Trump’s ‘peace plan’ is doomed. No people in history has ever resigned itself to permanent servitude and oppression. The Palestinians will prove no different
Capitalism is a genocidal ideology. Murdering human beings is how profits are made. Resource extraction powers the corporate oligarchy. If people are an obstacle they will be exterminated.
If only the Ottoman sultan had agreed that Herzl could buy Israel, back in the 1890s, then likely none of this tragedy would have happened. The Jews would have had their homeland; the rest of greater Syria would have remained intact; and Muslim-Jew co-existence would have continued peacefully as had been the case for centuries.
But when the Brits balkanized the land into 4 chunks, for no good reason but to give the French their bit too, all the problems started. Palestine now holds 20 x the number of people it did when the British created it and anyone who believes it will ever be at peace is deluded.
The Palestinians are ethnically and culturally identical with the rest of the Shami-speaking peoples of the wider Bilad Al-Shams (Greater Syria) area. The whole region urgently needs un-Balkanising and to go back to how it was during the 400 years of Ottoman rule and the thousands of years before.
Hi Jonathan I didn't listen but BBC Radio 4 had a program last night called 'A People's history of Gaza. The write up in government organ the Radio Times by Jeremy Aspinall says 'The experiences of ordinary folk fuel Tim Whewell's story of a sliver of land still dominating the headlines. The 89 year old who was 12 when he 'relocated' to Gaza on a camel in 1948, an Israeli 'settler' expelled from 'her' farm (!) in 2005, birdwatchers, doctors, musicians, even smugglers, reflect on a territory seemingly always in strife. Yet there was optimism in the 90s- the opening of the Gaza international airport; a Clinton-backed peace process-although a second 'intifada' from 2000 and the rise of Hamas changed that hopeful dynamic.'
Do you think that if Pope Leo started making arrangements for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Israel might respect him and stop the killing? I think not. But the outcry at the assassination of a Pope would wake up the world. Israel would just day Sorry, we thought it was an aid convoy. Ha ha ha.
This again, is an excellent article and analysis by @Jonathan_K_Cook. It's so important particularly now, that we have good honest journalists and journalism. Unfortunately, they're in short supply. So thank you Mr Cook 👍
Israel is a cancer in the Middle East. Imagine what it could have been like if Britain/France etc had not interfered back at the beginning of the 20th century.
As long as Netanyahu has a stranglehold on the world's conscience, the slow death of Gazans and the eradication of Palestine will continue. Someone needs to get in a room with Trump and make him understand what is being done in his name, because only when America changes its policy will the narrative shift.
I appreciate your attempt to understand the Gaza situation but to me you are falling into the classic trap all left-leaning Westerners cannot seem to avoid. You see every world situation through the lens of one people exploiting another. In so doing, you don't notice the broader situation in the ME and you don't notice the changing situation with Islam in the wider world.
Yes, Israel is exploiting the fall of US hegemony, and thus the end of the so-called rules-based order, to create greater Israel, pretty much by any means available, regardless of how many Palestinians suffer.
But the backdrop to this is an increasingly successful Islam, now to many people the only realistic alternative to free-form global capitalism. It is past the "terrorism stage," so to speak, and needs to reposition how it appears to the world. Muslims radicalised over the last few decades have become a problem not just to those in Tel Aviv, Washington or Ankara, but also to those in Doha and Riyadh. This is what you are missing by the way you frame the situation.
And it matters because it means that it is not just the Israelis or the Americans who want Hamas gone. This cannot be openly stated by ME leaders for two reasons. Firstly, because it would make them look bad in the face of the horrors going on in Gaza. Secondly, because right now Islam is making use of the Western Left to further its own advancement and needs to keep positioning itself as the victim.
One can't say this too much: Hamas is symptom, not a cause of Gaza and Palestine's problems.
Riyadh was cultivated in the laboratories of western imperialism, not an inevitable evolution in Islamic thinking.
ISIS is ...
You get the drift.
At some level you know this. Your bitterness towards the Ayatollahs is no excuse for being so reductive about Islam, or about the region you feel alienated from.
