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Don't Be Fooled: Trump Will Still Enable Israel's Annexation Plans
Any apparent dispute between the Americans and the Israelis concerns timing and method, not the objective itself.
Oct 30, 2025
As Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinians under the new umbrella of US President Donald Trump's "peace plan," the Americans are mounting a diplomatic campaign that feigns opposition to the Jewish settler-colony's latest moves to annex the West Bank.
To secure backing for a ceasefire in Gaza—where Israel has killed at least 88 Palestinians and injured 315 others since it took effect on October 10—Trump promised his Arab client regimes last month that he would not allow Israel to proceed with annexation, a red line they feared would ignite public anger and jeopardize Washington's broader normalization project in the region.
Israel's parliament, however, gave preliminary approval last week to two bills calling for the formal annexation of the West Bank.
Trump's vice president, JD Vance, who was in the country to help the Israelis coordinate the next phase of the Gaza genocide, described the vote as "a very stupid political stunt"—and one to which he "personally [took] some insult."
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
In an attempt to save face with Washington's Arab clients, Trump also dispatched his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to rebuke the Israelis for their ill-timed vote. While en route to Israel, Rubio issued the administration's sternest warning yet, saying: "That's not something we can be supportive of right now"—meaning the Americans would support it later.
A week earlier, Trump struck a similar tone in an interview with Time magazine, insisting that this was not the right time for annexation: "It won't happen. It won't happen. It won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can't do that now… Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened," he said.
The key word in these pronouncements is "now." Any apparent dispute between the Americans and the Israelis concerns timing and method, not the objective itself.
Advancing Expansionism
Far from opposing Israel's expansionist agenda, the Trump administration has long been integral to its realization.
After all, during his first term, Trump's "peace for prosperity" plan, authored by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, endorsed Israel's designs to annex 30% of the West Bank.
Under that proposal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel would move immediately to annex the Jordan Valley and West Bank settlements, while generously committing to defer the construction of new settlements in areas left to the Palestinians for at least four years.
Then-US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman signaled that Trump had green-lighted immediate annexation, stating that "Israel does not have to wait at all" and that "we will recognize it." Trump reiterated his position last February, when he justified annexation by observing: "It's a small country… it's a small country in terms of land."
It would be ludicrous to think that the Arab regimes truly believe Trump's promises. They only pretend to flatter him and play along for the sake of domestic public relations.
Indeed, and to his credit, Trump had already recognized Israel's illegal annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights in 2019, just as he recognized the illegal Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem in 2017.
Why, then, would he oppose West Bank annexation rather than simply postpone it to a more auspicious time?
In fact, the Israelis are already planning to expand beyond the West Bank, which, like East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, they already consider a done deal. They are now looking to seize more territory from their other Arab neighbors.
Just weeks ago, Netanyahu declared that he was on a "historic and spiritual mission" on behalf of the Jewish people, adding that he felt "very attached to the vision of the Promised Land and Greater Israel." This vision extends to the entire country of Jordan, as well as additional Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and Iraqi lands.
Arab countries were quick to condemn Netanyahu's vision coveting their territories as future parts of Israel, just as they condemn recent Israeli moves to annex the West Bank. Yet this is little more than a pro forma performance.
The Arab regimes, following European and American orders, have in practice acquiesced de facto in every Israeli annexation since 1948—and some have even embraced them de jure, as Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Morocco, Sudan, and Bahrain did when they recognized Israel's 1949 borders, which already encompassed annexed Palestinian land.
Global legitimization
When Israel was established in 1948, it included half the area allotted by the United Nations for a Palestinian state, as well as West Jerusalem, which was meant to remain under international jurisdiction.
While the UN General Assembly, including the United Kingdom, initially insisted that Israel would only be recognized once it withdrew from these territories in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan, between 1949 and 1950, the Security Council and the UK ultimately recognized the country with its new borders—expanded by conquest far beyond those contained in the 1947 UN Partition Plan—intact.
Israel initially agreed to negotiate with its Arab neighbors over the boundaries of the state, but kept the territories it occupied in violation of UN resolutions, especially those concerning its annexation of West Jerusalem in 1949. It moved its government offices there and declared the city its capital.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display.
The UN, the US and all of Europe recognized Israel's annexations de facto, if not de jure, by the early 1950s, and the normalizing Arab countries followed suit in later decades.
After all, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat saw no problem in addressing Israel's parliament in annexed West Jerusalem during his 1977 visit without a word of protest.
While King Hussein never paid an official visit to West Jerusalem, as his 1994 and 1996 visits to Israel were mainly to Tel Aviv and Lake Tiberias, he did visit annexed West Jerusalem in 1995 to attend the funeral of then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and again in 1997 to meet Israeli families who had lost children when a Jordanian soldier opened fire on them.
