, who were trying to find food or forced to take shelter in makeshift tents on the beach, in Israel’s designated “safe zone.” They have killed medical workers trying to save people’s lives after Israeli attacks, or those injured by attacks only to be struck again. In one strike in late December, Israeli forces bombed a press van and killed five Palestinian journalists near a hospital, where the wife of one of the journalists was giving birth.
Even as the military carried out these strikes, Israeli officials were taking part in ceasefire negotiations that appeared to be gaining steam, according to media reports. Like others before, these talks fizzled out as Israeli officials insisted on staying in Gaza even after a deal was struck and as reports have found that Israel intends to openly violate the terms of its ceasefire agreement in Lebanon.
The U.S. was party to these negotiations, but American officials have also played a major role in allowing Israel’s attacks to continue. In just the first year of Israel’s genocide, the U.S. sent $17.9 billion in military assistance to Israel — at minimum, according to a tally of just the publicly reported transfers.
More military sales are in the pipeline, all but guaranteeing that Israel can continue its aggression in the Middle East with the backing of the most well-funded military complex in the world. The Biden administration has pushed a massive $20 billion weapons sale to Israel — including tank rounds, JDAMs and fighter jets — while, just in November, reports emerged that the Biden administration is moving forward with a sale of thousands of JDAMs and small diameter bombs to Israel, worth $680 million.
Human rights groups and experts have documented dozens of instances of Israel using U.S. bombs to commit war crimes in Gaza. According to reporting by The Washington Post from October, the State Department has reportedly swept aside over 500 reports of Israel using U.S. weapons to kill civilians in Gaza and causing “unnecessary harm.”
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Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, you have stood for the social, political and economic rights of people in your constituency, migrants, migrant children, Native Americans, and coloured people steadfastly and consistently. When a war criminal addressed a joint session of Congress a few months ago, you were the only one who held a placard with the words ‘War Criminal’ and ‘Genocide’. You were the one who dared to tell the truth in this way, while most others were ecstatic in cheering the war criminal!
Some of us who follow your posts on your Page notice some vicious and negative comments by some right-wing people who firmly support and cheer on what Israel is doing in Gaza and the rest of the occupied West Bank, etc. However, you persist with your work and activities despite the misleading propagandists and trolls. For all that, I thank you on behalf of many people who are my readers and friends.
I wish you a happy new year and hope you will continue serving the causes and meeting the challenges in the new year as you have.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bolder and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with US pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1948, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of the Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well-documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Herzl, 1895) (to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs… We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East… The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel… (Muslims are) yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Jabotinsky, 1939)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Weizmann, 1919)
“With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Ben-Gurion, 1937) and “My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part (referring to partition plan) of the land is not the end but the beginning… every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” (Ben-Gurion, 1938)
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region. Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
The Dalet Plan—Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing military plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning. On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities began during and after the 1948 Arab- Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Yinon Plan—’A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s foreign ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies—underwritten by the United States—that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinization of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism. The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states. Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East
has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
‘A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A US-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action on how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless US-Israeli wars and chaos in the region. It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts—beneficial to Israeli strategy—in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the US leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The US-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region. It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the CIA to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling US-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South. Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now-extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The recent (December 21) large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of US Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as US Security Coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip. And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
Conclusion
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same—-remove all traces of Palestinians. And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When President Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on October 7, 2023, to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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