This past week, while the Palestinian people in Gaza are trying to make their way through a rubble-filled hellscape, a number of top-level Trump officials traveled to Israel. They included Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Why? To make sure Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu didn’t restart Israel’s all-out genocide in Gaza and derail Trump’s “peace plan,” which Israel, the U.S., and Hamas had agreed to. 

There are complex contradictions involved in all this. Here are some of the basics:

Several weeks ago, after two years of U.S.-backed Israeli genocidal slaughter, the fascist Trump reportedly had to strong-arm his fellow fascist Netanyahu into signing onto his Gaza “peace plan,” which reflected larger U.S. imperialist interests. Trump threatened to "no longer stand with Netanyahu” if he didn't go along. 

Then, on October 19, Netanyahu’s government accused Hamas of killing two Israeli soldiers in the Rafah area and then responded with a massive and deadly series of airstrikes across Gaza, which killed 45 people. (Hamas has denied carrying out any attacks.)¹ This was the 48th time in nine days that Israel violated Trump’s ceasefire and overall peace plan. 

This, along with other statements and actions by Netanyahu, made the Trump regime officials “increasingly concerned” that Netanyahu “could dismantle the U.S.-brokered agreement” and resume Israel’s genocide. So a high-level posse of Trump fascists headed to Israel to lay down the law. 

Imperialist Strong-Arm Tactics—Out in the Open 

Rubio said Trump had made enforcing the ceasefire a “top priority,” and U.S. officials and military commanders took extraordinary steps last week to try and make sure that happened. 

The U.S. military’s Central Command set up a new Civil-Military Coordination Center in southern Israel to ensure adherence to the ceasefire. It announced a number of diplomats would work there with the U.S. military to maintain “pressure on Israel to stick to the deal.”

The U.S. began flying drones over Gaza, which one former official called a “very intrusive version of U.S. monitoring.” It even demanded that Israel provide the U.S. advance notice of any major strikes by the Israeli army in Gaza. “Israeli defense sources say that senior American officials have said that they will not tolerate any surprises from Israel that could jeopardize the ceasefire in Gaza,” Haaretz reports. “In practice, the U.S. is taking over certain security authorities from Israel.”

While U.S. officials were in Israel, its Knesset (parliament) advanced two measures that would enable Israel to effectively annex the occupied West Bank. (The West Bank is home to 3.3 million Palestinians and, according to international law, is considered Palestinian territory. However, in addition to the all-out genocide in Gaza, Israeli settlers in the West Bank, with help from the Israeli army, have been carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.) This direct challenge to Trump’s plan drew harsh public rebukes: Trump declared, “Israel’s not going to do anything with the West Bank, OK?” Vance called it “a very stupid political stunt” and “insult.” Rubio called annexing the West Bank a “threat to the peace process.”

Trump and his regime are not motivated by concern for international law or the Palestinian people in the West Bank. The U.S. imperialists have supported illegal Israeli settlements and vicious attacks on Palestinians there for decades. This is about Trump trying to advance larger, extremely predatory U.S. imperialist moves in the Middle East.

Why Does the U.S. Need Israel? 

Last week’s rare, open intervention by the Trump regime in Israel sparked a debate over whether Israel was a U.S. “vassal” or “client state.” Netanyahu called the claim “hogwash,” adding “we have a partnership.” Vance declared Israel wasn’t a vassal state or a client state: “We want an ally here.”

So what is the basic nature of the relationship between the U.S. and Israel? The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian spelled this out in October 2023:

Why is Biden, and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world?” This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world. 

- from “Some Basic Truths About the U.S.-Supported Israeli War Against Palestine”² 

This analysis is key to understanding the nature of Trump’s “peace plan,” and the differences—and the overall unity—between the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. is an imperialist power that dominates the Middle East and the world, and Israel plays a “special role” in that oppression and mass murder. Israel has its own needs and ambitions that sometimes clash with the U.S.’s, but it is overall dependent on the U.S., which, to take one example, supplies 68 percent of its foreign sourced weapons.

As revcom.us has analyzed (HERE and HERE), the fascist Trump’s “peace plan” isn’t about ending Israeli genocidal oppression of the Palestinian people and ensuring their rights, much less their liberation. It’s about maintaining their subjugation, strengthening Israel, and extending U.S. imperialist domination of the Middle East. In a nutshell, Trump sees doing this by building closer alliances with reactionary states in the region including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Unite Arab Emirates and others. Israel’s ongoing threats to annex the West Bank and resume its Gaza genocide would make it very difficult for these states to draw closer to the U.S.—and Israel—thus threatening those strategic U.S. interests.³ 

Trump Regime’s Ongoing Support for Israel and Attacks on the Palestinian People

None of this means the U.S. is cutting Israel loose or renouncing genocide! Just this past week, Trump and his minions carried out one attack after another on the Palestinian people. 

Trump again threatened Hamas with obliteration if it didn’t adhere to the ceasefire and peace plan. On October 25, Trump gave Hamas a 48-hour deadline to turn over the remains of more hostages, “or the other Countries involved in this GREAT PEACE will take action.” This is ominous because these remains may be buried under tons of rubble—along with thousands of the Palestinian dead—and Israel has blocked the entry of the heavy equipment needed for this search.  

Rubio repeated Israel’s demand that the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA—the biggest and most effective aid agency in the territory—have no role in Gaza, even though starvation and hunger are rampant!⁴

Echoing Netanyahu, Rubio also said Gaza would be “demilitarized” and Hamas would have no role in governing a future Gaza (even though negotiations on that question are just getting underway).

