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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“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little alternative,” said one ethics expert.
After being convicted of 34 felonies in New York last year, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Friday received an unconditional discharge during a sentencing hearing that came just over a week before the Republican’s second inauguration.
Just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court—which includes three Trump appointees—allowed the hearing to proceed, New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan declined to impose fines or sentence Trump to prison for his crimes, which related to hush money payments to cover up sex scandals during the 2016 presidential election cycle.
“Donald Trump will have no penalty for criminal wrongdoing, which is an affront to accountability and to a system where no one is above the law, though the judge had little alternative,” said Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “But now, formally, the next president of the United States is a felon.”
“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.
Published date: 2 January 2025 11:10 GMT | Last update:5 days 3 hours ago
The incoming US president’s transactional approach to politics will see immigrants suffer, while suppport for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians will continue
A man shows support for US president-elect Donald Trump near his Mar-a-Lago resort on 14 December 2024 (Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images/AFP)
Given his mercurial nature, shifting from the politics of revenge to the politics of accommodation without explanation or changed circumstances, it is foolhardy to predict what lies ahead as Donald Trump prepares to be US president for a second time.
His rhetoric and ideology seem untamed and extreme – and this time around, he enters the White House with a strong electoral mandate as Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, and the support of an ultra-conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
This would seem to ensure the prospect of Trump’s total control over the governing process in the US, but there are some daunting bumps in the road ahead.
Some of the contours of Trump’s presidency have become clear even before he officially returns to the White House. Firstly, it seems certain that he will make millions of undocumented immigrants in the US miserable from day one.It is not a good sign that Trump blamed the New Orleans car incident on weak border security considering it was the work of an American army veteran who recently converted to the Islamic State group.
His obsession with stopping asylum-seekers and immigrants from crossing the border without proper papers is certain to be acted upon. Already, the man Trump has selected as “border czar” has indicated his intention to deport entire families of undocumented persons, including naturalised citizens.
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Trump could get away with this approach, however cruel in application, for a while – but the economics of the labour market will soon pose a challenge, creating strategic labour shortages in such critical sectors as agriculture in the southwestern US, exacerbating inflationary pressures.
There are also considerations around the growing need for skilled workers in the high-tech sector, which will increasingly shape the country’s economic future. These workers have been given high priority in relation to robust economic development, as Trump’s chief adviser, Elon Musk, keeps reminding him.
These concerns will be magnified if Trump goes ahead with his announced plans to place 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, along with punitive tariffs on Chinese imports. Such policies are the surest way to start a mutually destructive trade war.
Global dangers
On foreign policy, the outlook for a Trump presidency is more mixed, but uncertain and globally dangerous. In the beginning, Trump will probably seek to portray himself as a peacemaker, particularly in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war.
This conflict is both an example of the type of “forever war” he rejected during his first term in office, and an opportunity to explore whether a cooperative relationship with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia could circumvent the Atlantic alliance that has been a centrepiece of American foreign policy since the end of World War II.
Pushing for a ceasefire and diplomatic compromise was a grossly negligent missed opportunity during Joe Biden’s presidency, which seemed determined to inflict a geopolitical defeat on Russia, even at the cost of causing a disaster for Ukraine and its people.
Where does Donald Trump stand on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East?
If this change of direction occurs, Nato loyalists will have to rethink European security arrangements, and the American deep state will have to swallow defeat, or use its untested leverage to back the primacy of the US in geopolitical realms by keeping Russia out and Nato in.
When it comes to the Middle East, the story is different in terms of policy priority.
Trump has given every indication of wanting to exceed Biden’s unconditional support for Israel, including through the genocidal onslaught on Gaza, land grabbing, ethnic-cleansing operations and settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, and escalating unlawful violence against regional adversaries.
Trump, by his political appointments and undisciplined commentary, seems determined to “finish the job” in Gaza, which can only be understood as erasing Palestine and Palestinians as obstacles to the rapid establishment of Greater Israel from “the river to the sea”.
Beyond this, he seems determined to confront Iran in a more muscular manner, possibly by destroying its nuclear facilities and taking more overt steps to provoke regime change in Tehran.
These policies, if actualised, would have many risks and adverse consequences, including the possibility of a wider regional war and a surge of anti-US sentiments. They would also cement Israel as the pariah state of our time, which could weaken it to the point of emboldening the peoples of the Arab world to rise up against their western-oriented repressive regimes, and unite behind the cause of liberating Palestine from settler-colonialism.
Contempt for internationalism
Finally, in every way, Trump and his entourage have signalled their opposition to internationalism. Trump has long displayed an unwavering commitment to an ultra-nationalist and transactional world view. He exhibits contempt for addressing global challenges, and for the benefits of cooperative problem-solving, even in the context of climate change.
In this sense, the UN will be valued only to the extent that it fully backs American strategic priorities – and should it dare to censure or oppose these priorities, Trump will surely threaten, and then cut, US funding, or even withdraw US participation.
Given such attitudes, it is not surprising that Trump is dismissive of the regulatory role of international law, especially if directed at restraining the US. Say goodbye to the cynical pretensions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “rules-based world order”, which has seemed more a synonym for US-led geopolitics than a genuine submission to universally applicable principles.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism
Trump may unintentionally provide a service to humanity by stripping away the liberal illusions shielding the reality that the US and its friends habitually avoid the constraints of international law that their rivals are bound to obey. In effect, Trump’s nihilism may be preferable to Biden’s hypocrisy.
