The Gaza 'war' was a lie, just like the ceasefire. Trump just told you so

14 min read JONATHAN COOK

JONATHAN COOK

During Netanyahu's visit, Trump dropped Washington's sugar coating over Israel's 15-month genocidal destruction of Gaza. It was always about ethnic cleansing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House this week broke the mask of 16 months of gaslighting by Western leaders and the entire Western establishment media. US President Donald Trump has finally stopped sugar-coating Israel's genocidal destruction of Gaza.

It was always, he told us, a massacre made in the USA. In his words, Washington will now “take over” Gaza and develop it. And the aim of the massacre was always ethnic cleansing.

The Palestinians, he said, would be “settled” in a place where they would not have to be “worried about dying every day” – that is, killed by Israel with US-supplied bombs.

Gaza, meanwhile, would become the “Riviera of the Middle East,” with the “people of the world” – meaning wealthy whites like himself – living in luxury beachfront properties instead.

If the US “owns” Gaza, as Trump insists, it will also own Gaza’s territorial waters, where there happen to be fabulous quantities of untapped gas to enrich the enclave’s new “owner.” Of course, the Palestinians have never been allowed to exploit their gas fields.

Trump may even have inadvertently let slip the true death toll inflicted by Israel’s rampage. He referred to “all of them, there are 1,7 million or maybe 1,8 million people” who have been forced to leave Gaza.

The population count before October 7, 2023 was between 2,2 and 2,3 million. Where are the other half million Palestinians? Under the rubble? In unmarked graves? Eaten by wild dogs? Vaporized by 2.000-pound American bombs?

Demolition party

Trump presented his ethnic cleansing plan as if he had the interests of the Palestinians in mind. As if he were saving them from a disaster-prone seismic zone, not from a genocidal neighbor he considers Washington's closest ally.

His comments were greeted with shock and horror in Western and Arab capitals, with everyone distancing themselves from his blatant support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza's population.

But these are the same leaders who remained silent during the 15 months in which Israel razed homes, hospitals, schools, universities, libraries, government buildings, mosques, churches and bakeries in Gaza.

They then spoke of Israel's right to "defend itself," even though Israel caused so much damage that the United Nations warned it would take up to 80 years to rebuild the territory — four generations.

What did they think would happen at the end of the race of destruction that they had orchestrated and fully supported? Did they imagine that the people of Gaza could survive for years without homes, hospitals, schools, water supply systems or electricity?

They knew this was the outcome: destitute Palestinians would risk dying in the ruins or be forced to leave.

And Western politicians not only let it happen, they told us it was “proportionate,” that it was necessary. They slandered anyone who dissented, anyone who called for a ceasefire, anyone who took part in a protest march, as being anti-Semitic and hating Jews.

In the United States and elsewhere, students — many of them Jewish — staged mass protests on their campuses. In response, university administrations sent in riot police, who beat them. Universities then expelled the student organizers and denied them their degrees.

And yet Western politicians and media think that now is the time to express their shock at Trump's remarks?

They keep dying

Trump's brutal honesty only underscores the depth of the mendacity of the preceding 16 months. After all, who didn't understand that the three-phase ceasefire in Gaza, which came into effect on January 19, was also a lie?

It was a lie even before the ink dried on the page.

It was a lie because the ceasefire was officially intended not only to create a pause in the bloodshed. It was also intended to mitigate the damage to the civilian population, put an end to hostilities and lead to the reconstruction of Gaza.

None of that will happen, at least not for the Palestinians, as Trump has made clear.

Despite its claims, it is clear that Israel has not stopped firing munitions into Gaza. It has continued to kill and maim Palestinians, including children, even though the carpet bombing has ended for the moment.

In media coverage, these deaths and injuries are never mentioned for what they are: ceasefire violations.

Israeli snipers may no longer shoot Palestinian children in the head, as they routinely did for 15 months. But young people are still dying.

Without homes, without access to functioning hospitals and with limited access to food and water, Gaza's children are perishing - most out of sight, most uncounted - from cold, from disease, from hunger.

Even Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, says it will likely take 10 to 15 years to rebuild Gaza.

But Gazans don't have that much time.