Both Jared Kushner and Witkoff covered for Israel by denying it had committed genocide, even after Kushner blurted out during their 60 Minutes interview that Gaza “looked almost like a nuclear bomb had been set off in that area.” 

One plan now being discussed by the U.S. and Israel is to begin Gaza’s reconstruction in areas controlled by Israel. “[I]f Gazans therefore somehow begin moving to the areas Israel controls, this could entrench the current situation on the ground (where Israel controls 53 percent of Gaza) and prevent Israel from withdrawing from more than half of Gaza for many years to come,” Haaretz reports.

Palestinians Still Suffering—and Dying—as a Result of U.S.-Israeli Genocide and Ongoing Israeli Attacks

At this writing, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas is holding. But Palestinians in Gaza continue to starve, suffer horribly and sometimes die because of the U.S.-Israeli genocide, and Israel’s ongoing attacks on their lives and basic rights. Over the last two years, Israel murdered at least 68,229 people, including at least 20,000 children. Many thousands more lie buried under the rubble. The entire infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed with homes, schools and hospitals bombed, farmlands bulldozed, sewage treatment and water desalination plants demolished. It remains highly uncertain when— and if—this terrible trauma will be alleviated. Here are some examples:

• Half of Gaza’s population is still displaced, sheltering in tents, the shells of bombed-out buildings, even in the open air. All are struggling to survive. "The noise of the shelling has been silenced and the skies are clear, but the pain of the war still hangs over the tents," one doctor posted. "The battle in the bodies of the wounded, in the hearts of the mothers, isn't over yet—nor in the eyes of the children, whose light has been lost."
• As we write, Palestinians in Gaza are still being killed or wounded. On Friday afternoon, October 24, two brothers—Said and Mas’oud al-Ghawash—were killed in an Israeli airstrike east of Der el-Balah. The next evening, four Palestinians were injured in Central Gaza by an Israeli airstrike targeting their car.
• Others are being shot down for accidentally crossing into unmarked Israeli yellow or "no-go" zones. Apparently, some Israeli soldiers had been sparing children and donkeys who wandered into these zones. But Israel’s Nazi national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir demanded no, “shoot the children and the donkey too.” Overall, Israel has killed nearly 100 Palestinians and wounded 230 in Gaza, since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire came into effect on October 10.
• Israel’s bombs left some 170,000 wounded in Gaza, including 42,000 with life-changing injuries, such as amputations and permanent disabilities. The toll on children has been hellish: 56,000 lost at least one parent, thousands have lost both. Because of this, some 40 percent of Gazan families are raising children who are not their own according to UNICEF. All these children need medical care and support—yet Israel also decimated Gaza’s healthcare system and is now blocking life-saving aid, and refusing to allow all but a tiny handful to leave Gaza for medical care.

• Under Trump’s plan, 600 trucks of life-saving food, medicine, water, and other vital aid was supposed to enter Gaza every single day to alleviate the hunger and forced starvation caused by Israel’s blockade. But Israel is still preventing that from happening: according to the United Nations, fewer than 100 trucks have arrived per day on average and Gazans remain destitute.
• Israel’s genocide has not fully stopped under Trump’s deal. Israel continues to “arbitrarily” reject desperately needed aid deliveries into Gaza, including “tents and tarpaulins, blankets, mattresses, food and nutrition supplies, hygiene kits, sanitation materials, assistive devices, and children’s clothing,” states a letter from 41 humanitarian aid agencies. None of these are supposed to be restricted under the ceasefire.
• “Catastrophic.” That’s how the World Health Organization describes Gaza’s ongoing starvation crisis. Israel’s violations of international law and Trump’s ceasefire are so blatant that the International Court of Justice has ordered it to restore access for the UN, including UNRWA, to deliver food and other basic necessities into Gaza. The UN has also demanded that Israel open the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, so that urgently needed aid can get into Gaza.
• Over the past two years, Israel has destroyed 78 percent of Gaza’s buildings fully or partly, and it hasn’t stopped! Israel is still demolishing homes—labeling them “terrorist infrastructure,” and claiming this is in keeping with the ceasefire.

• Meanwhile, Israel’s onslaught has destroyed nearly one million of Gaza’s 1.1 million olive trees—a key source of income, food and national tradition. They’ve either been bulldozed, or dried up due to the lack of water Israel has deliberately created, or because they remain inaccessible to farmers.

• A somber, heartbreaking funeral was held on October 22 for the bodies of 54 Palestinian prisoners returned by Israel. In yet another depraved assault on the Palestinian people, Israel refused to identify these victims who died at their hands, marking them with only a number. “The signs of torture and brutal treatment on the body did not allow us to tell whether it was him or not,” one man searching for his relatives said. Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system also made it difficult for authorities to do DNA testing on the bodies. “It’s unbearable to watch,” one woman said. “I can’t imagine how it feels for a mother to stand here, unsure if one of these bodies is her son.”

The Situation Remains Dangerous and Uncertain, and Genocidal Monsters Are Still on the Loose

The fate of Trump’s predatory, imperialist “peace plan” remains uncertain. But what is certain is that it offers no future for the Palestinian people, or the people of the Middle East and the world. 

The U.S.-Israeli murder, oppression, and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel must end, and the millions who have stood up around the world must continue to demand that this imperialist domination and oppression end, and that we fight for a whole different, and much better world! 

Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People!

End the Siege on Gaza!

This whole system is rotten and illegitimate! We need and we demand: a whole new way to live, a fundamentally different system!