In the end, the Trump presidency may be forced to choose between a form of neo-isolationism and neo-imperialism. If the isolationist alternative prevails, then an accelerated transition will likely occur from the post-Cold War world of unipolarity to a new era of complex multipolarity.
If the neo-imperialist model prevails, due to a compromise between the ultra-nationalist Trumpists and the globally ambitious American deep state, tensions will emerge between antagonistic forms of multipolarity and competing alliance networks, resembling in structure the Cold War, yet with differences, including the agenda of geopolitical rivalries.
The de-centring of conflict that includes the partial bypassing of Europe is all but certain. Europe is no longer the chief geopolitical prize, as it was in the three 20th-century global wars (including the Cold War).
Whatever else, the Trump presidency is likely to confound expectations, including these, while keeping busy the world’s most influential media platforms.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he spoke with President-elect Donald Trump about Israel’s need to achieve “victory” against Iran and its allies in the region.
“I unequivocally declare to Hezbollah and to Iran: In order to prevent you from attacking us, we will continue to take action against you as necessary, in every arena and at all times,” Netanyahu said.
“I discussed all of this last night with my friend, US President-elect Donald Trump. We had a very friendly, warm and important discussion. We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory and we spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages,” the prime minister added.
The conversation between Netanyahu and Trump came after reports said Israel sees an opportunity to bomb Iran following the regime change in Syria that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad. The Wall Street Journal also reported that the Trump transition team is discussing the idea of strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The pretext for any Israeli or US action against Iranian nuclear facilities would be to stop Iran from building a bomb, but there’s no evidence that Tehran has decided to pursue nuclear weapons, something recently acknowledged by the CIA.
In his remarks on Sunday, Netanyahu also said Israel was changing the “face” of the Middle East. “Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran; it has also felt the might of our arm.
The Israeli leader claimed Israel has “no interest in a conflict with Syria,” but Israel has unleashed a heavy air campaign against the country since the downfall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, launching over 800 strikes.
The recent fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus marked a turning point in Syria’s ongoing conflict, with new reports revealing a covert Ukrainian role in aiding Syrian rebels.
Ukrainian intelligence provided strategic support, including drone technology and experienced operators, to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the dominant rebel faction in Idlib, Caliber.Az reports via The Washington Post.
This effort underscores Ukraine’s broader strategy to undermine Russian influence on multiple fronts amid its ongoing war with Moscow.
Approximately four to five weeks prior to the HTS-led offensive, Ukrainian operatives delivered 150 first-person-view drones and deployed 20 experienced operators to assist the rebels. Although Western intelligence sources suggest this aid played a modest role in the regime’s downfall, it was a significant demonstration of Kyiv’s intent to counter Russia in unconventional theatres such as the Middle East, Africa, and even within Russia itself.
Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the GUR, has reportedly collaborated with opposition groups in Syria under a special unit known as “Khimik,” bolstering rebel capabilities against Russian-backed Syrian forces.
Ukraine’s motivations for such actions are clear. With its homeland under siege, Kyiv is actively opening secondary fronts to stretch Russian resources and influence. A June report in the Kyiv Post detailed strikes by Ukrainian-backed Syrian rebels on Russian military installations, accompanied by video evidence of these operations.
Russian officials have expressed growing concern, with statements from representatives such as Alexander Lavrentyev and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accusing Ukrainian intelligence of conducting “dirty operations” in Idlib. Despite these claims, independent verification remains scarce.
While Russia has downplayed Ukraine’s involvement, pointing to HTS’s independent drone program and prior expertise, the rapid collapse of Assad’s regime caught Moscow off guard. Russian Telegram channels have sought to minimize Kyiv’s role, suggesting Ukrainian personnel were in Syria for too short a time to significantly influence operations. However, this narrative contrasts with Ukraine’s broader pattern of covert actions against Russian forces worldwide.
Beyond Syria, Ukraine has demonstrated its capability for overseas operations in other regions. In July 2023, Ukrainian intelligence reportedly supported Malian rebels in an ambush against Wagner Group mercenaries, resulting in significant losses for the Russian paramilitary group.
Such actions highlight the GUR’s aggressive strategy, with its head, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, affirming Ukraine’s commitment to targeting Russian military assets globally. This approach has drawn concerns from Western allies, including the Biden administration, over potential escalations.
Ukraine’s actions in Syria align with its broader strategy to disrupt Russia’s influence and partnerships. By aiding HTS, Kyiv weakened a critical Russian ally in the Middle East, further isolating Moscow. Although the Ukrainian assistance may not have been decisive, it contributed to an environment where the Assad regime’s fall became inevitable.
The parallels to other intelligence failures, such as Russia’s inability to anticipate HTS’s offensive or Israel’s surprise during Hamas’s October 2023 attack, are striking. Both underscore the challenges nations face in responding to unconventional threats.
For Ukraine, these operations serve as a testament to its resilience and resourcefulness in a protracted struggle against a powerful adversary. While not the decisive factor in Damascus, Ukraine’s covert actions signal its intent to shape the global battlefield to its advantage.
By Norman SolomonJanuary 6, 2025
By 
Peace and Justice Post 
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