Jonathan, I know you mean well. I feel that. But I have to say... please pick up your Guardian, check its pages and find a different conflict to project your Marxist fantasies onto.
How many people in the MENA region support revolutionary jihad? Essentially none. They support the Palestinian people, not the terrorists.
Marx identified the relentlessly algorithmic nature of capital accumulation. But the lens he used to address it served only to create legions of pointless intellectuals who fantasize about changing the world with ideologies. It doesn't work. But these people are now so addicted to dreaming they can't stop imagining it one day will.
PS. The point of these article is chiefly to help western readers better grasp their own social and political conditioning – and the way it is destroying our futures. The backdrop – in this case the Middle East – is almost beside the point. It just happens to be a region I know a lot about, and (because of oil) is the focus of the West's most malevolent scheming.
You think that you can change the world with your ideological perspective. I'm telling you, it won't work. And in cases like Palestine, your way of thinking will kill more and create more suffering. The Jews are not messing around here. As Dermer has pretty much openly stated, they are playing by the old rules... crush your enemies such that they never dare oppose you again. They are taking their lead from how the US ended WW2 in Japan. The Japanese never opposed America again. This is how they are thinking. You need to get this, Jonathan. This is not just an ideological discussion about what is fair and what is not.
You need to understand how the brain functions. Nearly all human behaviour is driven from the brainstem, not the frontal lobes. Thinking does not really matter. Chomsky and Ideologies are for coffee tables in Islington. It doesn't work in the real world. And, like all lefties, this is what you cannot bear to face... reality.
the US/UK treatment of the ME has caused religious radicalization and fundamentalism - all of that would have 'modernised' nicely with internal pressure from locals (like it had in the west) if they had been left to get on with it
Yes, US interventions in the ME were a main driver for Islamic radicalisation, which created constant terrorism threats for locals. And attracted legions of western lefties who wanted to support "the cause" from their apartments in Islington. Thankfully, Trump is in power now and some sense of order and natural development can be restored.
Rubbish. It is Israel that is constantly positioning itself as victim, now supposedly at the hands of "radical Islam"? Palestinians are generally moderate Muslims with a right to a peaceful, life as anyone else.
Yes, in the eyes of the consumers of Western media, the Israelis are clearly losing the war of words. Personally, despite living in the area, I'll happily admit that I have no clue what's going on, due to the level of lies, fabrications and exaggerations that the media, UN and aid agencies have all indulged in since the conflict began. But I agree that the Shami speaking Arabs of the region are hardly Wahhabis. The collapse of the Ottomans is the real cause here. They were much better at administering the region than the Brits and the French. Palestine, Lebanon and Syria should never have been created in the first place and if it had stayed one big region with a Jewish enclave around Jersusalem, none of this would be happening.
Currently, people are “waking up”; and when you hear the frequently asked questions “Are we the baddies?” or “Are we the Nazis now?”, the deeds are already done and the question is already answered.
Any 5 year old could read the "20 point peace plan" in a few minutes. It reads as if scribbled down between rounds of golf and the sycophantic adulation this awful president has received from world leaders is one of the sicker events of this year! The idea that it could lead to permanent peace is a joke.
TWO HOURS ago the BBC NEWS ONLINE home page carried the report that a passing mobile IDF patrol opened fire on a group of Palestinian boys playing football, killing one AGED 10.
It wasn't the lead story. You had to scroll way down to find it, but it was there. Now it's gone from the home page
MUHAMMAD AL-HALLAQ is now the fourth story down on the ISRAEL-GAZA WAR page of the site (and slipping swiftly further down as attention swings to the latest episode of Israel's hostage-return trauma). But he's been covered, right? So, done and dusted.
THERE'S NO POINT in any 'what ifs'. (What if he was a white Ukrainian 10-year-old shot casually/spitefully by passing Russians?) It's not an editorial misjudgement. It's the BBC's 'memory hole' treatment.
BUT THOSE OTHER BOYS PLAYING WITH MUHAMMAD WILL REMEMBER (burned into their minds with their trauma). His family and their families will remember. Others near and far will remember. Lots and lots of them.
