Israel is seeking to ‘eliminate and annihilate the Palestinian people’
Mustafa Barghouti, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, says Israel is pursuing three processes simultaneously as Netanyahu pushes to “remap” the entire Middle East.
The first is an effort “to eliminate and annihilate the Palestinian people by conducting not only genocide, but also ethnic cleansing”, Barghouti told Al Jazeera from Ramallah.
The second is an attempt to “annex the lands of other countries” in the region.
“At this moment, they have already invaded big parts of Syria and Lebanon, and the proposals they are making, with the help of the American administration, are about ripping away from Syria any form of sovereignty,” Barghouti said.
And the third process, he explained, is creating Israeli dominance in the region, which includes “economic hegemony, political hegemony [and] intelligence hegemony over the whole Middle East”.
International condemnation of Israel ‘performative, feckless, meaningless’
US President Trump is continuing a long history of American administrations that have backed, financed and armed Israel as it expands its illegal settlements throughout the occupied territory, says Omar Rahman, a fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.
But the Trump administration also has taken “many illegal steps on behalf of Israel”, including supporting the genocide in Gaza and recognising Israel’s claims to Jerusalem and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Rahman noted.
“Israel always understood that unless there was a kind of meaningful pushback against it for its settlement policy, then it could continue to do whatever it wanted,” he told Al Jazeera.
Rahman added that as long as governments continue to support Israel in practice, any rhetorical condemnation remains “performative, feckless [and] meaningless”.
Israeli gov’t outspoken about killing ‘as many Palestinians as possible’
Nabeel Khoury, a former US diplomat, has been speaking to us about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vision for a so-called “Greater Israel”.
“This is an old idea that dates back to … the early rise of the world Zionist movement,” Khoury told Al Jazeera.
“The idea was that it was a compromise to establish the State of Israel on only roughly two-thirds” of Palestine, he explained, but that Israel would eventually expand “to what they think religiously appeal[s] to most Jews around the world”.
Under Netanyahu’s far-right government, “the time has come” to implement this idea, Khoury said, noting that Israel’s cabinet ministers are becoming more vocal in their push to kill “as many Palestinians as possible”.
“There is very little doubt now that the ‘Greater Israel’ idea is on its way to being implemented,” Khoury added.
