Hamas guards covered her with their own bodies to save her from Israeli bombardments, an Israeli woman recently released from captivity by the Gazan resistance militia, has told news media. In a video interview circulated worldwide, the freed Israeli said she had been protected by her guards during many intensive Israeli bombings on the locality she had been held since capture in October 2023.
Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) which has major medical aid operations in Palestine, has said in a public statement last week that the severity of the infrastructure destruction by Israel in Gaza had made the Strip “almost uninhabitable”. The world-famous medical aid charity had in December last year, issued a study report on Gaza formally accusing Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing with its military offensives in the seaside Strip.
With the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza still holding, aid agencies studying the immense damage and recovery needs, are reporting their “shock” and “disbelief” at the scale of death and destruction in this tiny, long-besieged, ‘Strip’ of territory.
Controversial statements
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is enjoying attracting worldwide attention in this first fortnight of his second Presidency with his litany of controversial statements on key global issues. Some of these Presidential statements are typical Trumpian vacuity, but others are for real.
One can judge the truth or vacuity of a Trumpian Presidential statement by the degree and rapidity of its retraction by other administration officers and by any concrete actions initiated. Public reactions, domestic or foreign, against such pronouncements do not have much significance for Washington because any US pronouncement is one made after internal processing. Reactions to public postures are already factored in.
In any case, pronouncements are made with all the authority of the world’s most powerful State which has the capacity to globally enforce its decisions irrespective of global or domestic opinion.
Superpowers and their well-armed proxy states such as Israel, are very thick skinned and simply plant their jackboots and drop their 1000 kg munitions wherever their geopolitical inclinations take them. Like Iraq (twice in a decade with over half a million Iraqis dead), nearly three decades in Afghanistan, Libya and Syria simply cannibalised, and Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen ….the list is long. Others are just threatened or vilified simply to affirm bravado to the electorate.
President Trump has threatened to annex Canada (as the 51st State), buy up Greenland from Denmark (its frozen wastelands rich in minerals and already hosting a key US Arctic base) and militarily re-colonise the Panama Canal, which was ceded to Panama during President Jimmy Carter’s tenure.
The White House’ Greenland offer echoes the actual (and infamous) ‘Louisiana Purchase’ by Washington, from France in 1803, of some two million sq. km. of the vast, then thinly-populated, American hinterland for just US$ 15 million. Alaska was purchased from Russia for even less – just US$ 7.2 million in 1867. Incidentally, Alaska has no land border with the Lower 48 States – if travelling by car, one has to go through Canada to enter Alaska. Making Canada the 51st State will erase this difficulty.
The Louisiana Purchase doubled the ‘official’ US territory and gave access to the rest of the central North American continent right up to the Pacific Ocean. The several millions of Native or First Nation peoples living there were neither consulted nor even allowed to further occupy those vast stretches of their homeland after Washington took over.
Burning narcissism
The Greenland, Panama and Canada pronouncements caused much uproar which was great for the Trump ego, given the huge inferiority complex and consequent unconscious self-denial. That self-denial is the root of The Donald’s burning narcissism that constantly seeks affirmation of existence (as any psychologist will explain).
With attention won, Trump then moved to his serious agenda, guided as he is by his extreme Right-wing coterie. After a decade on the Trump political bandwagon, those political puppet-masters (some of them merely puppets of bigger corporate puppet masters) are now settling into strategic bureaucratic points in the White House.
Readers are invited to web check little known hard Right intellectuals such as Russel Vought, president of the Centre for Renewing American and its Research Director, Micah Meadowcroft. These are the fascistic intellectuals who gravitate to the centre of power with their totalitarian agendas, and, in the American case, dangerously imperial agendas.
Their now-exposed ‘Project 2025’ is now entrenched in the Washington system and liberal analysts are already identifying the action points in Trump’s many White House executive orders that are key items in Project 2025, although Trump denied any knowledge of it during the campaign trail.
These include the shutdown of USAID, cannibalising of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Education Department, and Department of Health.
The re-organising of the FBI and DOJ aims at emasculating these agencies’ surveillance and countering of Rightwing extremist groups including the many small fascist armed militia, allowing them to flourish.
