On Tuesday Palestinians in the Gaza Strip cursed at Arab officials and burned placards of President Donald Trump in protest of the administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” summit in Bahrain to discuss economic aspects of the long-awaited “deal of the century.” Yasmin Abu Arafa, a civil rights activist, told Mondoweiss: “After long years of struggle and fighting, a new Oslo seems to be imposed upon us by the U.S. But this will not happen again as in 1993.”
Aya Al Ghazzawi says that the Trump administration Bahrain conference is another step in the continual dehumanization of the Palestinian people. “It says that the blood of the Palestinian martyrs and the people’s long suffering can be bargained upon,” Al Ghazzawi writes, “That money can make up to Palestinians for the ongoing ethnic cleansing which began in 1948. That the incremental genocide inflicted by Israel on Palestinians can be forgotten for crumbs of bread and a trivial sum of money.”
Leading Middle East and Islamic studies scholars call on President Trump immediately to pull back from the brink of a war with the Islamic Republic of Iran: “It is clear to us that the human, diplomatic, legal, political, and economic costs to both countries, the Persian Gulf and larger Middle East, the global economy and the global system of international humanitarian law of a US attack would be even more devastating than was the US invasion of Iraq sixteen years ago.”
The US ambassador to Israel recently argued that Israel has the right to annex much of the West Bank. Jonathan Cook writes that Israeli officials have been preparing for this moment for more than half a century, since the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza were seized back in 1967.
The framing of the Palestinian struggle within diplomatic language as a “conflict” serves to convert settler-colonial violence and genocidal erasure of the indigenous people into a diplomatic dispute. Denijal Jegic writes, “as long as settler-colonial erasure remains the underlying structure, no economic relief or political measure could effectively benefit Palestinians.”
National Security Advisor John Bolton recently dubbed Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny,” but Danny Sjursen says the Middle East is where the genuine all-American troika of tyranny resides. “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the military junta in Egypt, and the colonizing state of Israel — all countries that eschew real democracy and are working together to rain chaos on an already unstable region,” Sjursen writes.
The Trump administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan drew criticism at the United Nations Wednesday, with European and UN officials saying Palestinians should not be coerced into selling off rights to run their own country.
President Trump’s veto of the resolution to end American support for the Saudi-UAE coalition in Yemen, and Congress’s failure to override it, has given U.S. defense contractors a green light to proceed with a business model that counts innocent Yemenis’ deaths as the cost of doing business.
The Trump administration’s long-awaited plan peace for the Middle East is really a cover for Israel’s annexation of West Bank settlements, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations Dr. Riyad Mansour said Tuesday. “Some in the administration, they think: ‘Yes, what will help peace is break the legs of the Palestinians, break one arm and five teeth, and when they are on the ground they will come crawling to you for anything you offer them’,” Mansour said. “Those who think that way don’t know the Palestinians.”
As the Trump administration moves dangerously toward war with Iran, U.S. mainstream media ignores a major reason: Israel wants America to attack.