The US-Israel ‘might makes right’ agenda: erase Palestine and the ‘axis of resistance’
In the words of Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff of the Israeli army, the US and Israel worked together with “unprecedented cooperation” over months to plan what is called ‘Operation Roaring Lion’ in Israel and ‘Operation Epic Fury’ by the US. The Ramadan ‘regime change’ attack on the sovereign nation of Iran that was launched on Feb. 28 while indirect negotiations between the US and Iran were supposedly ongoing is, as a ‘war of choice,’ a blatant violation of the UN Charter. Within hours, the military strikes had reportedly killed more than 100 elementary school children in southern Iran. Before the day was over the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been confirmed by Iran’s state media.
The US Constitution gives Congress the sole power “to declare War.” But that power has been highly contested and diluted by the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which “requires that the President shall in every possible instance consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities” or, at the very least, report in writing to Congress within 48 hours of committing troops to a military operation. Trump, who longs to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, has repeatedly used or threatened military force since re-gaining the White House without consulting Congress. His administration said top House and Senate leaders had been briefed before the Iran attack.
The Board of Peace holds inaugural meeting
It is no surprise that in his flagrantly racist, lie-strewn State of the Union address on Feb. 24 President Trump boasted that he “ended eight wars” during his first 10 months in office. But his failure to give the Board of Peace so much as a mention during the marathon speech is surprising since it had held its first working meeting the previous week, with signs of what some would consider ‘progress’ that he could trumpet.
On Feb. 19, the Board of Peace convened at the ‘Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace’, the new name for the US Institute of Peace, an independent non profit organization that the president had seized control of a year ago and then shut down. Representatives from 47 countries were present, 27 of which were Board of Peace members: Argentine President Javier Milei, Paraguayan President Santiago Pena, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev , Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, Emirati Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, Belarus Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan participated in this convocation of autocrats, while Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK were among the countries sending observers. There were no Palestinians present at the meeting.
Trump took the opportunity to tell the gathering that the authoritarian Hungarian leader Orbán had his “complete and total endorsement” for the country’s April parliamentary election. He also announced that the US would give $10 billion to the Board of Peace, funds which do not appear to have been approved by Congress.
What will they be used for? Some may be spent on the 350-acre military base in southern Gaza described in leaked documents as being “ringed by 26 trailer-mounted armored watchtowers,” with barbed wire enclosing “a small arms range, bunkers, and a warehouse for military equipment for operations.” Indonesia, Morocco, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and Albania agreed to send soldiers for the ‘International Stabilization Force,’ which would be headed by US Special Operations Commander Major General Jasper Jeffers.
A further $7 billion for the reconstruction of Gaza was pledged by Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. On Feb. 22, Israel declared there was “no reason” for it to contribute to rebuild what it had destroyed. (The amount it has spent to annihilate Gaza is detailed here). It appears that Trump will personally control the contributions made to the Board of Peace. Three days earlier, when the pledged sum was $5 billion, he told the New York Post that the money would go towards “making Gaza happen” and some would be sent “to other areas of the world that can, you know, where peace can be brought about.”
Descriptions of Gaza as a prime investment opportunity were presented by billionaire Board of Peace member Marc Rowen (who features in the Epstein files) while another billionaire Board member, Israeli-Cypriot Yakir Gabay, stated that the coast of Gaza could be “developed as a new Mediterranean Riviera with 200 hotels and potential islands.” Israeli high tech businessman Liran Tancman, an advisor to Jared Kushner, outlined a future economy for Gaza built around artificial intelligence.
The emerging dystopia in Gaza
In the words of Palestinian poet Nour ElAssy, under the Board of Peace “Gaza becomes a prototype for a new international colonial method of dealing with unwanted populations, not through the language of formal annexation or explicit ethnic cleansing, but through layers of administration, investment, and control – a polished form of domination designed to look like peace.”
What will this mean for Gaza’s residents? According to leaked documents from the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) obtained by Drop Site News, Palestinians living in what the CMCC calls ‘Gaza First Planned Community’ will be subjected to an extensive surveillance apparatus that will include monitoring not just their movements and communications, but all their financial transactions through Israeli-controlled electronic wallets that will replace the cash-based economy.