It bears mentioning that even before signing a peace treaty with Israel in 1993, Hussein had already conceded Palestinian and Arab sovereignty not only over West Jerusalem but also over East Jerusalem, when he insisted that "only God has a claim in Jerusalem"—a statement he would reiterate many times thereafter. The Egyptian and Jordanian embassies, like those of most countries that do not recognize West Jerusalem as Israel's capital, remain in Tel Aviv.
This, however, does not mean these countries do not recognize West Jerusalem as part of Israel.
Legacy of Conquest
Lest we think that Netanyahu's recently announced Greater Israel "vision" is a peculiar obsession of his alone, it should be remembered that he has so far conquered few Arab territories and has yet to annex any—unlike his predecessors, from David Ben-Gurion to Menachem Begin, who annexed vast Palestinian and Syrian lands.
Israel's avarice for the land of others has always been publicly avowed and on display. After its 1956 invasion and first occupation of Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, Israel's founding prime minister, the secular David Ben-Gurion, waxed biblical, claiming that the invasion of Sinai "was the greatest and most glorious in the annals of our people." The conquest, he added, restored "King Solomon's patrimony from the island of Yotvat in the south to the foothills of Lebanon in the north."
"Yotvat," the name the Israelis bestowed on the Egyptian island of Tiran, had "once more become part of the Third Kingdom of Israel," Ben-Gurion proclaimed.
In the face of international opposition to Israel's occupation, he insisted: "Up to the middle of the sixth century Jewish independence was maintained on the island of Yotvat… which was liberated yesterday by the Israeli army." He also declared the Gaza Strip "an integral part of the nation." Invoking the prophecy of Isaiah, Ben-Gurion vowed: "No force, whatever it is called, was going to make Israel evacuate Sinai."
When the Israelis were finally forced to withdraw, they bided their time and invaded and occupied these areas again in 1967. Despite Israel's final withdrawal from Sinai—whose demilitarization it demanded—talk of invading and settling the Egyptian peninsula is once again in the air today.
After 1948, the Israelis proceeded with plans to steal all the land in the demilitarzsed zone (DMZ) along the Syrian border near the Golan Heights. By 1967, they had taken over the area before conquering the Golan itself.
In the first 10 months of this year, Israel expanded its illegal acquisition of Syrian territories with the acquiescence of Syria's new US-backed regime, led by the rehabilitated former al-Qaeda and Islamic State member Ahmad al-Sharaa.
The Israelis created yet another "buffer zone" on Syrian territory, and just as they did in the DMZ between 1948 and 1967, Israeli Jewish settlers last month crossed into Syrian territory to lay the cornerstone for a new settlement called Neve Habashan, or "the Oasis of Bashan," on the newly occupied Syrian territories near Jabal al-Shaykh.
They hail from Israel's Uri Tzafon "Awaken the North" movement, which aims to settle Syria and southern Lebanon, asserting religious claims to the "Bashan region"—the biblical name Jewish expansionists apply to these lands. Last year, the movement sent thousands of eviction notices to residents of Lebanese towns using balloons and drones.
While the Israeli military removed the settlers in Jabal al-Shaykh, it is only a matter of time before official Jewish settlements are established—just as they continue to be built across the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981, the year after it annexed East Jerusalem.
Annexation Continues
In 2002, Israel built its illegal apartheid "separation wall" inside the West Bank, de facto annexing 10% of the territory, eliciting only pro forma protests from the "international" community, including the International Criminal Court.
Israel has also insisted since 1967 on annexing the Jordan Valley bordering Jordan—another 10 percent of the West Bank—a move that Trump's 2020 "peace" plan approved.
American and European acceptance, and in some cases sponsorship, of such territorial expansions is no different from their endorsement of Trump's more recent Gaza plan, which foresees Israel directly and indefinitely occupying more than half of Gaza's territory.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide.
The Arab regimes, as much as Europe and the US, know very well that Israel's annexation of the West Bank will proceed apace, even if it is tactically delayed. And this will be done with the actual blessings of the "international community"—albeit accompanied by the usual pro forma protests—with the Arab regimes (save Jordan, for its own national security reasons) at the forefront.
Rubio was explicit on this point: "At this time, it's something that we… think might be counterproductive" and "potentially threatening for the peace deal"—but clearly not at a later time, when it could be "productive" and "potentially" conducive to peace.
Indeed, the UN Human Rights Office just released a report documenting the complicity of dozens of countries—mostly European, but also Arab—in Israel's ongoing genocide. The Washington Post likewise revealed that several Arab states have upgraded their military cooperation with Israel during the genocide, including Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.
When Palestinians resist this international support for Israel's continued colonization, settlement, occupation, and annexation of their homeland, all these countries will feign surprise, while openly or covertly abetting the next phase of Israel's genocide, just as they have done for the past two years. And as ever, they will do so in the name of "Israel's right to defend itself."
