The other night, a convicted felon and a war criminal sat beside each other to answer questions from journalists.
The longtime allies and co-conspirators have a lot in common: not least the fact that they’re both in their respective offices primarily in order to avoid prison sentences.
They both also have a shared disregard for both human rights and international law.
While the first weeks of Donald Trump’s second presidency have already been a relentless circus, the joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu really was ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ on steroids.
And when I say ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’, I don’t mean the oft-repeated trope that ‘leftist media’ always gets hysterical over the Orange One’s antics – I mean in fact that Trump is simply deranged.
His startling talk of forcibly displacing the Palestinian population from Gaza and replacing them with ‘world people’, while turning Gaza into a ‘riviera’ of the Middle East, was… frankly, undisguised supervillain talk.
In fact, something very similar was plotted by Lex Luthor in one of the Superman movies, regarding destroying part of the American coast in order to develop luxury resorts.
By the way, what are ‘world people’?
However, the idea that Trump was simply riffing or merely throwing up off-the-cuff ideas is misleading.
Firstly, he was already floating similar notions prior to this conference – involving the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population.
January 26th, for example, it was reported that ‘Donald Trump told reporters that the residents of Gaza should be “cleaned out” and ethnically cleansed to neighboring Arab countries after Israel’s US-backed bombing campaign turned the enclave into a “demolition site”…’
Second, and more important, his statements are entirely in keeping with similar things that have already been espoused in Israel for some time. Not just the well-known calls for the Palestinians to be pushed into Egypt and Jordan, but even Israeli talk of Gaza’s future ‘beachfront properties’.
It has been well established that right wing Israelis see Gaza being emptied of its native population – and free for Zionist colonisation and redevelopment.
The Nation published an article back in July last year titled ‘The Awful Plan to Turn Gaza Into the Next Dubai‘, which was based on leaked documents from Netanyahu’s office, concerning ‘a (still unconfirmed) plan for the region dubbed “Gaza 2035”…’
As the article explained,‘the plan envisions postwar Gaza as a tabula rasa, purged of residents, on which Netanyahu can realize a cartoonish, convoluted vision of fossil fuel extraction (an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of oil sit in the Strip’s coastal area), preemptive greenwashing (there’s talk of “electric car manufacturing cities”), and total fealty to the technology and real estate industries to shape the land…’
I was already putting together an article on this subject before these latest statements by Trump and Netanyahu were made: I’ll publish it here in a few days.
But that’s presumably what the decimation of Gaza has been about since October 7th. A controlled demolition to make way for a new start.
As Trump himself said, ‘It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can maybe live in peace…’
It’s a basic formula – you demolish because you plan to create something else there.
They had to reduce the Gaza strip to rubble, render it uninhabitable. That’s why a more surgical, effective operation against Hamas was avoided.
Hamas was the pretext – the means to an end. Also, as I have written for a long time, Hamas is Israel’s useful tool – largely manufactured by Israel itself.
And October 7th was very much a state-enabled/controlled event.
You could see the joy and enthusiasm on Netanyahu’s face as Trump was speaking. All Trump has done is to be much more brazen about this stuff and to actually put it on the table as a serious idea.
Last March, Trump’s son-in-law (and Netanyahu’s friend and one-time room-mate) Jared Kushner also openly forecast Gaza being turned into a luxury resort, talking about the ‘…“very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.’
There’s no question that Trump and Netanyahu, along with Kushner and others, have been discussing these plans – probably behind the backs of Joe Biden and his administration.
Netanyahu’s strategy, I have written here all along, was to simply wait out the Biden administration and wait for Messiah Trump to retake the White House so that all could be fulfilled.
Again, I was actually working on a piece about how Netanyahu and Trump were collaborating behind the back of the American government – and the possible role Israel might’ve played in Trump’s possibly fraudulent reelection.
Again, I’ll publish that here in the next few days.
But for now let’s just say that the reason Biden lost patience with Netanyahu was probably precisely because he knew the Israeli regime was bypassing him and the US government entirely and conspiring with the Trump cabal – in spite of all the support the Biden government gave Israel (to its own detriment).