THE STATE OF ISRAEL HAS AN EXPIRY DATE. It's closer than its masters think. It is because it must be. The Zionist project has always been an unsustainable exercise in manic delusion.
Preface: This 13th Day of October, 2025—Canada’s Day of Thanksgiving—arrives as history converges.
This 13th Day of October, 2025—Canada’s Day of Thanksgiving, so different from America’s later feast on November 27—arrives as history converges. Today, Israel ends its seven days of Sukkot, the divine remembrance it has forgotten, even as it imposes a permanent Sukkot upon the people of Gaza. On this same day, Israeli hostages return to homes and families—yet tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many held without charge, emerge to find no homes left, no families waiting, and no shelter from the ruins of a man-made wilderness.
They are most certainly not Palestinian prisoners but hostages. There isn’t a single Palestinian prisoner. Please try to understand that and incorporate it in your writing and wording.
I don't disagree Edijal. I assumed the Watchers would know what I meant.
This is the logical followup to the link above article published this morning: While the World Watches Gaza: The Unreported Israeli War for the Annexation of the ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED West Bank.
This is the last word in the article with a live link to the story, of the kind the Pro-Israel MSM never report on. 'Israel kills 11 Palestinian family members in Gaza’s deadliest truce breach'
Capitalism is a genocidal ideology. Murdering human beings is how profits are made. Resource extraction powers the corporate oligarchy. If people are an obstacle they will be exterminated.
If only the Ottoman sultan had agreed that Herzl could buy Israel, back in the 1890s, then likely none of this tragedy would have happened. The Jews would have had their homeland; the rest of greater Syria would have remained intact; and Muslim-Jew co-existence would have continued peacefully as had been the case for centuries.
But when the Brits balkanized the land into 4 chunks, for no good reason but to give the French their bit too, all the problems started. Palestine now holds 20 x the number of people it did when the British created it and anyone who believes it will ever be at peace is deluded.
The Palestinians are ethnically and culturally identical with the rest of the Shami-speaking peoples of the wider Bilad Al-Shams (Greater Syria) area. The whole region urgently needs un-Balkanising and to go back to how it was during the 400 years of Ottoman rule and the thousands of years before.
Thank you Jonathan for this excellent piece (as usual), translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/dire-quil-y-a-eu-une-guerre-a-gaza
Just a remark about two error links (Drop Site and BBC) but I finally found them.
Many thanks, Zanzibar. Really appreciate the translation.
With pleasure, always.
Hi Jonathan I didn't listen but BBC Radio 4 had a program last night called 'A People's history of Gaza. The write up in government organ the Radio Times by Jeremy Aspinall says 'The experiences of ordinary folk fuel Tim Whewell's story of a sliver of land still dominating the headlines. The 89 year old who was 12 when he 'relocated' to Gaza on a camel in 1948, an Israeli 'settler' expelled from 'her' farm (!) in 2005, birdwatchers, doctors, musicians, even smugglers, reflect on a territory seemingly always in strife. Yet there was optimism in the 90s- the opening of the Gaza international airport; a Clinton-backed peace process-although a second 'intifada' from 2000 and the rise of Hamas changed that hopeful dynamic.'
My eyes are bleeding.
Jo.
Do you think that if Pope Leo started making arrangements for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Israel might respect him and stop the killing? I think not. But the outcry at the assassination of a Pope would wake up the world. Israel would just day Sorry, we thought it was an aid convoy. Ha ha ha.
Thank you, Johnathan, for this detailed analysis!
This again, is an excellent article and analysis by @Jonathan_K_Cook. It's so important particularly now, that we have good honest journalists and journalism. Unfortunately, they're in short supply. So thank you Mr Cook 👍
it IS a war, started by the arabs, now they cry victim... and many idiots like ou buy. hope the next yihad get you, antisemite idiot.
Israel is a cancer in the Middle East. Imagine what it could have been like if Britain/France etc had not interfered back at the beginning of the 20th century.
As long as Netanyahu has a stranglehold on the world's conscience, the slow death of Gazans and the eradication of Palestine will continue. Someone needs to get in a room with Trump and make him understand what is being done in his name, because only when America changes its policy will the narrative shift.