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Supporters of Peace in Gaza Must Work to Ensure That No One Will Be Forced to Leave
Israeli and US leaders must commit to the Trump peace plan’s promise that no one will be expelled from Gaza.
Oct 26, 2025
Amid some extremely cautious optimism for peace following a tenuous and incomplete ceasefire in Gaza, any hope for Gaza’s future depends significantly on a little-noticed point in President Donald Trump’s original 20-point peace plan.
The plan’s 12th point says, “No one will be forced to leave Gaza, and those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.” The plan goes even further, saying, “We will encourage people to stay and offer them the opportunity to build a better Gaza.”
Although there are reasons to doubt many elements of the Trump “peace plan”—which neither side has agreed to in full—the assertion that no one will be forced to leave Gaza represents a major reversal: Prior Israeli and US government policy clearly aimed to force some or all Palestinians from the Strip.
Indeed, Trump’s previous plan to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East” involved displacing Palestinians outside the Strip. Last March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated his support for the “realization of the Trump plan” and what some Israeli and US leaders euphemistically called “voluntary migration.”
Ending the displacement of Palestinians as well as the mass killing and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure are clear requirements for anything approaching peace.
“This is the plan. We are not hiding it,” Netanyahu said. That same month, the Israeli cabinet approved the creation of a so-called Voluntary Emigration Bureau charged with moving Palestinians out of Gaza and to other countries such as Libya, Indonesia, and the Republic of the Congo.
The mass expulsion of Palestinians by the Israeli government has been a major feature of the last two years of violence following the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas and allied forces, which resulted in the deaths of around 1,200 Israelis and foreigners. In a new report published by Brown University’s Costs of War Project, I compiled the best available international data to document how the Israeli military has displaced almost everyone in Gaza over the past two years: 2,026,636 people or around 92% of the strip’s pre-war population. Many have been displaced multiple times: on average, three to four times for every displaced person. Around 45% of the displaced have been kids.
The displacement has extended to the West Bank, where some Israeli leaders have also supported ethnic cleansing. In the last two years, 43,624 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have been displaced from their homes by the Israeli military and police forces, government-backed Israeli settlers, Israeli government demolition orders, and other violent causes. Broader Israeli and US wars in the region have displaced an additional 3.2 million people in Iran, Lebanon, and Israel itself, as well as what are likely thousands more in Yemen and Syria.
According to numerous experts, the mass displacement of Palestinians—nearly 12,000 per day on average in Gaza alone—constitutes the war crime of “forcible transfer,” which is a crime against humanity under international law. Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore) concluded in a September 2025 report that “the facts demonstrated overwhelmingly” that Israel was “implementing a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians and dealing a death blow to the vision of a future Palestinian state that would include Gaza and the West Bank.” Any implementation of the original Trump plan to displace Palestinians to other countries would constitute further war crimes and ethnic cleansing. It would also continue a pattern of ethnic cleansing dating to the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 and Israeli military forces’ expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians in what Palestinians call the Nakba—the catastrophe.
The lives of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and ultimately the lives of millions of Israelis, hang in the balance as the world waits to see if Netanyahu’s government abides by the current ceasefire and commits to a full end to its war or if it re-commences its assault and genocide as it has in prior ceasefires.
Since the announcement of a deal this month, thousands of displaced Palestinians have filled roads walking in search of their homes in a vast landscape of grey rubble. The sight of people trying to return home amid such destruction offers a glimmer of hope while reflecting the immensity of the challenges ahead.
“I’m going to Gaza City even though there are no conditions for life there—no infrastructure, no fresh water,” one of the displaced, Naim Irheem, insisted to one of the few news outlets reporting from Gaza. “Everything is extremely difficult, truly difficult, but we must go back. My son was killed, all my daughters were wounded. Still, I want to return. We’ll pitch a tent and live in it, however it can be done.”
Ending the displacement of Palestinians as well as the mass killing and destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure are clear requirements for anything approaching peace. Israeli and US leaders must commit to the Trump peace plan’s promise that no one will be expelled from Gaza.
This promise—and the entire peace process—may prove to be yet another cynical ruse, much like the Israeli government calling past expulsion “voluntary migration.” For now, supporters of peace must work to ensure that no one will be forced to leave Gaza, that the displaced can return home as international law requires, and that they receive aid and reparations for their displacement.
These must be among the first steps toward real peace and justice that will require holding perpetrators accountable for their crimes and addressing Palestinians’ rightful demands to return to homes from which they were displaced beginning in 1948.
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Israel Tried to Destroy Gazans' Peoplehood; It Failed
For ordinary people, survival, continuity, and self-assertion are the ultimate signs of victory against Israel, a country that does not hesitate to use genocide for temporary political gains.