This month, Israel banned the activities of the United Nations aid agency, UNRWA, in all Palestinian territories it illegally occupies.

UNRWA is the only agency capable of alleviating the worst excesses of the hell Israel has created in Gaza. Without it, the recovery process will be further hampered, and more Gazans will die waiting for help.

Turning a blind eye

But Netanyahu has no intention of maintaining the ceasefire beyond the first phase, the exchange of hostages. Afterwards, he has practically promised to resume the killing.

When Israel decides to “come back in,” there will be no price to pay from the Trump administration, just as there was none from the previous Biden administration.

Even now, when Israel breaks the ceasefire, firing on civilian vehicles because its inhabitants are unaware of the movement restrictions imposed by Israel, Western politicians and media turn a blind eye.

And when Israel eventually breaks the deal, as it will, the West will echo Israel in blaming Hamas for violating it.

The ceasefire is also a lie because, having turned Gaza into an uninhabitable killing field, Israel has moved its main focus of genocide to the occupied West Bank, where it is gradually introducing the same tactics it has used for 15 months in the tiny coastal enclave.

Over the weekend, it blew up large parts of the Jenin refugee camp, turning it into rubble, as it has done to much of Gaza and swathes of southern Lebanon.

Note that Israel is now targeting the West Bank even though it is not run by Hamas but by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who calls “sacred” the collaboration of his security forces with Israel in repressing all resistance to its illegal occupation.

Note also that the West Bank had nothing to do with the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. But none of this should surprise us. They were just pretexts for the massacre in Gaza.

The ceasefire lie, in turn, sits on a mountain of past lies: from Hamas's beheading of babies to its campaign of systematic rape, for which there is precisely no evidence.

And it gives life to a new round of lies, like Biden’s suggestion last month that the ceasefire would allow Gazans to “go back to their neighborhoods.” But those neighborhoods no longer exist. They don’t exist because the Biden administration sent billions of dollars worth of munitions to raze Gaza.

One might wonder why the Trump administration is trying to send Israel another $1.000 billion worth of munitions, if not so that the destruction and killing can continue.

Without blushing

The ceasefire is a lie because everything in the last 16 months has been a lie. It is the latest lie in a chain of lies, each one designed to support the other lies to create a mendacious global narrative: the giant lie.

The giant lie speaks of a decades-long “conflict” with the Palestinians, of Israel’s “war for survival” in the region. The giant lie obscures what is really at stake: the West’s latest settler-colonial project to eradicate a native people, in this case in the strategically important and oil-rich Middle East.

According to this gigantic lie, Hamas “started a war” on October 7, 2023, when it stormed the concentration camp where Palestinians in Gaza had been living for at least 16 years, deprived of the essentials of life by their Israeli oppressors.

According to this gigantic lie, Hamas is the terrorist, not Israel, which has been illegally occupying, settling and besieging the Palestinian homeland for three-quarters of a century.

According to this gigantic lie, Israel's slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children and the maiming of many more was necessary to "eliminate Hamas" and not proof of Israel's genocidal intent, as all major human rights organizations have concluded.

Even Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, admitted — only, of course, as he was about to resign — that Israel’s protracted slaughter had been entirely self-sabotaging. “We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost,” he said. “That is a recipe for a long-lasting insurgency and perpetual war.”

This week, Gaza authorities took advantage of the lull in Israeli attacks to reassess the death toll. They have revised it to nearly 62.000 after adding the names of those missing, presumed dead beneath the oceans of rubble. There are undoubtedly many more dead still to be identified.

In this gigantic lie, Western politicians and media have wiped off the map the ruling of the International Court of Justice from more than a year ago, according to which there were "plausible" reasons to believe that Israel was carrying out a genocide.

Not only that, but the West was quick to supply Israel with the bombs necessary to carry out the very massacres that have led the International Court to try Israel for genocide.

In this gigantic lie, the now British Prime Minister Keir Starmer presented Israel's starvation of the population of Gaza as legitimate, as "legitimate self-defense."

Meanwhile, journalists and other politicians are colluding to avoid mentioning Starmer's comments so as not to embarrass him, even after the International Criminal Court (ICC) indicted Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity over the same starvation policy.

