Acad4PSA

Whoever wins next month’s election – whether Netanyahu again or one of his rivals – will keep the country heading on the same ethnic supremacist track Israel has been on for decades. Trump, Burnham, Macron and other western leaders understand this. They want Netanyahu out of the way not so there is real change but simply so they can revert to what constituted business as usual before the Gaza genocide: a slower, more incremental pace to the eradication of the Palestinian people. They want to be able to rebrand the Gaza genocide as one man’s historic folly, a tragic catastrophe that cannot be reversed but can be mitigated if he is gone. They want us looking resolutely forwards, to real-estate deals and a distant two-state solution, not backwards: to their active role in levelling the homes of more than two million people – with mostly US munitions that unleashed eight times the explosive force of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Trump administration has already okayed the shipment of vast numbers of these mega bombs to replenish Israeli stocks, even before the result of the Israeli election is known. Notably, the same Trump administration that allowed Netanyahu, a war crimes suspect, to travel to the UN in New York blocked the putative leader of the Palestinians, Mahmoud Abbas, from doing so. In announcing his new sanctions policy targeting Israel’s illegal settlements, Miliband was keen to stress that it would in no way affect intelligence sharing with Israel - the kind of intelligence coordination that saw British planes carrying out surveillance operations over Gaza throughout the genocide. And while Miliband promised a “double lock against arms exports” to Israel as part of the UK’s sanctions package, in practice not a single existing arms export licence has been revoked or suspended since. The current fight is not against a genocidal Israeli state or for some illusionary Palestinian state - let alone for justice for the endlessly abused Palestinian people. It is about engineering a reset in which the West gets Israel’s old guard back in charge. Western leaders have been embarrassed by the froth-mouthed rantings of Netanyahu’s government. This week Smotrich called for Israel to unleash its genocidal Gaza policies on the West Bank - presumably using the very bombs Trump is about to ship them. He told the Israeli media: “We should do there what we did in Gaza.” Western leaders fear what that would do to their sinking credibility. And they have allies in Israel, among its opposition, whose vision - at least for the moment - is not Smotrich’s of a Gaza-style eradication of the West Bank. Rather they envision continuing the current trajectory of gradually turning the West Bank’s small, surviving Palestinian ghettos, trapped in a sea of illegal Jewish settlements, into mini-concentration camps - small replicas of Gaza before it was destroyed. Those are the competing visions among Israelis for the West Bank: the absolute confinement of Palestinians in a series of cages versus their extermination. This is an extract from my latest article The West wants Netanyahu gone - so Palestinians can be killed more quietly again. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️