“Peace President“ Trump and the new phase of the Gaza horror

Some of the people hoping for a more restrained and less war-oriented foreign policy continue to look for signs that Trump is actually doing that. There’s nothing wrong with optimism. And there’s always the thought, “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.” Or, in former Texas Gov. Rick Perry famously put it, “Even a stopped clock is right once a day.”

When it comes to Israel’s latest escalation in direct war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, he has the Trump 2.0 Administration’s full backing. Trump is trying to juggle the PR face of genocide. But he is supporting it.

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill has a report at Drop Site on the plan as it’s currently being implemented. (1) He speaks about it at length in this interview: (2)

As Scahill explains in his article:

Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear: His decision to allow a minuscule amount of aid to enter Gaza is a tactical one aimed at quieting international condemnation of Israel’s forced starvation of Gaza and to clear the path of a final solution imposed on the Palestinians of Gaza.

"We're going to take control of all the Gaza Strip,” Netanyahu vowed Monday in a video released by his office announcing that Israel would begin delivering “minimal humanitarian aid: food and medicine only.” Netanyahu claimed that international pressure, including from pro-Israel Republican senators and the White House, required the appearance of humanitarian intervention. "Our best friends in the world—senators I know as strong supporters of Israel—have warned that they cannot support us if images of mass starvation emerge," he said. “They come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you all the help you need to win the war… but we can’t be receiving pictures of famine,’” Netanyahu added. To continue the war of annihilation, he asserted, “We need to do it in a way that they won't stop us.” [my emphasis]

Peace President Trump actually can stop Netanyahu’s war on Gaza Palestinians by cutting off US military aid. But that’s not the plan he’s currently implementing. Scahill:

Netanyahu’s coalitional ally Bezalel Smotrich—an extreme right-wing government minister and longtime advocate of starving, mass killing, and depopulating Gaza—endorsed Netanyahu’s move. Smotrich said the aid scheme would allow “our friends in the world to continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and the Hague Tribunal, and for us to continue to fight, God willing, until victory.” …

“Truth be told, until the last of the hostages returns, we should also not let water into the Gaza Strip. But the reality is that if we do that, the world will force us to halt the war immediately, and to lose. It would be winning the battle, and losing the war. I'm committed to winning the war,” Smotrich declared. “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us. There are pressures. There are those who attack [us]; they are trying to [make us] stop; they are not succeeding. You know why they aren't succeeding? Because we are navigating [the campaign] responsibly and wisely, and that's how we'll continue to do [it]."

Smotrich said that the Israeli forces are initiating a campaign to force Palestinians into the south of Gaza “and from there, God willing, to third countries, as part of President Trump's plan. This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.” [my emphasis]

Scahill also did another long interview with his Drop Site colleague Ryan Grim. (3)

Trumpista “restrainers”?

Alex Kane describes the (basically fake) “restrainer” rhetoric that Trump 2.0 has been projecting in the Peace President mode:

Experts say that Trump’s distance from Netanyahu has been visible since before the Middle East tour—in particular since March, when Israel ended the ceasefire with Hamas that Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff had helped broker. According to Yousef Munayyer, head of the Palestine/Israel Program at the Arab Center Washington, DC, Israel’s renewed bombardment of Gaza dashed Trump’s hopes of using the ceasefire to build on the Abraham Accords—the normalization deals between Israel and Arab states that he facilitated during his first term—and especially his aspiration to bring Saudi Arabia into the agreements. “It became clear the Israelis were not going to help Trump advance the objectives that he wanted within the region, and that Netanyahu was putting his own domestic political interests ahead of his relationship with Trump,” said Munayyer. [my emphasis] (4)

Kane gives this description of the “restrainer” element in the Trumpista movement (paragraph breaks added):

More broadly, observers say, the Trump administration’s assertive position with Israel is part of a new “America First” brand of foreign policy that focuses on making deals with one-time enemies to reduce tensions and advance US economic interests in the Middle East, all while focusing attention on other rivals such as China, which Trump and his allies believe more acutely threaten American hegemony.

