Trump’s Exemplary Gaza Plan

Trump’s Exemplary Gaza Plan

Jim Kavanagh 

Donald Trump has presented the world with a spectacular plan to help the people of Gaza. He will take control of the strip and move all the residents of the demolished, unlivable territory to nice safe homes in other countries.

Now, many people, including myself, correctly denounce this plan as outright, egregious, ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Not to mention unhinged. And so it is.

pic.twitter.com/JivikzDa3v

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2025

And what is their plan instead?

Unfortunately, most of the people now denouncing this plan have been part of that very plan, helping to carry it out all along. What were Israel and US government under the Biden administration doing by providing all the bombs and weapons that destroyed Gaza and killed many tens of thousands of Gazans over the past 15 months? What were the US and western media doing when they repeated the fake Israeli narrative and supported that killing and demolition in a myriad of explicit and implicit ways? What were all the U.S. and European politicians doing who welcomed Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and praised the Zionist project that was carrying out that killing and demolition for the past 15 months? What plan did they think Israel and the U.S. were executing?

Now here comes Donald Trump, being crudely blatant, forgoing all the complex "peace process," "two-state" mumbo-jumbo, under which sanctimonious Western liberals pretend that they don’t know, and are not supporting, the criminal ethnic-cleansing project that Zionism is in Gaza. Trump is telling us that the U.S., now speaking in the same voice as Israel has been using 77 years, is a full-on, leading partner in the Zionist project of erasing the Palestinian people. It’s an exemplary case of stripping the supercilious, hypocritical lipstick from the U.S/Zionist pig. His discourse, in other words, undermines the soft-power face of U.S. imperialism in favor of identification with the utterly-indifferent-to-“soft power” Zionist project.

Gaza, Trump says, is “right now a demolition site,…a hellhole…the people…have been absolutely destroyed…they are living in hell.” True, as he should know, since every U.S. government, including his, has participated in making it so—as he himself admits: “It's just terrible. And that includes on the American side, by the way. We should have never gone in there a long time ago, spent trillions of dollars and created so much death. So it includes Americans.”

So, then, why not “give people a chance at life...a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony”? Let’s have Jordan and Egypt “open their hearts and…give us the kind of land that we need to get this done.” Because there is no other way: “they've tried the other…for decades and decades and decades. It's not going to work. It didn't work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history…you just can't let it keep repeating itself.”

Trump is here acknowledging the purpose and unity of the US-Israel Zionist project. He is saying, in effect: Gaza has been destroyed and made unlivable, by us along with the Israelis, and the necessary, as well as most humanitarian, result is to expel the Gazan people, whose homeland aspirations, we all assume, are irrelevant to all the important people. We’ll take that project over and finish it for the Israelis.

As I’ve said for over a year, the Israel plan in Gaza has always been to kill or expel the Palestinians—preferably “all of them,” as Trump said, but a great majority will do, for a start. For more than a year. Israel has been saying to the world quite clearly: “See us. We’re killing them all. We don’t care whether you call it ‘genocide’ or not. We have impunity from the U.S. If you’re so concerned for them and want us to stop killing them, and if you’re not going to make us stop, take them away. Otherwise, bleat your outrage and watch us keep killing them.”  The Biden administration quietly helped the plan, trying  to get Egypt to accept Gazan “refugees” in exchange for debt relief.

Everybody saw that and knew depopulation was Israel’s essential plan for Gaza. Western politicians and media pretended they didn’t, thereby enabling it. Donald Trump has made that pretense impossible anymore. He has now explicitly embraced that plan as President of the United States, adding the twist that the U.S. will “take over” the Gaza Strip and take charge of implementing the plan.

So now various Western politicians and media must express outrage. A “violation of international law,”  “a straightforward crime against humanity,” cry Western ethicists.  Yup, as was the establishment of Israel via the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli war of territorial conquest of 1967, the killings and maimings of Great March of Return protestors in 2018, the repeated previous Israeli demolishment bombing campaigns of Gaza, et. al.

It's easy to denounce Trump’s plan. But what are those outraged Western politicians and media going to do about it that’s different from what they did about the same plan they’ve been accepting for 15 months? What plan do they have that will put an end to the present and future “straightforward crimes against humanity” visited upon the Palestinians of Gaza, and make the Strip decently livable for them?

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Joe Biden’s Marxism

Jim Kavanagh

After all the ridiculous right-wing accusations that Democratic politicians like Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are “socialists” or “communists” or “Marxists,” we might as well take the opportunity to extract the lesson in Marxism implied in Joe Biden’s farewell address.

By way of preface, I’ll point out that accusing political opponents of being “Marxist” did not start in the era of Barack Obama and did not always come from the Republican right. One of the strangest such incidents occurred during a 1976 presidential debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in which implications of Marxism were unexpectedly used to smack down an opponent. In trying to defend the recent Republican unemployment record, Ford demurred that unemployment during previous Democratic administrations was lower because more men were in the army fighting the Vietnam War: “I must remind him [Carter] that we’re at peace and during the period that he brags about unemployment being low, the United States was at war.”

