For Palestine and Palestinians, 14 May 1948 was a fateful day in its 4,000-year history. It was also historically pivotal for the United States. Paraphrasing British author, George Orwell, it is essential to rediscover the past in order to gain control of the present and save the future.
Eleven minutes after David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, declared Israel a state in May 1948, President Harry S. Truman recognized his claim, giving legitimacy to Ben-Gurion’s bogus declaration.
In 1947, thirty-three members of the newly-created United Nations General Assembly (57 then) voted in favor of Resolution 181, recommending the partition of historic Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states. Truman, undeterred by the fact that the UN Security Council had not voted on the resolution, which would have made it binding on all members, threw the full weight of the United States behind it.
Truman’s decision to position Israel as a citadel of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East has boomeranged and has resulted in the United States being despised in much of the world. Rather than protect U.S. interests in the region as planned, Israel has imperiled them.
As we have seen since the 7 October 2023 insurrection, there are no limits on U.S.-Israeli brutality and on the suffering they have been willing to inflict on the Palestinians in order to preserve their imperium in the region.
Imperial arrogance on the part of American presidents is, of course, not new. It reached new heights, however, when President Donald J. Trump threatened to take over, “to own” Gaza and remove (euphemism for ethnically cleanse) Palestinians from their ancestral land to foreign destinations. The Zionist colonizing baton in Gaza would essentially be passed to American imperialists.
Trump revealed his illegal plan for Gaza during a recent (11 February) White House press conference. As humiliated King Abdullah of Jordan looked on, he said: “We’re going to hold it; we’re going to cherish it… It’s fronting on the sea. It’s going to be a great economic development job.” When asked by a reporter under what authority are you permitted to take the sovereign territory of Gaza; he smugly responded, “U.S. authority.”
Hellbound and Down 