On Netanyahu’s win – David M. Halbfinger and Aaron Boxerman in NYT:
‘Ultimately, Mr. Netanyahu got almost everything he could have hoped from Mr. Trump’s proposal — a demand that Hamas release the hostages immediately and lay down its weapons, without which Israel would have carte blanche to keep pummeling Gaza.
As for Israeli troops, they would get to remain in Gaza’s perimeter for the foreseeable future. There was such a stinting nod to the aspiration of statehood for Palestinians that the proposal all but suggested they just keep dreaming. And the Palestinian Authority would be left playing no role in Gaza anytime soon.’
(…)
‘Hamas would struggle to accept a deal that would amount to surrendering its rule in Gaza, but brushing off a clear path to ending the conflict would risk further angering Palestinians who have lived through nearly two nightmarish years of killing and devastation. Some Gazans accuse Hamas of fighting a war for its own political survival at their expense.’
(…)
‘After hearing the terms of the proposal, Mahmoud Abu Matar, a 27-year-old sheltering in central Gaza, said a vast majority of Palestinians living there would most likely support the deal so as to put an immediate end to the violence.
“We don’t want any more war and bloodshed,” he said. “The ball is now in Hamas’s court.”
Some of the most important players in the Trump-Netanyahu vision for Gaza did not speak at the White House on Monday. Among them were Arab and Muslim nations that have offered to provide troops or funding for a peacekeeping force to provide security in Gaza, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.’
(…)
‘That response showed how much has changed since 2020, when Mr. Trump released a peace plan for the overall Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was similarly skewed toward Israel’s preferences. Back then, in an American election year, the P.A. rejected Mr. Trump’s proposal out of hand, and he was voted out of office that November.
Today, the P.A. is being allowed by Mr. Trump to cling to the hope of a future for itself. Hamas is not.’
Read the article here.
Maybe the US will manage to do in Gaza what it didn’t manage to do in Afghanistan and Iraq? Turn the country into a westernized, more or less thriving ally of the empire. I would not bet more than 1000 dollars on it, but who knows.
And then we got Friedman:
‘In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth in private. In the Middle East, officials lie in private and tell the truth in public.’
(…)
‘I don’t need to remind Israelis that on June 1 more than 100 Ukrainian drones that had been smuggled into Russia struck air bases deep inside Russia, damaging or destroying at least a dozenwarplanes, including long-range strategic bombers. I am guessing that this daring surprise attack cost Ukraine something closer to a big shopping spree at Best Buy than anything approaching the roughly $80 million price of a single Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jet in Israel’s fleet.’
(…)
‘If you are praying person, pray that everything you know about this region, its current leaders and the poisonous legacy of the Gaza war will be overcome — because somehow the key players all realize that this really is the last train to somewhere decent and the next one, and all those ever after, will be nonstops to the gates of hell.’
Read the article here.
You have to admire this man for his aphorisms. I’m not sure if Netanyahu is honest when he talks to his people, but alas, the aphorism might survive Bibi.
Perhaps the Gaza war will end before the war in Ukraine.
The drone as the weapon of the poor. Wait till militias will fly their own drones.
There Friedman is absolutely right. The suicide attacks are the past, the drones are the present and the future.