As Drop Site’s Jeremy Scahill toldDemocracy Now! on Feb. 20, “What Palestinians in Gaza are being faced with is you either fully bend the knee and accept a colonial apartheid regime as your overseer, that you accept a new reality as dystopian plantation workers on Jared Kushner’s real estate project, or we’re going to kill you. That is what is being said here. So, the U.S. has plans to build a huge military base there for their international occupation force. The Israelis are in control of nearly 60% of Gaza in the east of the strip. They don’t seem to have any intent of leaving. You have a reeducation program that Israel’s foreign minister spoke of at this so-called Board of Peace meeting yesterday and said that it begins with disarmament and demilitarization and then deradicalization. So if you are a Palestinian family, what they’re saying to you is your children need to be raised to accept that Zionism is going to dominate their lives now, that a colonial apartheid regime is going to dominate your lives now, and if you dare think otherwise we erase you from the earth.”
Suffering and solidarity in Gaza
This Ramadan, as Gaza resident Majdoleen Abu Assi writes in The Guardian, “our hands are joined in solidarity that rises above hunger.” In Gaza, she says, “hope is not a feeling. It is a decision…I feel a flicker of tranquility. Not because the world is just or we can see an end to our suffering, but because we are still here, weaving hope from threads of ruin. We fast, we pray and we remain – not out of habit, but as an act of reclaiming our souls from the wreckage.”
Meanwhile, bouts of flooding still swamp tented encampments and there is no end to the killingmeted out by missile-firing Israeli drones, warplanes, armored vehicles and gunboats. At least 628 people have been killed in Gaza during the sham ceasefire. Some 40,000 children have now lost one or both parents according to UNICEF, and research appearing in The Lancet Global Health found that the Gaza death toll is considerably higher than official figures suggest. Israel’s assertions that it is eliminating ‘terrorists’ are largely unchallenged, even as a meticulous Earshot and Forensic Architecture investigation of the massacre of 15 medical aid workers on March 23, 2025 exposes how “the Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times,” piling lie upon lie. On Feb. 17, Staff Sgt. Ori Yafe was shot dead by the army “after he was mistakenly identified as a terrorist” during the search of a “suspicious building,” bringing to 925 the number of Israeli soldiers killed since Oct. 7, 2023.
Under Trump’s ‘Peace Plan’ 600 trucks of humanitarian aid were supposed to enter Gaza every day, but that number has averaged about 260 per day, with deliveries of fuel only a fraction of what had been agreed to. According to Drop Site News, aid deliveries are already being tracked by the private company Palantir Technologies, operating out of the CMCC.
On March 1, the 37 humanitarian aid groups that have been banned by Israel because they did not turn over information about their local staff were supposed to suspend their operations in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank. But on Feb. 27, after 17 of them had petitioned the Israeli high court, the court issued an interim injunction allowing all the groups to operate until the case was given a full judicial review.
Twenty-seven groups, most with little or no humanitarian experience, have been cleared to work in Gaza. According to a piece in The New Humanitarian, several of them are interlinked groups that belong to “the Helping Hand Global Forum (HHGF), an Israeli-based umbrella organization for mostly evangelical Christian international charities” working in Israel, including in West Bank settlements. Some that are now authorized to bring food trucks into Gaza have delivered supplies to the Israeli proxy Abu Shabab militia east of the ‘yellow line’ and to the army, whose talking points they often reproduce. Some worked with the murderous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in 2025.
If international NGOs are indeed banished after the High Court makes its final ruling, Gaza will lose vital witnesses to army atrocities, even as its journalists continue to be targeted for death. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 89 journalists were killed by Israel last year – two thirds of the total killed around the world. Most were from Gaza.
Israel’s biblical land claim
On Feb. 15, the government endorsed a Smotrich-Levin-Katz proposal to register large areas of the West Bank as ‘state property’ for the first time since 1967. In the words of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch, this is a “mega land grab” that enables Israel to take over a large part of the more than 60% of the West Bank that makes up Area C. If Palestinians cannot prove ownership of the land on which they and their ancestors have been living for decades or centuries, or if they could be found to have violated the ‘Absentees Property Law’ by being absent from their homes between Nov. 29, 1947 and the end of the 1948 war, their land could be taken from them by the state.