To which Carter replied that Ford was “insinuating that ...unemployment could only be held down when this country is at war. Karl Marx said that the free enterprise system in a democracy can only continue to exist when they are at war or preparing far [sic] war. Karl Marx was the grandfather of Communism. I don’t agree with that statement. I hope Mr. Ford doesn’t either.”

Gerald Ford had indeed echoed the argument of Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, in Monopoly Capital, that roughly the same proportion of the workforce was either in the military, unemployed, or dependent on welfare in the 1960s as during the Great Depression, with the difference that a higher percentage were in the military in the 60s. Carter apparently recognized this source, and said—not that that Ford’s statement was false, but. essentially: “That’s a Marxist argument, so it can’t be entertained. As I’m sure Mr. Ford will agree.” Mic drop, American style.

Well, I’ll take the occasion to do a reverse Jimmy Carter, drawing out the Marxist implications in this excerpt from Biden’s farewell speech in order not to dismiss but to take them seriously:

That’s why in my farewell address tonight, I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before.

More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.

Actually, Joe, an oligarchy has taken shape in America. a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people.”  Yes, “we’ve seen it before,” and neither the “trust busters” of over a century ago nor the New Deal and post-war policies ended that oligarchy, although the latter did for a while ameliorate its effects.

Jimmy Carter's Legacy

Jimmy Carter’s Legacy

Jim Kavanagh

I was part of the Carter Center’s election observation missions in Palestine (1996 & 2006) and Nigeria (1999), and I met Jimmy Carter personally. He was, in all my interactions with him, a very nice man. He impressed me as sincere in his humanistic Christianity and, above all, in his love and respect for his wife, Rosalynn. There were a lot of problems in the 1996 Palestinian election that caused many of us to urge him not to make a statement flatly endorsing it as “free and fair,” and it was Rosalynn who successfully insisted that he make a more nuanced statement, incorporating our concerns. That relationship with Rosalynn, along with his surprising passion for wild turkey hunting (I mean going on about it at great length and in great detail) certainly humanized him for me.

Of course, personal impressions do not determine political effects. On the occasion of his death, Carter is best known by most Americans for his "post-presidency,” which shines in contrast with the self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement of other ex-presidents.  Foregoing vanity “library” projects and collections of six-figure speaking fees in favor of physical labor for Habit for Humanity, respected international election and health work via the Carter Center (the latter less well-known but central to its mission), speaking forthrightly about Israeli apartheid, and meeting with Palestinian resistance groups like Hamas made him into our most admired ex-president.

His relative honesty about Palestine-Israel is the strongest lingering “political” trait associated with him, and one for which he was shunned by the Democratic Party, including Obama, who forbade him from speaking at the 2008 Democratic convention on the advice of Alan Dershowitz—though you’re not likely to hear that during the liberal mainstream media encomia today. Nor are you likely to hear much about his accurately describing the U.S. as an “oligarchy with unlimited bribery.”

Swallowing Syria

Swallowing Syria
Jim Kavanagh

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the summit of Mt. Hermon in Syria, Dec 17, 2024. (Photo: Screenshot/GPO)

I am finding it very hard to swallow the disaster that has occurred in Syria, or to digest its consequences. It makes me sick.

Though it foresaw the looming disaster, my last article was written just before the flight of Assad and the fall of Damascus, and it was still possible to imagine there might be another out to be played. Well, it’s now, definitely, game over, and there’s no denying who won and who lost. The result is depressing and demoralizing.

To reprise what I said in that article, “If Now that Syria is lost to the Erdogan-sponsored Jihadi forces, Russia, Iran, Lebanon, the Axis of Resistance, and the Palestinian people will have lost something very important, something that cannot be recovered without a…more deadly fight than would have been required to prevent the loss.” Correspondingly, US imperialism, Zionism, and Turkish neo-Ottomanism have won a strategic geopolitical victory that gives them advantages that will be hard to overcome.

Since 2012, I’ve written at least 17 articles about the vicious “multiple, concentric proxy war” the US, Israel, Turkey, and the Gulf States (especially Qatar), with their jihadi pawns, have waged to destroy the Syrian state. By 2015, it had become “the most expensive US covert action program in history.” Along with many others, I critiqued and attacked the Axis of Chaos’s arrogant and insouciant destruction of a country and a region, creating hundreds of thousands of casualties and refugees, destroying ancient and vibrant cities and towns, replacing secular pluralism with head-chopping takfiri sectarianism—all to eliminate a polity independent of and resistant to U.S. imperialism, Zionist colonialism, and Turkish ambition. I and many others had been glad to see that project interrupted by a Russian intervention, and, even though most of us knew that it was not stopped, we were too complacent about the ongoing destructive effects of the ongoing U.S. occupation and sanctions (per US thug Diana Stroul) and way too complacent about the persistence and armament of the Turkish-controlled jihadi redoubt in Idlib.

