This Israeli Government Is Not US Ally — Dear President Trump
Addressing a conference on May 5 sponsored by the religious Zionist newspaper B’Sheva — Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister, spoke like a man who couldn’t care less what you think Smotrich said
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“We’re occupying Gaza to stay” “There will be no more entering and leaving”
The local population will be squeezed into a less than a quarter of the Gaza Strip
As the Haaretz military expert Amos Harel noted,
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“Since the army will try to minimize casualties, analysts expect it to use particularly aggressive force that will lead to extensive damage to Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure”
“The displacement of the population to the areas of the humanitarian camps, combined with the ongoing shortage of food and medicine, could lead to further mass deaths of civilians … More Israeli leaders and officers could face personal legal proceedings against them”
Indeed, this strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt
Those two pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure both fear that Netanyahu aims to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into their countries which would surely foment instability that would spill over their borders even if Palestinians themselves did not
This hurts us in other ways
As Hans Wechsel, a former senior policy adviser to US Central Command, put it to me,
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“The more hopeless things seem for Palestinian aspirations, the less readiness there will be in the region to expand the US-Arab-Israeli security integration that could have nailed down long-term advantages over Iran and China — and without requiring nearly as many US military resources in the region to sustain”
