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“I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip,” Shakespeare says. Yet, the world, holding its breath, watched not a lady walking from Venice to Sharm el-Sheikh to rubber-stamp the fate of Palestine, but men who travelled eagerly from all around the world to touch the nether lip of the US president—cringing and flattering him as if he had set the Thames on fire. No, he did not. But he left Palestine on fire—on imperialist fire that can only be extinguished through its eventual defeat. An old and forgotten quote of Shakespeare has torn apart the Israeli myth of Palestine being a “land without people.” On the contrary, he did not mention Israel, for such an entity was an imperialist construct, created in the middle of the twentieth century—somewhat akin to a Fox production. “For Mussalmans,” Marx wrote, “there is no such thing as subordination. Inequality is an abomination.” But the spineless Muslim leaders—maintaining their hegemony through coercion in their own countries, lacking revolutionary spirit—were gathered only to seek security or, akin to Shylock, a “pound of flesh” to feed their unfamished appetite. They knew well what Byron had alluded to: Trust not for freedom to the Franks—They have a king who buys and sells. But ostriches are known to bury their heads in the sand whenever danger presents itself. When mediocrity is imposed upon a people, it leaves behind humiliation as its legacy—a collective, deep-seated humiliation, the irony of which escapes the psyche of the nation at large. In slavery, human sense perception is compromised to the extent that one fails to perceive the possibility of an alternative. The chains one wears become the only reality. “Men,” Horkheimer says, “…take the jargon of their jailors and, with cold reason and mad consent, tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise, contending that they have not been treated so badly after all.” Obsequious premiers and presidents standing behind Trump applauded a peace treaty devoid of substance, fully cognizant of its hollowness. No one was there to save Gaza or the Palestinians—they never existed for them. The entire circus was staged to protect the apartheid entity, fatigued by a long conflict. People knew this; their politicians did not—or perhaps reality for them was stranger than fiction. Being hypocritical, they lacked the courage to face it. Despite its firepower and Western backing, Israel failed to achieve its objectives. It could neither free its “hostages” through warfare nor exterminate Hamas, nor did it manage to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. The peace accord was conspicuous by the absence of both Netanyahu and the Iranian leadership—one of the key powers of the Middle East. Iran’s absence is understandable; its leaders refuse to share a podium with an apartheid entity that had invaded the country only months earlier. Netanyahu’s absence, however, was interpreted differently. According to David Hearst, despite Trump’s insistence on the Israeli premier’s participation, Arab leaders, fearful of their people, declined to stand beside a wanted criminal in public. For Norman Finkelstein, his absence on religious grounds signified non-compliance with the pact—a charade from the outset. The moment was important for Trump himself. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize may have been one motive, but not the most significant one. Trump, as Finkelstein notes, is a real estate tycoon, and several other vassal states, plan to build new cities in the desert. Turning Gaza into a Riviera was fantasy, and Trump knew it. In the presence of active resistance, it was a dream whose interpretation lay beyond even Freud’s imagination. Like all American presidents beholden to the Wall Street and AIPAC, Trump also found himself in a dilemma. On one hand, he was pushed to the brink by his Zionist billionaire supporters—especially Miriam Adelson, who contributed $100 million to his election campaign. She wanted nothing short of Eretz Israel—a state stretching from the occupied territories to parts of Syria, Lebanon, and, if possible, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Trump was at her mercy. As he confessed to the Knesset, she could meet him at her whim and preferred Israel over the United States. On the other hand, his electoral base—demanding the realization of his “America First” slogan—was turning against him. Although he was not ambitious for a third term, Trump was acutely conscious of the midterm elections, in which his party was likely to lose its majority in both the Senate and Congress to the Democrats, rendering him a lame-duck president. Even in the incumbent Congress, Israel’s grip was loosening, and not only voices of discontent but also calls for a “surgical separation” of Israel from the United States were echoing. Trump expressed concern in a speech delivered in the Knesset, warning Netanyahu of his diminishing influence—his soft power—within Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a US Senator, openly criticized Israel for its genocide, while Congressman Seth Moulton announced he would return donations received from AIPAC in protest of its support for Netanyahu. It is expediency, opportunism, or fear of shifting political winds in the United States that is forcing those who once supported—or turned a blind eye to—the genocide to change their positions. Time changes; history consigns all old forms to the grave. But if change is absent in Israel, it is because the entity, with its ideology of Zionism, is plagued by a moral gangrene that, once begun, consumes life swiftly and completely. Before the ink of the Peace Accord could dry and the flattering applause fade, Israel, true to its nature, had already begun to undermine the process by violating it openly. As an imperialist outpost, Israel’s existence depends on perpetual war. War unites the Israeli masses and facilitates the realization of accumulated capital. The military-industrial complex not only develops new means of destruction—tested in the laboratory called Gaza—but also suppresses internal contradictions created by the capitalist mode of production. It consolidates, validates, and glorifies the myths of the “chosen people” and anti-Semitism in the minds of the occupiers. The glorification of falsehood as natural becomes part of an ideology that wages war against its own liberation. “Dumbness becomes an objective spirit.” The “great peaceful president” of the United States—nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by two of God’s Republics—is now preparing to invade Venezuela on the baseless pretext of a war on drugs. Maduro, with a $50 million bounty on his head, is portrayed as today’s Saddam Hussein. The Nordic countries have already prepared an alternative in the form of a US stooge, Maria Machado, by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a woman who has promised to sell her country’s resources to the US-Israeli nexus. Akin to Narendra Modi, she is a proto-fascist and a staunch Zionist within the Anglo-American sphere—and can walk beyond Palestine “for a touch of his [America’s] nether lip.” As the Palestinians receive the bodies of their dead, the world is forced to confront a horror in which even corpses are not spared Israeli terror. The cadavers’ organs were taken and sold—a hideous revelation that cost a Swedish journalist his job and nearly his life. “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” Walter Benjamin warned—and Palestinians know it. Like Byron, they sing: “The land of slaves shall never be mine.” They have proved it with their blood and their tears. This is liberation. Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