I appreciate your attempt to understand the Gaza situation but to me you are falling into the classic trap all left-leaning Westerners cannot seem to avoid. You see every world situation through the lens of one people exploiting another. In so doing, you don't notice the broader situation in the ME and you don't notice the changing situation with Islam in the wider world.
Yes, Israel is exploiting the fall of US hegemony, and thus the end of the so-called rules-based order, to create greater Israel, pretty much by any means available, regardless of how many Palestinians suffer.
But the backdrop to this is an increasingly successful Islam, now to many people the only realistic alternative to free-form global capitalism. It is past the "terrorism stage," so to speak, and needs to reposition how it appears to the world. Muslims radicalised over the last few decades have become a problem not just to those in Tel Aviv, Washington or Ankara, but also to those in Doha and Riyadh. This is what you are missing by the way you frame the situation.
And it matters because it means that it is not just the Israelis or the Americans who want Hamas gone. This cannot be openly stated by ME leaders for two reasons. Firstly, because it would make them look bad in the face of the horrors going on in Gaza. Secondly, because right now Islam is making use of the Western Left to further its own advancement and needs to keep positioning itself as the victim.
One can't say this too much: Hamas is symptom, not a cause of Gaza and Palestine's problems.
Riyadh was cultivated in the laboratories of western imperialism, not an inevitable evolution in Islamic thinking.
ISIS is ...
You get the drift.
At some level you know this. Your bitterness towards the Ayatollahs is no excuse for being so reductive about Islam, or about the region you feel alienated from.
Jonathan, I know you mean well. I feel that. But I have to say... please pick up your Guardian, check its pages and find a different conflict to project your Marxist fantasies onto.
How many people in the MENA region support revolutionary jihad? Essentially none. They support the Palestinian people, not the terrorists.
Patronising to say the least. Marx didn't fantasize.
Essentially all Semites in MENA want revolution to end Western tyranny in the region.
Marx identified the relentlessly algorithmic nature of capital accumulation. But the lens he used to address it served only to create legions of pointless intellectuals who fantasize about changing the world with ideologies. It doesn't work. But these people are now so addicted to dreaming they can't stop imagining it one day will.
PS. The point of these article is chiefly to help western readers better grasp their own social and political conditioning – and the way it is destroying our futures. The backdrop – in this case the Middle East – is almost beside the point. It just happens to be a region I know a lot about, and (because of oil) is the focus of the West's most malevolent scheming.
Westerners don't have a monopoly on malevolent scheming. Thankfully
Time to read a bit of Chomsky, or maybe the New Testament.
My first duty is to fix the self-destructive thinking and behaviours of my society. Maybe yours is to do the same for your own society.
You do your job. I'll do mine.
You think that you can change the world with your ideological perspective. I'm telling you, it won't work. And in cases like Palestine, your way of thinking will kill more and create more suffering. The Jews are not messing around here. As Dermer has pretty much openly stated, they are playing by the old rules... crush your enemies such that they never dare oppose you again. They are taking their lead from how the US ended WW2 in Japan. The Japanese never opposed America again. This is how they are thinking. You need to get this, Jonathan. This is not just an ideological discussion about what is fair and what is not.
You need to understand how the brain functions. Nearly all human behaviour is driven from the brainstem, not the frontal lobes. Thinking does not really matter. Chomsky and Ideologies are for coffee tables in Islington. It doesn't work in the real world. And, like all lefties, this is what you cannot bear to face... reality.
the US/UK treatment of the ME has caused religious radicalization and fundamentalism - all of that would have 'modernised' nicely with internal pressure from locals (like it had in the west) if they had been left to get on with it
Yes, US interventions in the ME were a main driver for Islamic radicalisation, which created constant terrorism threats for locals. And attracted legions of western lefties who wanted to support "the cause" from their apartments in Islington. Thankfully, Trump is in power now and some sense of order and natural development can be restored.
Rubbish. It is Israel that is constantly positioning itself as victim, now supposedly at the hands of "radical Islam"? Palestinians are generally moderate Muslims with a right to a peaceful, life as anyone else.
