Our new president’s policies for the Middle East, are, I’m sorry to say, a disaster for those of us who support a non-interventionist foreign policy. A war between Israel and Hamas has been going on for over a year. A fragile truce is in place as I write, but who knows how long it will last? Gaza is now a desolated area, because in its ruthless campaign to destroy Hamas, Israel has killed many civilians, destroyed their homes, and reduced others to starvation. Disease is rampant, but hospitals have been bombed, impeding a medical response to the outbreak of disease. Here is an account by the renowned historian Adam Tooze of what has happened over the past year: “Before the onslaught, Gaza was a compact space with clusters of dense urban settlement. It is comparable in population and size not to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, but to neighboring Omdurman, Sudan’s second metro area. Omdurman has a population of 2.3 million spread over 230 square miles. In Gaza 2.1 million people live in 139 square miles. Into the most densely populated parts of Gaza’s urban areas, the Israeli military have unleashed extraordinary firepower. Already in December 2023 John Paul Rathbone, the Financial Times security correspondent, concluded that Israel was inflicting on Gaza one of the heaviest and most concentrated bombardments in military history. By April 2024 Euro-Med Civil Rights Monitor put the figure for munitions used at 70,000 tons of explosives. For sake of comparison that is ten times greater than the tonnage dropped in the notorious bombing raid on the German city of Dresden in February 1945. It is four and half times the explosive force of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima in August 1945. In November 2024 the Environmental Quality Authority of the Palestine Authority estimated that in barely more than a year, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had delivered no less than 85,000 tonnes of explosives. The result in Gaza is destruction of an intensity rarely seen in the history of warfare. It is unimaginable in Sudan’s civil war, which is fought with far less military equipment. Nowhere in Sudan has suffered anything like the concentrated destruction meted out to Gaza. What has enabled this concentration of firepower are not only Israel’s own resources but unstinting US aid. Enthusiastically promoted by the Biden administration and supported by huge majorities in Congress, this has accounted for a very high share of the munitions dropped.
Across Gaza more than half of all buildings have been damaged. In Gaza city the share is over 80 percent. Unsurprisingly, the havoc extends to Gaza’s 12 universities, all of which have been completely or partially destroyed. At the same time, the intensity of fire and the orders of the IDF have brutally displaced virtually the entire population, making it impossible for normal life to continue. If education and scholarship have continued – and they have – it is only due to the dauntless determination and bravery of Palestinian faculty and students. Not only is the damage to the education system clearly far more comprehensive than that suffered in Sudan, or anywhere else in the world, but the kind of communications networks that allow educational researchers to assess the scale of the damage in Sudan in relatively precise terms, no longer exist in Gaza. It is a scene of total ruination.”
It is obvious what America should do in this situation or rather not do. It isn’t our job to impose a peace settlement, but we must cut off all American financial aid and shipments of arms and missiles to the area. We should try to end the ties between AIPAC and Congress. We should certainly not do anything to abet Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s plans to take control of Gaza and to expel large numbers of Gazans.
Trump has so far done the reverse of this. He has gone so far as to suggest cleaning out the entire Gaza area, emptying it of all its residents. Why should America support the inhuman plan to deprive a people of their homeland? Here is an account of Trump’s proposal: “Well that didn’t take long. President Trump has said he wants to “clean out” Gaza and relocate its population to US client states Egypt and Jordan, which would of course be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. It would also align perfectly with longstanding Israeli agendas to remove Palestinians from their homeland so that their territory can be seized and settled by Jews. Speaking with the press on board Air Force One on Saturday, Trump said he talked to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about taking in large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza, and said he plans to speak with Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about doing the same. ‘I’d like Egypt to take people and I’d like Jordan to take people,’ Trump told reporters, saying ‘the Gaza Strip is a real mess’ and ‘literally a demolition site’. ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,’ Trump said.”
Trump is sympathetic to Netanyahu’s efforts to expand Israeli settlements into Gaza. Why should America support such a blatantly unjust policy? “U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday rescinded sanctions imposed by the former Biden administration on far-right Israeli settler groups and individuals accused of being involved in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, the new White House website said. The website said Trump rescinded Executive Order 14115 issued on Feb. 1, 2024, which authorized the imposition of certain sanctions ‘on Persons Undermining Peace, Security, and Stability in the West Bank.’ Trump’s decision is a reversal of a major policy action by former President Joe Biden’s administration which had slapped sanctions on numerous Israeli settler individuals and entities, freezing their U.S. assets and generally barring Americans from dealing with them. As much of the world’s attention has focused on the war in Gaza, growing violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank and land grabs in the occupied territory have raised concern among some of Israel’s Western allies.”
According to The Times of Israel newspaper, Trump also has removed a temporary hold on shipping “bunker buster” bombs to Israel : “US President Donald Trump said on Saturday night that he had lifted a hold put in place by former president Joe Biden on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel. “A lot of things that were ordered and paid for by Israel, but have not been sent by Biden, are on their way!” Trump wrote on his social media app Truth Social, without providing further details. Also Saturday, Trump said to reporters aboard Air Force One, “We released them (the bombs). We released them today. And they’ll have them. They paid for them and they’ve been waiting for them for a long time. They’ve been in storage.”
Trump is also very favorable to AIPAC, and Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson’s widow, who supports an “Israel First” foreign policy is personally close to Trump and was a major donor to his presidential campaign: “Viewers tuning in early to broadcasts of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony on Monday could catch a glimpse of a woman with long white hair standing next to Hillary Clinton and speaking animatedly with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The woman was Miriam Adelson, the pro-Israel megadonor who helped propel Trump to both electoral wins and who hosted an inaugural ball alongside Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO who has more recently engaged with Trump. Adelson, 79, born in Tel Aviv and raised in Haifa, is a major funder of pro-Israel political activity and a prolific donor to Jewish causes, carrying on a legacy she built with her late husband, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Adelson gave Trump’s campaign at least $100 million in October, making her the third biggest donor to his campaign, after Elon Musk, who is playing a key role in the administration, and the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.”
Let’s do everything we can to urge Trump to stay out of the Middle East, to end sending money there, and to stop supporting Israeli expansion. Stay out!
