The Gaza 'war' was a lie, as is the ceasefire. Trump just told you

During Netanyahu’s visit, Trump dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. This was always about ethnic cleansing

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House this week tore the mask off 16 months of gaslighting by western leaders and by the entirety of the western establishment media.

United States President Donald Trump finally dropped Washington’s sugar coating of Israel’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.

This was always, he told us, a slaughter made in the US. In his words, Washington will now "take over" Gaza and be the one to develop it.

And the goal of the slaughter was always ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians, he said, would be "settled" in a place where they would not have to be "worried about dying every day" – that is, being murdered by Israel using US-supplied bombs.

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the "Riviera of the Middle East", with the "world’s people" – he meant rich white people like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties in their stead.

If the US "owns" Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there just happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new "owner". Palestinians have, of course, never been allowed to develop their gas fields.

Trump may even have let slip inadvertently the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to "all of them – there’s 1.7 million or maybe 1.8 million people" being forced out of Gaza.

The population count before 7 October 2023 was between 2.2 and 2.3 million. Where are the other half a million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by feral dogs? Vaporised by 2,000lb US bombs?

Wrecking spree

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the best interests of the Palestinians at heart. As if he was saving them from a disaster-prone earthquake zone, not from a genocidal neighbour he counts as Washington’s closest ally.

His comments were greeted with shock and horror in western and Arab capitals. Everyone is distancing themselves from his blatant backing for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.

But these are the same leaders who kept silent through 15 months of Israel’s levelling of Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries.

Then, they spoke of Israel’s right to "defend itself" even as Israel caused so much damage the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory – that is, four generations.

What did they think would happen at the end of the wrecking spree they armed and fully supported? Did they imagine the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, or hospitals, or schools, or water systems, or electricity?

They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would either risk death in the ruins or be forced to move out.

And western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was "proportionate", it was necessary. They smeared anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who went on a protest march as an antisemite and a Jew hater.

In the US and elsewhere, students – many of them Jewish – staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in the riot police, beating them. Afterwards, the universities expelled the student organisers and denied them their degrees.

And yet western politicians and media outlets think now is the time to express shock at Trump’s statements?

Still dying

Trump’s appalling, savage honesty simply highlights the depths of mendacity over the preceding 16 months. After all, who did not understand that the three-phase Gaza ceasefire, which came into effect on 19 January, was a lie too.

It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page.

It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not just to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also supposed to allow for the mitigation of harm to the civilian population, bring the hostilities to an end, and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza.

None of that will happen – at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.

Despite its claims, Israel has clearly not ceased firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued killing and maiming Palestinians, including children, even if the carpet bombing has ended for the time being.

In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never referred to as what they are: violations of the ceasefire.

Israeli snipers may no longer be shooting Palestinian children in the head, as happened routinely for 15 months. But the young are still dying.

Without homes, without access to properly functioning hospitals and with only limited access to food and water, Gaza’s children are perishing – mostly out of view, mostly uncounted – from the cold, from disease, from starvation.

Even Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, says it will likely take 10-15 years to rebuild Gaza.

But the people of Gaza don’t have that much time.

This month Israel instituted a ban on the activities of the United Nation’s aid agency, Unrwa, in all of the Palestinian territories it occupies illegally.

Unrwa is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hellscape Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered – and more of Gaza’s people will die waiting for help.

A blind eye

But in truth, Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the "ceasefire" beyond the first stage, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has all but promised to restart the slaughter.

When Israel decides to "go back in", there will be no price to pay from the Trump administration, any more than there was a price to pay from the previous Biden administration.

Even now, as Israel breaks the ceasefire, shooting at civilian vehicles because the inhabitants are unaware of the tripwire restrictions on their movements imposed by Israel, western politicians and media turn a blind eye.

And when Israel finally tears up the agreement, as it will, the West will echo Israel in blaming Hamas for being the one to violate it.

The ceasefire is a lie too because, having made Gaza uninhabitable, a death camp, Israel has switched its primary genocidal focus to the Occupied West Bank, where it is gradually introducing the same tactics employed for 15 months in the tiny coastal enclave.

At the weekend it blew up large parts of the refugee camp of Jenin, turning it into rubble, just as it has already done to most of Gaza and swaths of south Lebanon.

Note that Israel is now targeting the West Bank even though it is run not by Hamas but by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who refers to his security forces’ collaboration with Israel in repressing all resistance to its illegal occupation as "sacred".

Note too that the West Bank had nothing to do with the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023. But none of this should surprise us. These were only ever pretexts for the slaughter in Gaza.

In turn, the ceasefire lie sits atop a mountain of past lies: from Hamas beheading babies to its waging a campaign of systematic rape, for which there is precisely zero evidence.

And it breathes life into a new round of lies such as Biden’s suggestion last month that the ceasefire would allow the people of Gaza to "return to their neighbourhoods". Except those neighbourhoods are gone. They don’t exist because the Biden administration sent billions of dollars worth of munitions to level Gaza.

Why, one might wonder, is the Trump administration seeking to send an additional $1bn worth of munitions to Israel, if not so it can continue the destruction and slaughter?

Blushes spared

The ceasefire is a lie because everything about the past 16 months has been a lie. It is the latest lie in a chain of lies, each meant to support the other lies to create a mendacious overarching narrative: the giant lie.

The giant lie tells of a decades-old "conflict" with the Palestinians, of Israel’s "war of survival" in the region. The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s last settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important oil-rich Middle East.

