Friends + Interlocutors,

Donald Trump has giving Israel the green light to carpet bomb Gaza. The fact that Israel has already killed approximately 50,000 Palestinians under President Biden's watch is not enough. The fact that U.S.-supplied bombs have already destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure is not enough. Israel Katz, Israeli defense minister, says that if all the hostages are given up and Hamas is “kicked out” then something else will transpire…it is not clear what except a relocation of the survivors.

What happened to the two-state solution? You might wonder. There is none. It no longer is possible, thanks to Israel and U.S. foreign policy working in tandem with Israel. Thanks to Washington having become a pawn of Tel Aviv, the Palestinian refugee problem is now unsolvable.

You may not remember it, but Hamas was legally elected leader of all the Palestinians under Israeli occupation in 2006. The U.S. and others supervised the election. When Hamas won, the election was immediately torpedoed by Washington and the EU. In the meantime, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who lost the election to Hamas, has been in power ever since on the West Bank under Israeli supervision, and has been ruling by fiat, unelected.

Please remember that a people living under military occupation, like the Palestinians in Gaza and on the West Bank, have the legal right to resist. The Hamas attack on October 7th was an act of resistance and a kind of prison break. They attacked military bases and took civilian hostages to exchange for Palestinians in jail on the West Bank. What really happened on October 7th?  

Hamas and all Palestinians under Israeli military occupation have been forced to fight an asymmetrical war, a kind of gorilla war, because they are up against an opponent who has been given the best military equipment in the world by the U.S., Germany, etc. Moreover, Gaza has no air defense cover at all. Just like Lebanon and Syria. The whole area, the entire Arab Middle East, is a free-fire zone for Israel.

Professor Stephen Walt of Harvard, who co-wrote the book on the Israel Lobby with Professor Mearsheimer, has stated, “According to the Geneva Conventions, a population living under 'belligerent occupation' has the right to resist the occupying force. Given that Israel has controlled the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967, colonized these lands with more than 700,000 illegal settlers, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process, there is little doubt that this is a 'belligerent occupation.' Acts of resistance are still subject to the laws of war, of course, and Hamas and other Palestinian groups violate them when they attack Israeli civilians. But resisting the occupation is legitimate….”

Why has President Trump now given Israel carte blanche to bomb Gaza to bits and slaughter many more Palestinians? You can easily guess why. Do I need to draw you a map? Do you hear any Democrat party big shots, like Hillary Clinton or Obama, protesting it? No? Why not? Because they and Trump are all in the same puppet-show together, and the show must go on. Follow the money.

Patrick

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