Oct 25, 2025
For the last two years, my social media algorithm has been relentlessly dominated by Gaza, particularly by the voices of ordinary Gazans, displaying a blend of emotions that centers on two core principles: grief and defiance.
Grief has characterized life in Gaza for many years, a consequence of successive Israeli wars, the unrelenting siege, and habitual bombardment. The last two years, marked by genocide and famine, however, have redefined that grief in a way almost incomprehensible to the Palestinians themselves.
Yes, Palestine has endured numerous massacres before, during, and since the Nakba—the tragic destruction of the Palestinian homeland. But those massacres were typically episodic, each distinctively marked by specific historical circumstances. Each is incorporated into the Palestinian collective psyche as proof of Israeli barbarity, but also as a demonstration of their own enduring resilience as a people.
I grew up in a Gaza refugee camp where we commemorated each massacre with rallies, general strikes, and artistic expressions. We knew the victims and immortalized them through chants, political graffiti, poetry, and the like.
The Palestinian nation has emerged even more deeply rooted in its identity, both in Gaza and elsewhere.
The war of extermination launched by Israel against Gaza in the last two years has fundamentally changed all of that. On a single day, October 31, 2023, the Israeli army killed 704 Palestinians, and 120 in the Jabaliya refugee camp alone. Single bombs would annihilate hundreds in one strike, often in hospitals, refugee shelters, or United Nations schools. Massacres were taking place every day, everywhere.
There was no time to reflect on any of these massacres, to pray for the victims, or even to bury them with proper dignity. All that Gazans could do was desperately try to cling to life itself, bury their loved ones in mass graves, and use their own bare hands to dig out the wounded and dead from underneath the massive slabs of concrete and mountains of rubble. Thousands remain unaccounted for, and about a quarter of a million Gazans have been killed and wounded.
The tally will continue to grow, and the degree of devastation keeps worsening, even now that the rate of killing has subsided. But why, then, does my social media feed continue to show Palestinians openly celebrating their victory? Why are Gaza's children, though gaunt and exhausted due to the famine, continuing to perform traditional debka dances? Why is 5-year-old Maria Hannoun, one of Gaza's many influencers, continuing to recite the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and sending fiery messages to US President Donald Trump that Gaza will never be defeated?
To say that "Gazans are built differently" is a massive understatement. I have spent the last 20 years dedicated to academic research on the people‘s history of Palestine, focusing heavily on Gaza, and I still find their collective will astonishing. They seem to have made a shared, conscious decision: The metrics for their defeat or victory would be entirely separate from those used by the media covering the war.
These measures are rooted in resistance as a foundational choice. Core values like Karamah (dignity), Izza (pride), and Sabr (patience), among others, are the standards by which Gaza judges its performance. And, by these profound standards, the people of the genocide- and famine-stricken strip have won this war.
Because these values are often ignored or misinterpreted in war coverage, many have found Gaza’s response to the ceasefire, one of unbridled joy and celebration, confusing. The scene of mothers waiting for their sons to be released in a large celebration in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, was particularly illuminating. They cried bitterly, while clapping and ululating all at once. One mother perfectly clarified the paradox for a reporter: The tears were for the sons and daughters killed in the war, and the ululating was for the ones being released.
News media, however, rarely understand the complexity of the Gaza survival paradigm. Some, including Israeli military analysts, have concluded that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has lost the war because he failed to achieve any of his declared objectives. Others speak of some kind of Israeli victory simply because Israel managed to obliterate nearly the whole of Gaza and a large section of its population.
Each side uses numbers and figures to back up their claims. Yet, Palestinians in Gaza view this situation in a fundamentally different way. They understand that Israel's war was ultimately an attempt to destroy their very peoplehood—to shatter their spirit, disorient their culture, turn them against one another, and ultimately eradicate the core essence of being Palestinian.
Gazans celebrate precisely because they know Israel has failed. The Palestinian nation has emerged even more deeply rooted in its identity, both in Gaza and elsewhere. The child singing of the martyrs, the civil defense workers dancing the debka for their fallen comrades, and the woman using the wreckage of a destroyed Israeli Merkava tank to air her laundry—all these images speak of a nation unified by its love for life and its fierce commitment to shared values of valor, honor, and love.
Some analysts, trying to find a more nuanced and reasoned conclusion, have resolved that neither Israel won the war, nor were Palestinians defeated. While this balanced approach can be appreciated in terms of the strategic reading of the ceasefire, it is still profoundly incorrect when understood against the backdrop of popular Palestinian culture. For ordinary people, survival, continuity, and self-assertion are the ultimate signs of victory against Israel, a country that does not hesitate to use genocide for temporary political gains. The core of their triumph is simply this: They remain.
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