There are a lot of people who love the thrill of driving fast, who are intoxicated by the taste of danger. Most of them nevertheless refrain from reckless driving. If you are somebody who tends to not hold your horses when driving a motorised vehicle, you are probably an immature driver in that you don’t fully comprehend the danger to which you are subjecting others. If you do comprehend that danger, but simply don’t care or believe that your time is much more valuable than anybody else’s, you should consider the possibility that you’re a psychopath.
There are of course other reasons why people drive as though there were no tomorrow. Maybe you are so upset or angry that those who love you, if you are lucky enough be loved, tell you: don’t take the car now. Maybe you are not loved; your wife just told you she’s leaving you. Maybe your boss blamed you for something you haven’t done. Maybe a tree crashed over your house, or maybe you actually are fleeing from, say, a volcano or a tornado.
I don’t know which of these predicaments caused Trump to make that reckless deal with Netanyahu about Gaza. Let’s put it this way for a start: I am absolutely convinced he wanted to put an end to “all the killing”. He wanted to save those who are still alive from the ongoing industrial slaughter. Yes, or rather no, I don’t generally approve of Trump, but he does seem to have a humane streak in him.
But at what cost? To put it plainly, at the cost of Palestine. With this deal, there will be no Palestine, ever. Israel has made it clear, time and time again, most recently at the UN general assembly just a few days ago: Israel will never, ever, ever even consider accepting a Palestinian state. “Negotiations in five years” will be a waste of time and money, as have all previous negotiations headed by naive and/or deceitful mediators, including not least from my own country. Israel has even taken to killing negotiators.
Without Hamas, no Palestine. Israel knows this, which is why they want to eradicate Hamas. The Palestinian Authority on the West Bank, often referred to as PA, contents itself with doing Israel’s bidding. That’s what it gets paid for. Without Hamas, some Palestinians will be allowed to live in Gaza and the West Bank, as serfs for the Israelis and on subsistence wages.
Tony Blair, a malevolent figure (and war criminal) who turned the Labour Party into a neoliberal tool of the 1 %, but better known by most as a consummate liar, is vying for a job as the viceroy of Gaza. He will make sure that the handful of surviving Gazans cause no trouble while Jared Kushner and his ilk build their luxury hotels. That’s the deal.
So my tentative diagnosis of Trump’s decision so far: Yes, he does care about loss of lives. But he has no respect for international law, no more than does Israel, he has no understanding of Palestine’s decades long case and, worst of all, he does not really care if one people lives in servitude to another.
Better alive than dead? I’m not sure. The problem is that the Palestinians will not forget who they are. Those who are still alive have endured months and months and months of unimaginable conditions – conditions reminiscent, but worse, than those endured in Nazis concentration camps (cold, hunger, fear, no toilets, no sanitary napkins, no water, no electricity … ) They are formidable heroes! And they will not forget. Memory hurts.
Besides, Netanyahu is as treacherous as the Devil himself: He considers all Gazans members of Hamas, and will try to kill the rest of them even while the deal is being sealed.
Did Trump have any alternatives? Of course he did. He could have cut off all support for Israel. Simple as that. No more arms, no more money, no more trade, no more vetoes against the vast majority of the global community in the UN.
Yes, the US Zionist billionaires would have stopped financing him. He may have lost his entire fortune. But had he done the decent thing, he would have been universally celebrated. He would have been granted almost as much as he had lost but by non-Zionists. Had he done the decent thing. Even little Norway, I am sure, would have been able to provide him with a life in the lap of luxury, had he done the decent thing.
He did not. His recklessness has also had the following consequences:
1) It has killed what was so precariously won, in spite of all the deaths, after WWII: International Law.
What remains is the playground of filthy-rich bullies and psychopaths. With or without a 2000-year-old myth or legend, anybody with sufficient funds can go on a killing spree in neighbouring or even distant states and get away with it.
2) It effectively sounds the death knell of the Jewish state.
As Norman Finkelstein tells Aljazeera on 4 October: At least we have “the historical record” of what has happened. Indeed. We have the record of a new Holocaust committed by the “Jewish State” and endorsed by the USA.
Had Trump done the decent thing, the “Jewish State” might have continued to exist indefinitely. Instead, his recklessness has driven a nation into servitude, while the despicably racist Jewish state is a pariah. The state of Israel has proven to be so murderous that even right-wing evangelicals in the US are stunned.
The US and its adoring “Western” vassals, represent only 12 % of the world’s population. The remaining 88 % will not bow indefinitelyto the primitive Stone-Age will of the bully. Eventually, some semblance of International Law will be resuscitated, and the pariah Jewish State will not be invited to the party.
So what Trump actually achieved was probably more than he reckoned with.