Yes, in the eyes of the consumers of Western media, the Israelis are clearly losing the war of words. Personally, despite living in the area, I'll happily admit that I have no clue what's going on, due to the level of lies, fabrications and exaggerations that the media, UN and aid agencies have all indulged in since the conflict began. But I agree that the Shami speaking Arabs of the region are hardly Wahhabis. The collapse of the Ottomans is the real cause here. They were much better at administering the region than the Brits and the French. Palestine, Lebanon and Syria should never have been created in the first place and if it had stayed one big region with a Jewish enclave around Jersusalem, none of this would be happening.
Currently, people are “waking up”; and when you hear the frequently asked questions “Are we the baddies?” or “Are we the Nazis now?”, the deeds are already done and the question is already answered.
https://griobhtha1.substack.com/p/complicit-across-the-rubicon-the
Many thanks for this excellent article!
Agree that the use of "war" is an intentional misleading understatement of genocide.
The Trump plan should never be associated with "peace" - better described as "piece" - enlarging the piece occupied by the rogue state Israel.
The impossible hurdles for Hamas set by the imbecile:
1. Getting all the dead bodies out in 72 hours (with no earthmoving equipment)
2. Laying down arms - without removing all the Zionist terrorists within designed to destabilise
Palestine.
3. Palestine has no say in its future.
Any 5 year old could read the "20 point peace plan" in a few minutes. It reads as if scribbled down between rounds of golf and the sycophantic adulation this awful president has received from world leaders is one of the sicker events of this year! The idea that it could lead to permanent peace is a joke.
“No people in history has ever resigned itself to permanent servitude and oppression.” - EXCEPT AMERICANS lol
TWO HOURS ago the BBC NEWS ONLINE home page carried the report that a passing mobile IDF patrol opened fire on a group of Palestinian boys playing football, killing one AGED 10.
It wasn't the lead story. You had to scroll way down to find it, but it was there. Now it's gone from the home page
MUHAMMAD AL-HALLAQ is now the fourth story down on the ISRAEL-GAZA WAR page of the site (and slipping swiftly further down as attention swings to the latest episode of Israel's hostage-return trauma). But he's been covered, right? So, done and dusted.
THERE'S NO POINT in any 'what ifs'. (What if he was a white Ukrainian 10-year-old shot casually/spitefully by passing Russians?) It's not an editorial misjudgement. It's the BBC's 'memory hole' treatment.
BUT THOSE OTHER BOYS PLAYING WITH MUHAMMAD WILL REMEMBER (burned into their minds with their trauma). His family and their families will remember. Others near and far will remember. Lots and lots of them.
THE STATE OF ISRAEL HAS AN EXPIRY DATE. It's closer than its masters think. It is because it must be. The Zionist project has always been an unsustainable exercise in manic delusion.
Preface: This 13th Day of October, 2025—Canada’s Day of Thanksgiving—arrives as history converges.
This 13th Day of October, 2025—Canada’s Day of Thanksgiving, so different from America’s later feast on November 27—arrives as history converges. Today, Israel ends its seven days of Sukkot, the divine remembrance it has forgotten, even as it imposes a permanent Sukkot upon the people of Gaza. On this same day, Israeli hostages return to homes and families—yet tens of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many held without charge, emerge to find no homes left, no families waiting, and no shelter from the ruins of a man-made wilderness.
https://rayjc.com/2025/10/13/the-apostolic-manifesto-the-majors-seal-from-a-canadian-jail-to-gazas-cry/
They are most certainly not Palestinian prisoners but hostages. There isn’t a single Palestinian prisoner. Please try to understand that and incorporate it in your writing and wording.
I don't disagree Edijal. I assumed the Watchers would know what I meant.
This is the logical followup to the link above article published this morning: While the World Watches Gaza: The Unreported Israeli War for the Annexation of the ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED West Bank.
This is the last word in the article with a live link to the story, of the kind the Pro-Israel MSM never report on. 'Israel kills 11 Palestinian family members in Gaza’s deadliest truce breach'
https://rayjc.com/2025/10/18/while-the-world-watches-gaza-the-unreported-israeli-war-for-the-annexation-of-the-illegally-occupied-west-bank/