Across the Arab world, ordinary citizens stand and watch the United States sliding into the abyss and wonder, what can the Americans be thinking there? Their institutions, packaged once as the envy of the world with a free society and values of compassion and tolerance …  all blowing away in the winds of history, over the edge and gone. The true Semites, of the Middle East, and not of Europe, gape at this catastrophe of so-called “liberal” Western-style democracy, as it is casually sucked into the moral black hole of a tedious television entertainer, a Wrestlemania con-man, with his billionaire henchmen and techno- Utopianists, who now plunder the richest, most powerful nation in the world as its own elites sit back in comfort, waiting to carve up the spoils. It is like watching Leviathan washed up on the beach, being dismantled by efficient, busy sand crabs. As everyone knows, fish rots first from the head.

To watch an American president openly say, while dutifully standing in the White House before the flag of an Israeli occupier, “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the United States in the Gaza Strip, as if he were showing a triplex condo on Central Park to a lesser Saudi prince, strips away the last veil in this long, sordid dance, this burlesque of empire pretending to moral superiority, while waiting for the right moment to deploy the Art of the Deal. “The Riviera of the Middle East,” he robotically intones, ever the salesman, as a grinning, indicted and fugitive Prime Minister looks on, scarcely able to believe what he is hearing, “The U.S. will take over,” and “we’ll own it.” Of course, everyone from the Achaemenids to Rome to Napoleon has liked Arab beaches, but Palestinians stand with the people of Greenland when they say, “Our land is not for sale;” nor do we yield to conquest, it should be clear to everyone by now. Any U.S. position in Gaza would have well-deserved consequences Americans are not prepared to own.

The American President—like so many before him—has a strange habit of talking about Palestinians as if they have no agency in what befalls them, no choice in the matter. And he talks too, as if what has happened to Palestinians and their land is just random political weather: “The Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades,” he drones on, “it’s been very unlucky, an unlucky place for a long time.” In this, he is not so different from each of his predecessors, pretending in his rhetoric that the U.S. and its citizens have not, in fact, been the subsidizing engineers of Palestinian “bad luck”, the architects of their misfortune, but rather that it just happened to them, and the reasons why are simply lost in the mists of time. In fact, the 118th Congress of the American people, under a Democratic president, delivered 85,000 tons of explosives to Israel, which it dropped on the Gazans—all of this paid for by each and every U.S. taxpayer, red state or blue: over 4000 Hellfire missiles; 14,000 MK-84 2000-lb. bombs, which blast a crater fifty feet wide and three stories deep; many thousands of 1000- and 500-pounders; over 17,000 bomber or drone or missile sorties flown. The total tonnage and complete destruction surpasses that of the Allied bombing of major European cities in the Second World War, or the massive “carpet bombing” dumps over Vietnam. By some estimates, 40% of this destruction came by means of ordinary “dumb bombs,” with unexploded munitions now littering Gaza’s rubble-scape. All this industrial-scale murder, made in the USA, directed at a people without airplanes or ships or tanks or air defenses, or even water and food now—one has to ask, has any military force in modern memory ever acted as cowardly and cruelly as Israel has done?

This moral atrocity had bi-partisan support—Democrats and Republicans, hand-in-hand—in case anyone thinks U.S. politicians are no longer capable of cooperating. It will take an estimated fifteen years to clear the debris alone—that is, unless American troops are so foolish as to land bulldozers, dig in, and attempt to make it their forward operating base, earning the scorn of the free world, and generations of resistance. Imperial over-reach is never far from the American mind, which now prattles from the mouth of its criminal leader, plotting crimes in public, with no one to stop him, as his “efficiency” squads dissolve government agencies in the middle of the night.

All the US tax dollars have only bought it well-deserved contempt and hatred on the Arab street, and around the world. No free-thinking human will ever again entertain the fairy-tale of American liberty and justice, the myth of “Pax Americana.” The meaning of the Holocaust has forever been changed. The shape of Zionist intent was visible all along, and ethnic cleansing now has its sales pitch and its salesman, promising, there will be jobs for everyone!

The mass-murder of over 60,000 innocent, mostly women and children; the maiming and terrorizing of almost two million more; the unrelenting destruction of every standing structure in Gaza; the deliberate starvation of its people and intended spread of disease —all of these activities are the lawless acts of war criminals, led by a delusional, convicted criminal, and paid for by Americans who are now in the eighth decade of a fantasy: that the Palestinians should cease to exist. And now the American president proposes further war crimes openly, to a roomful of applause, musing out loud on what a “world class” development will replace Palestinian towns and cities, as if Gaza were one of his failed casino projects in New Jersey, or his sham on-line university. And the captive “free” press, now quaking in fear before its mighty Potentate, blandly airs without comment his psychotic nihilism, as if concepts of international law no longer exist. For this is what America’s willing dispossession of the Palestinians will mean: that law no longer exists.

It is a dark road to go down, disappearing into a forest of un-broken nightmares. Somewhere in that forest, as the path winds on, are familiar, dark American horrors: black citizens lynched from trees; atomic bombs flashing shadow-people on stone; napalm burning a child running down a road; the Capitol swarmed by a deadly mob of angry men and women desperate to safeguard the privilege of skin-tone that they ache for, but do not have and never will.  A nation born from the genocide of five million Native Americans once again chooses genocide, its original sin, inescapable and mutating through time. There can no longer be any ignorance in the American people about Palestine’s tragedy, or the nature of its fight: Israel’s crimes against Palestinians indict America’s failure to act lawfully as a nation, to stand for what is basic and right. The slow-motion eradication since well before 1948 of Palestinian national rights, sovereign lands and now their people themselves has unfolded in plain view for all to see, and none to deny. The “international community” which once “committed” itself to protect the very rights and lives of all Palestinians, now eagerly awaits real estate brochures for beach-front condos—as if its resistance movements would let that happen. But Palestinians wonder, what will the American people do?

As a dear friend and client of 30 plus years …  a Palestinian resistance leader recently said to me in speaking of the American body politic … “If we might give a word of advice to them: beware of the rot of lawlessness that spreads down from the top, from your elites, your oligarchs. Like a cancer, it will devour your rights sooner than it will defeat ours.”

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