by HAKKI OCAL
As the U.S. administration remains bound by Israel, Netanyahu drives the country into further extremism
The Atlantic magazine wonders if U.S. President Donald Trump could contain Israel’s hard right because Israel’s extremists, who keep Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the helm of Israel, seem not to be giving up on their ethnic cleansing policy. The Foreign Policy magazine asserts that only Trump could save Israel from its own government, but its editors suspect that even Trump could not stop history from repeating itself in Gaza because the Israeli army keeps planning for many more months of conflict to come, to kill and displace many more Palestinian civilians and to aggravate an already intolerable humanitarian situation.
Trump already began talking smut and using foul language when asked if Netanyahu violates his peace plan. While almost the entire foreign policy and international security team at the White House was in Tel Aviv, as if laughing in their faces, Netanyahu had the Knesset pass a law enabling the government to annex the West Bank. Knesset members also voiced the idea that Gaza City should be “West Shariazed” when the U.S. team was trying to make sure that Trump’s peace plan would not be violated.
Meaning of ‘West-Shariazed’
What is to be “West Shariazed” in the Zionists’ parlance? One of the three major regions of the Arab Partition of Palestine was named the “West Bank” (of the River Jordan or Nahr Al-Sharieat in Arabic) after the Zionists colonized Palestine. Through the policy to occupy, dispossess and settle in the Arab villages, towns, and even cities, or, as Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian and a leading scientist among Israel’s new historians, calls it, the “urbicide of Palestine,” the Zionist colonialism nearly emptied the Arab partitions of the Arab population.
After the 1967 War, Israel annexed the northern-most Nazareth (Acre) section and implemented a military occupation regime in the middle (West Bank) and the south (Gaza City) sections. The Gaza Strip was under Israeli Military Administration from 1967 to 1994. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon disengaged the Israeli military from Gaza in 2004 and the actual unilateral dismantlement of the Zionist settlements occurred in 2005. However, the decision to disengage from Gaza was largely opposed by the Israeli hard right; they supported Netanyahu’s government with a six-vote majority in the Knesset in exchange for the promise to reoccupy Gaza and allow resettlement. Meanwhile, occupation, settlements and occasional annexation continued in the West Bank.
Now, Netanyahu’s accomplices in war crimes and genocide in Gaza, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, pushed the annexation of the West Bank and called for the same military regime to be implemented in Gaza after the dissolution of Hamas: hence, “West-Shariazing Gaza.”
U.S. officials should wake up
Meanwhile, a “senior American official” said that if Netanyahu screws up the Gaza deal, Trump will screw him! However, using foul language is not going to work on Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. Neither would issuing “stark warnings” to Netanyahu if he allows the cease-fire to collapse!
Daily Sabah for more