In the West Bank, Trump is giving Netanyahu a free hand to blow up the region
People gather in front of a hospital after several Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air attack in Jenin, West Bank, 14 January 2025
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 23 January 2025:
Anyone who imagined that US President Donald Trump would be the Stop the War president the Middle East had been waiting for, should have a look at what is currently underway in the Occupied West Bank.
Dumbfounded by the sight of hundreds of well turned out Hamas fighters and jeeps surrounding the Red Cross transport vehicle which held the first three Israeli hostages to be released, the Israeli army is laying waste to Jenin with a fury uninhibited by 15 months of continuous war.
The images from the hostage release in Gaza City shocked an Israeli public fed on myths of total victory. “After a year and four months, in which the public’s eyes have been flooded with information and baseless narratives of stories of total victory and revenge, the Israeli public sees from Gaza images of Toyotas, armed Hamas members and Gaza rising from the ruins,” journalist Israel Frey told Middle East Eye.
That said, the large-scale ground assault on the West Bank refugee camps was pre-planned. But its timing was enough to keep Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister and de facto consul general of the occupied West Bank, in the cabinet when he threatened to resign over the ceasefire in Gaza.
The other item in Smotrich’s sweetie bag was the promise to clear out the army leadership. If you think that Lt General Herzi Halevi, Israel’s top general who resigned this week, has done enough in Gaza to be considered the next recipient of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), his replacement will be worth watching.
With the accompanying settler attack on the Palestinian town of Funduq, as Trump was lifting sanctions on its most violent lynch mobs, you could be forgiven for thinking that Israel had merely pressed the pause button on Gaza, only to unleash the same hell on the West Bank. Within hours, 10 bodies lay on the streets of Jenin, too dangerous to retrieve.
So has the pattern for Trump’s second term in office already been set, and is this what it looks like?
A repeat of the dream relationship?
No one can argue with the facts: all the pieces are in place for a repeat of the dream relationship with Israel achieved by Trump during his first term.
Trump allowed Israel to annex the occupied Golan Heights – a move destined, one day, to create war with Syria -to use the Abraham Accords as a lever to bury the Palestinian cause, and to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
For his second and last term, Trump has appointed an ambassador in Mike Huckabee, who believes there is no such thing as a Palestinian, a defence secretary in Pete Hegseth, who said a Third Temple should be built on the ruins of Al Aqsa mosque, and a peace envoy in Steve Witkoff who wants to “relocate Gazans to Indonesia”.
Trump himself has made it abundantly clear that he cares not one fig for the fate of seven million Palestinians.