Photo courtesy of NBC News
US president-elect Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the demagogic twins, seem to be on parallel paths with deadly desires to expand the borders of their respective countries. While Trump wants to annex Greenland, make Canada the 51st state of the US, take over the Panama Canal and rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America either through military coercion or economic pressure or both, Netanyahu has produced a new map of the Middle East without Palestine but Greater Israel grabbing territories internationally accepted as belonging to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The irony is that the US and Israel are not two different countries but one without a common border like former East and West Pakistan. That may be the reason why Ariel Sharon once reminded the Israelis not to worry about US reaction to what Israel does or does not because Jews are in control of that country. Referring to the Gaza war during his election campaign, Trump stated that to destroy Israel was tantamount to destroying the US and he repeatedly warned Hamas that if it failed to release the Israeli hostages by the time of his inauguration, all hell would break loose on Hamas and what is left of Gaza.
Is Trump serious about his territorial expansion agenda or is it a diversionary tactic to shift ordinary Americans’ outrage away from the economic hardship that would unavoidably ensue from his plan to cut $5.6 trillion from federal programs to provide $10 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations? His cuts from federal programs would include changes to Medicare including Obama’s Medicaid and ending Biden’s climate programs along with other welfare expenditures that would increase the cost of living for the working class.
As Henry Giroux of McMaster University put it so eloquently, Trump’s “delusions of grandeur, disdain for reason and truth, sycophantic worship of billionaires and despots, militarism, and embrace of white supremacy signal the birth of authoritarianism on a scale that recalls the horrors of the Third Reich, Pinochet’s Chile, and Putin’s Russia”. Likewise, Netanyahu is another megalomaniac and sociopath trying to realize by force what his Zionist forefathers such as Teodore Herzl and David Ben Curion dreamt about – an Israel without any Arabs living there. Netanyahu and his Zionist sycophants are not going to let go the opportunity created by Hamas to annex Gaza and Occupied West Bank with Israel and go further to grab territories in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The Likud Party Charter of 1977 refers to an Israel from river to the sea, which means that between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River Israel sovereignty would prevail. Donald Trump and his ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee would offer every assistance possible for Netanyahu to realize that dream and redesign a new Middle East with Israel as the commanding capital. On December 14, 2024 Netanyahu reminded Israelis that “a year ago I said, we would change the face of the Middle East, and we are indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria, Lebanon is not the same Lebanon, Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran; it has also felt the might of our arms”. Surprisingly, he did not include Yemen from where the Houthis are firing missiles at Israel and Iraq where most pro-Assad forces have sought refuge.
There is now a Gaza cease fire deal brokered by the usual intermediaries between Hamas and Israel to which Trump is claiming full credit. It is unlikely that cease fire would last long because of all sorts of conditions that Israel would impose. Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk talked about treating Gaza under Israel as Germany and Japan were treated after World War II. According to him this treatment should involve eliminating at first those like Hamas who want to wipe out the state of Israel and then through re-educating or brainwashing Palestinian children so that they will not hate Israel. But the Zionist zealots do not want Palestinian Arabs at all inside their country. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and the Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli resigned in protest. Already Netanyahu is complaining that Hamas is breaking the deal. Eventually Israel is not going to lose its grip on Gaza.
What could the world do when even the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have lost their clout in the face of US pressure? The US has offered a cash reward of $25 million to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and another $15 million to capture his Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino for “undermining democracy, the rule of law and human rights”. But no one is prepared to capture and extradite the Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant against whom ICC has issue arrest warrants for committing genocide and other war crimes in Gaza. US President Joe Biden called the ICC action “outrageous”. With Trump as president Netanyahu would receive every assistance he wants from the US to run amok in the Middle East. As Vijay Prasad argued in a recent television interview, there is an unwritten international division of humanity into superior white living in the West and inferior rest or savages living elsewhere. That justifies Israel’s genocide of Palestinians who in the eyes of Netanyahu and his supporters are human animals and cockroaches. Trump’s plans on day one of his presidency to “restore the travel ban, suspend refugee admissions, stop the resettlement and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country” reflect the same attitude.
Given the dark clouds gathering over the international economic horizon, the crumbling post-World War II entrepreneurial empire and the new world order put in place to support that empire at the end of the Cold War seem to be looking for salvation by resorting to deadly territorial expansion. President Trump’s America First ideology, his mercantilist attitude towards imports from foreign countries particularly his proposal to impose 25 percent import tax on all imports from Canada and Mexico with an additional 10 percent on China and China’s global economic challenge backed by its military power may be the compelling reasons for Trump’s diversionary agenda. While he is targeting the American continent, Netanyahu will be allowed to target the oil rich Middle East. The Abraham Accord that Trump initiated during his first term was part of this agenda. There is a good chance that Saudi Arabia too would be pressured by the Trump administration to sign that accord, normalize relations with Israel and jointly explore and commercialize the oil and gas resources under the waters of Palestine. But the resistance of Palestinians would continue globally and the world is in for a period of unrest and economic hardship under Trump’s demagoguery.