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AMONG the innumerable miracles Donald Trump claims to have performed in the past four months, has he also sidelined the Netanyahu regime?
That was one of the more lurid fantasies doing the media rounds when, earlier this month, the US president restricted his Middle Eastern foray to the Gulf, ignoring Israel. What’s more, his administration has concluded a deal with Yemen’s Houthis and is negotiating with Iran; furthermore, Trump held talks in Riyadh with the former jihadist who is now guiding Syria’s fortunes. None of these efforts is likely to have enjoyed Israel’s imprimatur.
Be that as it may, had Trump landed in Jerusalem, the media’s focus would have shifted to his genocidal hosts. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the usually vocal Zionist lobby barely objected to the president’s flight plan. Extensive reports about the ethics of accepting a luxury Boeing from Qatar or the fuzzy details of purported trillion-dollar deals with Riyadh, Doha and Abu Dhabi could only help to distract attention from infants dying of malnutrition and the daily devastation wreaked on Gaza by mainly US-supplied weaponry.
Last Friday, when one of Gaza’s few remaining paediatricians, Alaa al-Najjar, turned up to work at one of the territory’s few remaining medical facilities, the incinerated bodies of seven of her 10 children were delivered to the Nasser hospital, too charred to be recognised. Two others, including six-month-old Sayden, were buried in the rubble of her home in Khan Yunis. One cannot even begin to imagine the kind of fortitude it takes to carry on in such circumstances, as Dr al-Najjar did, because there were other lives that might be saved.
The US almost certainly could halt Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign at a stroke.
On Monday, a Gaza City school where hundreds of people from besieged Beit Lahia had sought safety, was targeted, killing at least 35. As usual, children and women dominated the list of fatalities. The IDF described it as “a Hamas and Islamic Jihad command and control centre”. Simultaneously, 19 people were massacred in a house in Jabalia.
On the same day, thousands of Israelis marched through the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City chanting slogans such as “death to Arabs”, “Gaza is ours” and “let their villages burn”. One of the banners proclaimed “without a Nakba there is no victory”. The state-sponsored march is coordinated by Am K’Lavi, an outfit chaired by Baruch Kahane, the son of the late terrorist rabbi Meir Kahane. Unsurprisingly, the marchers were joined by their Kahanist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been particularly unconcerned about disguising his genocidal intent.
A poll conducted in March and published last Thursday by Haaretz suggests 82pc of Israelis support the expulsion of native Gazans and Palestinian refugees from the strip, and 47pc see no problem with killing all of its inhabitants. Would the responses from those living under Nazi rule or occupation in the 1930s-40s have been much worse had they been asked about their Jewish neighbours?
But never mind all that. There’s Trump’s tariffs against China and the EU, his crude vendetta against Harvard and particularly international students there and elsewhere, his misguided drama about “white genocide” while entertaining his guests from South Africa, and his mindless messaging about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, which he has failed to instantly resolve. Might the verified genocide against Palestinians not be worthy of his attention because the victims are not white?
He can’t control the actions of Vladimir Putin (or, for that matter, the utterances of Volodymyr Zelensky), but the US almost certainly could halt Netanyahu’s genocidal campaign at a stroke. It chooses not to do so, and Trump deliberately ignores Israel’s unceasing transgressions against every known foundation stone of humanity.
The European, Canadian and Australian leaders who have lately been persuaded to condemn Israeli words and actions are not much better. They know their statements won’t save any lives as long as they are not backed by action. A genocidal state deserves the suspension of not only arms supplies but all trade — much of it with China, the US and the EU. It took a vast war to demolish Nazi Germany, but boycott, divestment and sanctions sealed the fate of apartheid in South Africa.
The latter would probably suffice to halt the genocide. But who knows how long it might take to accomplish anything of the kind? Posterity will never absolve humankind from the stain of inaction in such circumstances. And should a monument to Trump ever be erected in what remains of Gaza over the buried bones and decomposing flesh of the mothers and children he never cared about, it ought to be a Parsi-style tower of silence where Zionist vultures feed on the remains of what the likes of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu and their Israeli and European cohorts have wrought.
Published in Dawn, May 28th, 2025