According to that giant lie, Hamas "started a war" on 7 October 2023 when it broke out of the concentration camp Palestinians in Gaza had been living in for at least 16 years, deprived of the essentials of life by their Israeli oppressors.

According to that giant lie, Hamas are the terrorists – not Israel, which has been illegally occupying, settling and besieging the Palestinians’ homeland for three-quarters of a century.

According to that giant lie, Israel’s slaughter of many tens of thousands of men, women and children and its maiming of many times that figure were necessary to "eliminate Hamas" rather than evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent, as every major human rights organisation has concluded.

Even Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, admitted – only, of course, as he was stepping down – that Israel’s extended killing spree had been entirely self-sabotaging. "We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost," he said. "That is a recipe for an enduring insurgency and perpetual war."

This week officials in Gaza used the lull in Israeli attacks to reassess the death toll. They have revised it to nearly 62,000 after adding the names of those missing, presumed dead under the oceans of rubble. Many more deaths have doubtless still not been identified.

In the giant lie, the International Court of Justice’s ruling more than a year ago that there were "plausible" grounds for believing Israel was carrying out a genocide were airbrushed out of the picture by western politicians and media.

Not only that, but the West hurried to supply Israel with the bombs needed to carry out the very massacres that has led the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide.

In that giant lie, Britain’s now-prime minister Keir Starmer presented Israel’s starvation of Gaza’s population as lawful – as "self-defence".

Meanwhile, journalists and other politicians collude in avoiding mention of Starmer’s comments to spare his blushes, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) charged Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, with crimes against humanity for that very same starvation policy.

Supine media

According to the giant lie, Hamas is holding hostages, while the many thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel to be used as bargaining chips in the current swaps – including hundreds of doctors, aid workers and children – are "prisoners", legitimately "arrested" as terror suspects.

According to the same giant lie, Israel’s government had to destroy Gaza to bring home the hostages, even as it spent the last days before the ceasefire went into effect intensifying its bombardment of the enclave, clearly indifferent as to whether it killed the hostages in the process.

In the giant lie, Israel’s levelling of Gaza, the aid blockade and starvation of 2.3 million people were somehow justified and "proportionate" rather than intended to make the enclave uninhabitable, with the goal of forcing Palestinians out and into the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai or other parts of the Arab world.

The "ceasefire" lie is perfectly of a piece with this giant lie.

The giant lie that claimed Biden had "worked tirelessly" for a ceasefire that he could have got days after 7 October 2023 with one call to Netanyahu. The "hard won" ceasefire that was available in exactly the same format last May, but had to be delayed because Israel needed longer to carry out its genocide.

The giant lie that hailed Biden and Trump for pulling off a diplomatic coup with the ceasefire when for more than a year millions of protesters in the West have been smeared, beaten by police and arrested as Jew haters for demanding precisely the same.

The giant lie that for decades has presented Washington as an "honest broker" when it is Israel’s biggest arms dealer, its most vociferous apologist, its most terrifying enforcer.

The grand lie that required physically hauling two reporters out of Blinken’s farewell press conference last month. Each tried to remind us that Emperor Biden had been naked all along.

For anyone wondering why the media have been so supine through the past 15 months – failing in the case of Gaza to summon up any of the passion and indignation they so readily evoked over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – here was the answer.

The other journalists kept their heads down or looked away sheepishly, fearful that they might lose their access should they be tainted by any association with these rule-breakers. Decorum had to be maintained inside the royal court, even in the midst of a genocide.

The giant lie needed to be protected at all costs.

Snake-oil salesman

Whatever western politicians and the media claim, the ceasefire has brought nothing to an end. It offers only brief respite to the Palestinian people from their most immediate pain and misery.

We must not allow it to bolster the narrative of the giant lie. Which is exactly what Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister and the oiliest of snake-oil salesmen, sought to do.

In a statement on the prospect of the ceasefire last month, Starmer suggested that it would allow the people of Gaza what he called "a better future", including the creation of "a sovereign and viable Palestinian state".

Really?

No one wants to think through what the very best-case scenario for Gaza would mean – Starmer’s claim is based on the entirely fanciful notion that Israel actually wants a permanent ceasefire .

The reality is that it would take us back to 6 October 2023, when Israel was blockading Gaza, holding its 2.3 million people hostage. It was denying them the import of essential items while keeping them on a privation diet.

It was refusing the sick an exit to life-saving treatments they could only receive abroad. It was crushing the economy by denying businesses an export market. It was allowing the people of Gaza only a few hours of power a day, and surveilling them 24/7 through an army of airborne drones.

On the very best-case scenario, Gaza would return to this – plus all the devastation wrought by Israel since: no homes, schools, universities, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, churches; oceans of rubble to traverse; wrecked water and sewage systems; and vast swaths of the population needing medical treatment for serious injuries and disease; and nearly 40,000 orphans to care for.

Is that the "better future" Starmer was referring to?

What are the chances that Gaza will receive even this best-case scenario from hell when Israel is losing no time extending its genocidal policies to the West Bank?

The ceasefire is a lie because everything else we have been told is a lie: that Israel is a normal western liberal democracy, that Israel wants peace with its neighbours, that Israel’s army is the most moral in the world.

Israel is not just a standard-issue settler-colonial state – the kind that seeks to eradicate the native population whose lands it covets. Israel is the most lavishly armed, the most indulged settler-colonial state in history, and one addicted to its scorched-earth approach to the region it inhabits.

The truth is everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be repaired, nothing can heal, until the lies stop.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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