U.S., Israel Strangle Palestinians

The U.S. and Israeli rulers are working hand in hand to pound the oppressed Palestinians into utter submission. Last month, the White House announced an end to all funding to UNRWA, the United Nations agency that provides food, education and medical care to more than a million Palestinian refugees, while cutting $200 million in direct aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Next Washington axed $25 million in assistance to Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem. On September 10, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, announced the closure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) diplomatic office in D.C. All of these moves came on the heels of Israel’s enactment of a racist “nation-state” law enshrining the country’s essence as exclusively Jewish and giving unequivocal legal codification to the subjugation of non-Jewish minorities, centrally the Palestinians.

The aim of this offensive is to compel the Palestinians to crumble under the diktats of the right-wing Israeli regime of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu and Trump’s reactionary fraternity was sealed with the move earlier this year of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem—a big middle finger to the Palestinians, who have long considered East Jerusalem to be their capital and a symbol of their national identity. The policy of the Trump administration is hawkish and bloodthirsty, with key figures like senior adviser (and son-in-law) Jared Kushner embracing “Bibi” Netanyahu as family. Yet it is merely an acceleration of long-established bipartisan policy, including unwavering Democratic Party support to Israel. A recent bill authorizing $38 billion in military aid to the Zionist state was signed into law by Trump, but it was his predecessor Barack Obama who pledged the funds.

Such is the barbarity of U.S. imperialism, irrespective of the party in power: billions for Israel’s war machine, starvation for the Palestinian masses. An article (14 September) on the Israeli left-liberal website +972 pointed out, “It is easy to blame Trump or Bolton for the steps they have taken over the past year. But they are not acting alone. It is both houses of Congress that laid the legislative groundwork for each and every one of these measures.” Bellicose support to Israel, combined with cynical “peace” talks that extracted endless concessions from the Palestinians, has defined Democratic administrations for decades. Only more recently has the GOP begun to outdo the Democrats in resolute allegiance to the Zionist butchers, in large part reflecting the influence of Republican Christian evangelicals who believe that Israel is essential to the “second coming” of Jesus. The main difference today between the two capitalist parties with respect to the “Holy Land” is that Democrats still mouth the words “two-state solution,” in full knowledge that they are void of meaning.

Twenty-five years after the U.S.-sponsored Oslo accords, a grotesque pact brokered by Democratic president Bill Clinton, the American/Israeli axis of evil is set on stamping out any pretense of Palestinian national rights. The sham Oslo “peace process” gave cover to the Zionist regime to further dispossess, marginalize and ghettoize the Palestinians. Since then, Palestinian laborers from the Occupied Territories have largely been excluded from Israel’s economy, Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have swelled to over 800,000, and Gaza has been turned into a giant Palestinian concentration camp. The plight of the Palestinian people has become immeasurably worse. (read on)