Insensitive media

According to the gigantic lie, Hamas is holding hostages, while the many thousands of Palestinians kidnapped by Israel to be used as bargaining chips in the current swaps – including hundreds of doctors, aid workers and children – are “prisoners”, legitimately “detained” as terrorist suspects.

According to the same gigantic lie, the Israeli government had to destroy Gaza to bring the hostages home, even as it spent the final days before the ceasefire went into effect intensifying its bombardment of the enclave, clearly indifferent to whether it killed the hostages in the process.

In the gigantic lie, Israel's leveling of Gaza, blocking of aid and starving 2,3 million people were somehow justified and "proportionate", rather than intended to make the enclave uninhabitable, with the aim of forcing Palestinians to leave and move to the neighbouring Egyptian territory of Sinai or other parts of the Arab world.

The lie of the "ceasefire" is perfectly related to this gigantic lie.

The gigantic lie that claimed Biden had “worked tirelessly” for a ceasefire that could have been secured days after October 7, 2023 with a call to Netanyahu. The “hard-won” ceasefire that was available in exactly the same format last May, but had to be delayed because Israel needed more time to carry out its genocide.

The gigantic lie that hails Biden and Trump for having pulled off a diplomatic coup with the ceasefire when for over a year millions of protesters in the West have been slandered, beaten by police and arrested for hating Jews for demanding precisely the same thing.

The big lie that for decades has portrayed Washington as an “honest broker” when it is Israel’s biggest arms dealer, its most vociferous apologist, its most terrifying enforcer.

The big lie that required physically removing two journalists from Blinken’s farewell press conference last month. Each tried to remind us that Emperor Biden had been naked the whole time.

For anyone wondering why the media has been so callous over the past 15 months – in the case of Gaza they have been unable to summon any of the passion and outrage they so readily evoked over Russia's invasion of Ukraine – here was the answer.

The other journalists ducked their heads or looked away timidly, afraid of losing their access if they were tainted by any association with these rule-breakers. Decorum had to be maintained within the royal court, even in the midst of a genocide.

The big lie had to be protected at all costs.

Snake oil salesman

Whatever Western politicians and the media may say, the ceasefire has not put an end to anything. It only offers a brief respite to the Palestinian people from their most immediate pain and misery.

We must not allow it to reinforce the narrative of the big lie. Which is exactly what Keir Starmer, British Prime Minister and that most oily of snake oil salesmen, tried to do.

In a statement on the prospect of a ceasefire last month, Starmer suggested it would allow the people of Gaza what he called “a better future,” including the creation of “a sovereign and viable Palestinian state.”

Really?

No one wants to think about what the best-case scenario for Gaza would be: Starmer's claim is based on the entirely fanciful idea that Israel actually wants a permanent ceasefire.

The reality is that it would take us back to October 6, 2023, when Israel blockaded Gaza and held its 2,3 million inhabitants hostage. It denied them the import of basic necessities and kept them on a diet of deprivation.

It denied the sick access to life-saving treatment that could only be obtained abroad. It crushed the economy by denying companies an export market. It allowed Gazans only a few hours of electricity a day and monitored them 24/7 by an army of drones.

At best, Gaza would be back to this situation, plus all the devastation Israel has caused since then: no homes, schools, universities, hospitals, bakeries, mosques, churches; oceans of rubble to wade through; shattered water and sewage systems; and vast swaths of the population in need of medical treatment for serious injuries and illness; and nearly 40.000 orphans to care for.

Is this the “better future” that Starmer was referring to?

What are the chances that Gaza will even receive this hellish scenario at best, when Israel is wasting no time in extending its genocidal policies to the West Bank?

The ceasefire is a lie because everything else we have been told is a lie: that Israel is a normal Western liberal democracy, that Israel wants peace with its neighbors, that the Israeli army is the most moral in the world.

Israel is not just a typical settler-colonial state, the kind that seeks to eradicate the native population whose land it covets. Israel is the best-armed and most pampered settler-colonial state in history, and addicted to its scorched-earth approach to the region it inhabits.

The truth is that everything we have been told about Israel is a lie. Nothing can be fixed, nothing can be healed, until the lies stop.