Over the last couple of years, many of us focused on the waning hard and soft power of U.S. imperialism in relation to the rising military power of Russia and China and their allied economic bloc in BRICS, as well as to the waning of Zionism’s hard and soft power in relation to the rising power of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Axis of Resistance and in relation to the world’s (especially the world’s youth) rising understanding of the illegitimacy of Zionist colonialism.

All these factors are still true and in play, but we have foolishly underestimated how strong, tenacious, and diverse the Zio-imperialist team is, and we have to recognize that. We didn’t see him as the team slugger, but, in Syria, Erdogan came in and hit a walk-off home run. And we didn’t even know what inning we were in. It’s going to be a long, hard season.

Here’s where we now stand, what we have to accept:

Syria is gone. The “nation” of Syria exists only as a wished-for abstraction; it is no longer, and will never again be, the geopolitical polity that it was. It is now a territory divided into sectarian—ethnic and religious—cantons, with no central administration or military power, subject to the political and military whims of actual states, especially the United States, Israel, and Turkey, who planned and executed that outcome.

The current “leadership” in Syria is comprised of the rebranded Al-Qaeda, now named Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani. As I’m writing, Golani is still a “terrorist” with a USG $10-million-dollar bounty on his head, although he’s also meeting with Western media personalities and cabinet officials, who are frantically rebranding him. Haircut, beard trim, new suit, and even a new name, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and voila, the old ISIS/al-Qaeda “terrorist” becomes an internationally respected, diversity-loving, moderate rebel.

In fact, the HTS/al-Golani-al-Sharaa “leadership” controls nothing. Its job, that it’s doing very well, is to stand down and allow Israel to bomb the former country over 800 times to destroy every bit of the former Syria’s military and its research facilities, to take its main water resources,  and to invade, seize, and settle all the former Syrian territory it wants. HTS’s job is to allow its immediate puppet master, Erdogan, to remind the world that, if it weren’t for that pesky World War a hundred years ago, Aleppo and Damascus would be part of Turkey. HTS’s job is to “shift” the former Syria into a full “free-market” economy so that US and European capital can buy up all its assets. And HTS/Golani has no more important job than constantly to proclaim that their new regime has no quarrel with Israel or the West, and will peacefully accommodate whatever the fuck Israel, or Turkey or the US/Blackrock want to do with the corpse of Syria. It makes me sick.

Wild Turkey: Syria’s Blindside

Wild Turkey: Syria’s Blindside
Jim Kavanagh

The sudden jihadi offensive in Syria is a disaster. It is, first of all, a disaster for the Syrian people. It's also a disaster for the Palestinian people, Hezbollah, Iran, and the entire axis of anti-Zionist resistance. And it's a disaster for Russia (and China) and the project of replacing unipolar American hegemony with multipolarity based on a new BRICS-based global political economy.

It's a disaster that challenges all the parties involved to recognize that what they might have more comfortably treated as parallel but separate conflicts are elements of one big, unavoidable war that is going to require new strategies from each and from all of them together—strategies that reconcile the interests of each with the interests of all. If that is possible.

It does no good to downplay the disaster-in-progress in Syria. In short order—what can aptly be called a blitzkrieg—jihadi forces have taken control of Aleppo, a city of over 2 million people and one of the oldest continuously habited cities in the world, and Hama, a city of a million people, with—and this is the crucial point—no significant resistance from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

We can comfort ourselves by saying it’s a tactical retreat and the Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi PMU cavalries are on the way. These are potentially formidable forces, and we all saw how Russia and Hezbollah helped the SAA defeat what seemed an unstoppable jihadi offensive from 2011 to 2019.

But, a) “Helped” is the operative word.  The SAA fought like hell during that time, resisting every assault from a panoply of forces supported by the U.S., Israel, NATO, and Gulf monarchies, until Russia and Hezbollah came in and turned the tide. This time, the SAA melted away from two major Syrian cities in a week, despite knowing that the Idlib jihadis were arming up for an offensive. As I write, the jihadis are threatening Homs and have the momentum. There may not be enough time for Russian, and/or Iranian, and/or Iraqi forces to assemble and organize an effective defense, let alone counteroffensive, before Damascus is breached. Something has gone seriously wrong with the SAA, whether complacence, incompetence, and/or corruption (per Alexander Mercouris, who reports that the SAA Aleppo contingent simply defected), and foreign forces cannot replace what was a disciplined, dedicated SAA. If Assad needs an extended commitment of masses of foreign troops (which Russia never supplied) to stop the jihadis, Assad is toast. Russia and Iran can help Syria; turning it into a protectorate of Russia or Iran is another thing entirely.