Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement last week of a massive military escalation in Gaza dominated all attention in Israel.
But while politicians and the media picked over his plan to wreak final destruction on Hamas, he had only the vaguest notion that his closest ally, Donald Trump, was in the final stages of a deal with the terrorist group.
Mr Trump’s envoys had gone behind Mr Netanyahu’s back to negotiate the release of Edan Alexander, the 21-year-old hostage.
Or is the far-left media trying to provoke such a break?
Is Donald Trump really preparing to recognize a Palestinian state? The news hit like a thunderbolt on Saturday, amid an avalanche of stories claiming that Trump is angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is changing course from his previous wholehearted support of Israel’s defense against Hamas and the other jihadist entities that are determined to destroy it. As is so often the case in such matters, however, there was decidedly less to the story than there initially appeared to be.
I ran from the White House briefing room, past the portico entrance of the West Wing to our camera position on the lawn, and flung on an ear piece connecting me to the studio.
A moment later the presenter asked me about the comments we had just heard live from US President Donald Trump.
I said we were seeing a fundamental shift in a United States’ policy position after decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It was February this year, and Trump had just held talks with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – the first foreign leader since Trump’s inauguration to be invited to the White House. The US president vowed that his country would take control of the Gaza Strip, having earlier pledged the territory would also be “cleaned out” and emptied of its Palestinian population.
JUST IN: Israeli PM Netanyahu Credits TRUMP for the peace deal in the Middle East
FOX'S DOOCY: "We have heard Biden and Trump take credit for the hostage and cease-fire deals. Who do you think deserves more credit?"
NETANYAHU: "President Trump"
That settles it! pic.twitter.com/rfkzUkj75y
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) February 4, 2025
Off topic President Trump announces plan to obliterate Iran in the event of his assassination.
HOLY SH*T: President Trump says he has left instructions to OBLITERATE Iran if they assassinates him:
"That would be a terrible thing for them to do, not because of me. If they did that, they would be obliterated. That would be the end. I've left instructions."
“There will be… pic.twitter.com/osWC0cikXX
— Jack (@jackunheard) February 4, 2025
h/t XC
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected on Tuesday to become the first foreign leader to visit the White House since Donald Trump’s return to office.
The two leaders are set to discuss the state of the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas Islamists in Gaza and explore paths toward ending the conflict altogether.
Prior to his arrival, Netanyahu’s office announced that he would dispatch a delegation to participate in a new round of negotiations in Doha, Qatar, later this week.
On November 22, 2024, at the National Gallery of Berlin, the American photographer and political activist Nan Goldin asked, “Why can’t I speak, Germany?” With apparently no sense of irony, she spoke at a lectern in front of a large audience, with numerous phones pointing at her, at the opening of her retrospective, titled “This will not end well.” The subject of her talk was not her artistic portfolio but rather her political agenda on Israel.
An enthusiastic audience applauded her outrage and indignation over the “genocide” in Gaza and Lebanon, and her immoral equivalence between the Palestinian population after the October 7 atrocities with pogroms against Jews under the Russian Empire. Goldin’s false claim that “antizionism has nothing to do with antisemitism” was followed by loud chants of appreciation and applause.
Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu, visiting the Syrian border on Sunday, hailed the collapse of the Assad regime, “a central link in Iran’s axis of evil,” describing it as a “historic day in the history of the Middle East.”
Netanyahu said the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who fled the country after a coalition of rebel groups stormed Damascus on Sunday, was the direct result of blows Israel inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, “the main supporters of the Assad regime.”
Netanyahu on the fall of the Assad regime:
“This is a historic day for the Middle East. The collapse of the Assad regime, the tyranny in Damascus offers great opportunity, but also is fraught with significant dangers. This collapse is a direct result of our forceful action… pic.twitter.com/gYyixHkmXQ
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) December 8, 2024
Most recently, Israel has confounded expectations in its war against Hamas. The IDF has ground Hamas into the rubble of Gaza, killing most of its leaders. It has wreaked sufficient devastation on Hezbollah to produce a ceasefire agreement, albeit a shaky one. Commentators warned solemnly of ‘escalation ladders’ and a ‘wider regional war’, predicting that Iran would not stand idly by as its proxies were degraded. Yet apart from a few token missile strikes, that is precisely what has happened.
Earlier this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Israel of committing “genocide” in the Gaza Strip in its counterterrorism operation against the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group. Hamas had launched the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, murdering 1,200 Israelis, wounding thousands, and kidnapping more than 240 hostages. Erdogan, whose country has been hosting and supporting some of the leaders of Hamas, threatened that Israel will “eventually pay the price for this genocide.” He added: “There will be no peace in the world without accountability for the genocide in Gaza.”
The Biden administration has been in a terrible bind over the past year.
In September 2023, Jake Sullivan declared that there was peace in the Middle East due to Biden’s tremendous leadership. One week later, all hell broke loose.
Most people recognise anti-Zionism as a Leftist phenomenon in America. But they are less attuned to how Right-wingers have adopted the ideology, given that conservatives are frequently assumed to be axiomatically pro-Israel.
Chris Brunet, who made his name through his collaboration with Christopher Rufo in breaking the Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal, has recently publicly split with a number of former comrades and associates within anti-woke conservative circles over the issue of Israel. So pronounced is this rupture that he is now the subject of admiration from far-Right commentator Nick Fuentes and his following of Groypers, while Rufo has today written an essay condemning — without directly referring to Brunet — “anti-Semitic ideologies […] on the fringes of American conservatism”.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump warned at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday that Israel would be “doomed” if his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, is voted into the White House on Nov. 5.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered contrasting thoughts of President Joe Biden, who said a deal with Hamas terrorists for a cease-fire and hostage release is getting closer.
However, Netanyahu poured cold water on the Biden-Harris Administration’s claims, saying it was “exactly inaccurate” that an agreement was close.
He made the comment after describing what Palestinian and Turkish officials said was the killing by Israeli troops of a Turkish-American woman taking part in a protest on Friday against settlement expansion in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
“The only step that will stop Israeli arrogance, Israeli banditry, and Israeli state terrorism is the alliance of Islamic countries,” Erdogan said at an Islamic schools’ association event near Istanbul.
John Spencer is one of the world’s preeminent experts on urban warfare. He’s been inside Gaza three times since December, embedded with the Israel Defense Forces, analyzing the war against Hamas from multiple angles. He interviewed the prime minister, the IDF chief of staff, division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, “all the way down to soldiers in the field.”