It was obvious that Netanyahu and co saw Biden as insufficiently subservient: as we observed recently, only total and complete submission to the Golden Calf is considered acceptable.
Trump was always Israel’s guy. If the 2016 Trump election victory was greeted euphorically by Zionists at the time (and it was), 2024 was the Second Coming.
And once again, we just saw why.
When it comes to the Zionist project, Trump will always go the extra mile: and that’s why he’s a much preferred asset compared to a Biden or an Obama.
Take this, for example: Trump actually signing executive orders aimed at deporting people who dared to protest against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
But when Netanyahu says Trump is ‘the best friend Israel ever had’, it means more than just the surface-level shows. And I remind everyone here that the July 13th assassination hoax was in fact a religious ritual enactment.
Trump was symbolically anointed by Israeli religious figures at that time (see here).
He is seen as the figure who will facilitate the Final Solution – and yes, that’s the term I’m choosing to use in this context from now on.
The figure who will facilitate the final fulfillment of longstanding plans to not only rid Israel of the Palestinians, but to achieve both ‘Greater Israel’ and to seize the Temple Mount and build the Third Temple.
His commitment to the Zionist project is unparalleled, even by the standards of US Presidents.
The Israelis can pretty much do anything now – not that they weren’t basically doing that anyway.
And so the full ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territory and permanent displacement of the population – to make way for a Zionist luxury retreat, presumably featuring Trump hotels, casinos and golf courses, is not the far-fetched act of evil it might seem like.
Never mind that both Jordan and Egypt have already rejected this idea of taking in all of the displaced refugees.
We talked about this whole geo-political paradigm here over a year ago: so none of this has come entirely out of left field.
On the contrary, Trump’s vision is in keeping with Netanyahu’s ‘New Middle East’ – again, suggesting that the pair have been discussing these things for some time.
Jordan, by the way, already has a substantial Palestinian refugee population. But the Jordanian position has always been that they will not participate in a mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land.
Again, this Jordanian obstacle is why the Israelis might’ve plotted against the Jordanian king a few years ago – a controversy that was barely covered in the media, but which I covered at the time here.
Quite how Israel and MAGA would coerce the Jordanians or even the Egyptians into going along with these perverted plans is entirely unclear.
And we haven’t even talked about the West Bank yet.
But any attempts to sanitise or whitewash what Trump was saying are – just like the attempts to defend or sanitise Elon Musk’s Nazi salute – desperate and disingenuous.
Trump was clear in his various answers that he doesn’t see Palestinians having right of return to their land. It wasn’t ambiguous – and he didn’t just suggest US occupation to facilitate the rebuilding of Gaza, he even said America would “own it”.
At this point, is isn’t even necessarily about whether these plans could be conceivably carried forward: what’s happened here is that the vision and intent has simply been laid bare for all to see.
There’s no obfuscation or concealment anymore: it’s out in the open.
That’s probably a good thing.
In conclusion, we are so far beyond mere moral bankruptcy by now, and into openly boasted iniquity. Israel should’ve been held to account or made to see reason ages ago by international institutions and by its closest allies (especially the US, Britain and Germany) – long before Trump came back into the picture.
Instead, the Biden administration, a pathetic Britain and others meekly tried to stay on the Zionist machine’s good side, make excuses for them or avert their gaze wherever possible.
And that’s when they weren’t actively facilitating the mass destruction in Gaza.
All the while, Netanyahu and co were biding their time, prolonging the decimation, deliberately avoiding recovery of the Israeli hostages, and simply waiting for the return of Trump the Messiah.
Some commentators have expressed shock or dismay at Trump’s and Netanyahu’s casual statements this week.
But this is simply the kind of stuff that ultimately happens when the Bad Guys win.
It’s also the stuff that ultimately happens when international law is repeatedly flushed down the toilet and no one tries to do anything about it.
That’s also something I’ve been writing about for years: how the deliberate and incremental violation of international law has been paving the way for an eventual state of affairs – and a desired one, at that – where a convicted felon sitting as US President can casually advocate ethnic cleansing while talking about luxury property developments on stolen land.
All while a War Criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court sits beside him, grinning.