On Feb. 17, the UN missions of 85 countries in addition to the Arab League and the EU condemned Israel’s action even as Finance Minister Smotrich said he would be “encouraging the migration” of Palestinians from the West Bank.
Three days later, podcaster Tucker Carlson posted an interview he had conducted in Ben Gurion Airport with Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel. Carlson asked Huckabee about the biblical verse Genesis 15 in which God promised Abraham that his descendants would receive land “from the Euphrates to the Nile, I think. And that would include basically the entire Middle East. That would be the Levant. So that would be Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. It would also be big parts of Saudi Arabia and Iraq.”
Huckabee said, “I’m not sure it would go that far, but it would be a big piece of land.” He added: "But this particular area that we're talking about now – Israel is a land that God gave through Abraham to a people that he chose. It was a people, a place, and a purpose." When asked by Carlson, "Does Israel have the right to that land?" Huckabee responded: "It would be fine if they took it all."
14 countries in the region along with the League of Arab States, the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation immediately condemned the Huckabee statement, warning that “the continuation of Israel’s expansionist policies and unlawful measures will only inflame violence and conflict in the region.”
But Yair Lapid, the opposition ‘liberal’ leader of the secular-leaning Yesh Atid party, agreed with Huckabee. He told a Feb. 23 press conference that “Yesh Atid’s position is as follows: Zionism is based on the bible. Our mandate of the land of Israel is biblical. The biblical borders of Israel are clear…Beyond the practical considerations, I believe that our ownership deed over the land of Israel is the bible, therefore the borders are the biblical borders.”
US goes along with Israel’s playbook
Israel is now preparing the ground for a 300-mile barrier running from the Golan Heights to the Red Sea which will put a large section of the Jordan Valley – the agricultural heartland of the West Bank - off limits to Palestinians. While brutal settler attacks around the West Bank continue to drive Palestinians from their homes and a new settlement plan for the Qalandia refugee camp - Kufr Aqab area near Ramallah threatens to displace tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel shrugged off the report on ethnic cleansing that had been released on Feb. 16 by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, declaring that it was part of “a vicious campaign of demonization and disinformation against the State of Israel.”
The US meanwhile seems undisturbed by West Bank developments, including the killing by settlers of a 19-year-old Palestinian American, Nasrallah Abu Siyam, who was shot dead in the village of Mukhmas on Feb. 18. According to the organization DAWN, Abu Siyam is the 14thAmerican to be killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers since 2003, and in no instance has Israel held anyone criminally accountable. DAWN has urged the US government to conduct its own investigation of Abu Siyam’s slaying. But the US has never challenged Israel’s investigations of any of the murders of Americans, ensuring the killers total immunity.
Although Trump on Feb. 10 said he opposed the steps Israel was taking to annex the West Bank, he has no problem giving legitimacy to Israeli settlements. On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that beginning with Efrat, the US embassy would for the first time provide consular services within West Bank settlements where tens of thousands of Israeli-Americans live.
What the mainstream media leaves out
The results of a Feb. 27 Gallup poll indicate that among Americans Israel’s favorability is at a record low, and that more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. What would that trajectory look like if the mainstream media had been reporting on Israel’s rolein pressing Trump for a war in Iran and its more than 1,600 ‘ceasefire’ violations? What if it widened its focus on the newly-released Epstein files and, like Drop Site News, reported that the Israeli government had installed elaborate surveillance equipment at the East 66th Street Manhattan apartment controlled by Epstein where former Israeli Prime Minister Barak, other Epstein contacts and “under age models” were frequent guests?
What if it showcased the actual voice and findings of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese? The vicious defamation campaign directed at her may have swayed heads of stateanxious to keep on the right side of the US and preserve Israel’s impunity. But academics, lawyers, cultural figures and other civil society groups have strongly supported her, and she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. On Feb. 26, her husband and daughter sued the White House, claiming that the sanctions leveled against her by the US government in July 2025 violated her First Amendment rights and had a deleterious impact on their family life.
Words she wrote in her report dated Oct. 20, 2025 urgently need to be amplified today:
“The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