In the case of Nazi Germany, such intelligentsia such as Alber Speer, Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Adolf Eichman, and many other Nazi intelligentsia literally built the Nazi Reich out of the barely established post-First World War liberal German State. They created the Nazi war economy and, also, the racial extermination industry.
The difference with Washington today is that the Nazi movement had a strongly focused and strategically thinking leader whose political practise was certainly not individualist political enterprise nor purely narcissistic. The Nazi Movement unified under Hitler and the NSDAP and was successful in actually strengthening the imperialistic German State.
Political leadership
The American hard Right today is not led by President Trump or even any other coordinated political leadership – thankfully for the American people and the world. These various Rightwing think tanks and ‘intellectuals’ (some being weirdos with little intellect) never truly coordinated and are more separate factions of extremists with their own selfish group agendas and financed by and representing various discrete business faction agendas.
Thus Project 2025 has little to do with the agendas of immensely powerful mega corporates (and tech moguls like Elon Musk who leads the opaque Department of Government Efficiency) and giant industry sector interests, which have their own, far more sophisticated and genuinely imperialistic, politico-economic agendas.
The pseudo liberal main political parties (Democratic and Republican Parties), with their own elite think tanks, are part of this much bigger US Establishment.
How much the new ‘rebel’ Rightwing can go in fulfilling its mix of hairbrained and semi-sophisticated ‘reform’ agendas depends partly on how much serious damage they cause to the US and how soon the larger system reacts to modulate this adventurism. These columns will continue to monitor these inner politics of the sole superpower.
Trump did make two pronouncements that not only caused an international stir but seem to have a clear geopolitical intent. These are, firstly, Washington’s initiative to end the Ukraine War and, secondly, a public declaration of intent of ethnic cleansing of Gaza in the aftermath of the January 19 Ceasefire.
Trump seemed to have followed the advice of American Zionist forces and their Israeli friends, when he began to strongly advocate the emptying of the Gaza Strip of its nearly three million population and a direct US role in the ‘redevelopment’ of the Strip. Unmentioned is the replacement of Gaza’s current indigenous Palestinian population with Israeli Jewish settlers and other foreigners. This, after all, has been a long-term goal of the Israeli State ever since it seized the Gaza Strip from Egyptian control – the Strip having been legally transferred to Egypt by the then colonial occupier, the UK, in the 1940s.
Indeed, when Israeli seized the Strip from Egypt in its internationally-condemned 1967 invasions, Tel Aviv began settling Israelis in a series of settlements along the Strip’s central coastline, thereby dividing the resident Palestinian population into Northern and Southern enclaves. These settlements were later withdrawn.
Psychological pressure
But the global and regional reaction to Trump’s ‘Gaza plan’ is so strong, that it is highly unlikely to be implemented. But it lends the typical psychological pressure of an ‘maximum’ demand to tilt the post-war (if any) Gaza recovery in Israel’s favour and limits the expected Arab oil wealth that must finance the Strip’s recovery.
The Arab and Muslim States and even many US allies such as UK and Germany have already summarily rejected the Trump plan. Any direct US intervention in Gaza runs counter to the very inward-looking and non-interventionist policies (“America First”) of the ruling Republican Party, its popular MAGA base and also even the outlook of the hard Right factions around President Trump.
If the Gazan plan is also not much of a starter, the Ukraine ‘peace’ plan has already started. To Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s shock, he found that President Trump had already held a nearly two hours’ long phone chat with Russian President Vladimir Putin. And then Trump called Zelensky and probably told him the ‘real deal’.
In any case the US Administration’s Defence and State Secretaries were already publicly declaring that not only would Ukraine have to forget NATO membership but also give up chunks of territory in any ending of the War. This would essentially mean that Ukraine will not be able to go back to the pre-2014 borders, when Russia annexed Crimea. It would mean that the War would end mostly on Russia’s terms.
Kyiv has no choice because its defence of its motherland is entirely dependent on Western arms and funds.
NATO is most likely to heave an opportunistic sigh of relief and follow Washington’s line, even if grumbling darkly.
The Ukraine War ‘deal’ is directly in line with the new US administration’s inward-looking policies. How much such a frog-in-the-well attitude will ease other war-like American geopolitics elsewhere remains to be seen.