Multiple conservative commentators told Jewish Currents that the administration’s embrace of this position is responsive to a newly robust conservative “restraint” movement, which sees the War on Terror era of US intervention in the Middle East as an utter failure and instead demands a massive pullback of military assets from the Middle East. “There are dozens of people I would identify as restrainers in this administration,” said Justin Logan, the director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

At times, Trump himself has adopted the language of restraint: In his Saudi Arabia speech, he inveighed against “neocons” and accused Middle East “interventionalists” of “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.“ Curt Mills, the executive director of the anti-interventionist conservative magazine The American Conservative, said that the newfound strength of the “restraint” strain has meant that the Israeli government—and in particular Netanyahu—has become more vulnerable to previously muted criticism from the right. “There’s always been this looming question within populist conservative foreign policy: Is it America First, with the exception of Israel?” he said. “This month would seem to indicate the answer to that is no.” [my emphasis]

Yes, Trump did use “restrainer” rhetoric in Saudi Arabia. But he’s continuing to provide the military aid necessary for Israel to continue the Gaza genocide. And the results so far are clear, as Dahlia Scheindlin explains in a column that also gives some first-hand insight into what Israeli protests there are against the war:

Estimates of direct deaths in Gaza from the Israel-Hamas war range from 52,000 to 64,000, and indirect deaths could be in the hundreds of thousands by now. In March, UNICEF reported that approximately 15,000 of the dead were children; on Thursday, Gaza's Health Ministry put that number at 16,500 children.

Cities, towns and camps have been eradicated; infrastructure, schools, hospitals, cultural and educational centers decimated. Bodies are rotting under crushed concrete, dogs are eating the bodies, children die of malnutrition. The living lack water, food, medicine, sewage, homes – not to mention safety from Israeli bombs, aimed even at their wretched tents. (5)

And so far, Peace President Trump has continued the military and economic aid and diplomatic aid that make all this possible. Except in the occasional rhetorical posture, that alleged Trumpista “restrainer” faction doesn’t seem to have much clout when it comes to actual policy.

The (mercenary-backed) Gaza Humanitarian Fund

In another ghastly development in the Peace President’s policy, the UN agency that has provided humanitarian support for Palestinian refugees since the Nakba of 1948 is no longer allowed by Israel and its Trumpista backers to do so. Responsibility for the trickle of aid that Natanyahu’s government is now allowing into Gaza belong to a new agency called the Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). This headline to a column for Haaretz by Ben Samuels gives a glimpse of the vibe around this project: (6)

The minimal aid that the “humanitarian” fund will be providing will be reinforced by mercenaries. As Samuels comments:

Amid all the scrutiny and skepticism surrounding the Trump administration's plan to address Gaza's humanitarian crisis, one element has seemed particularly perplexing: the use of private military contractors to secure the planned aid.

Two little-known firms, the Safe Reach Solutions (SRS) logistics company and the UG Solutions private security company, will publicly assist the newly established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and deliver aid amid increasing global outrage surrounding Israel's failures to alleviate the crisis.

Blackwater mercs in Iraq caused major problems for the US-controlled interim Coalition Provisional Authority back during the Cheney-Bush Administration’s disastrous intervention there.

The use of mercenaries and soldiers of fortune dates back thousands of years, though their presence in conflict zones became particularly concerning over the past several decades amid the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We know from countless examples that contractors do not see themselves as bound by the same already-way-too-loose rules of engagement that the militaries operate under," Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy think tank, told Haaretz.

As Samuels reports, the SRS mercenary group’s CEP, Phil Reilly, served a senior manager for “special activities” for a company called Cosntellis, which was:

... a private military contractor formed after Academi merged with fellow private security company Triple Canopy. Academi was the rebranded Blackwater, which is perhaps the most notorious example of a private security company wantonly using force in a war zone – as it became a household name after a massacre committed by its employees in Iraq in 2007. [my emphasis]

And he includes a further statement from Matt Duss:

Humanitarian organizations already have the capacity to massively surge aid into Gaza if the Israeli government would stop blocking aid into Gaza. The scheme for delivering aid is simply a way to facilitate the policy of denying aid to some people, and using aid to corral Palestinians into a smaller piece of land.

I’m going to make an easy prediction here. This will not work out well. Not for the United States, and certainly not for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. I’m providing a link to the full Samuels column that does a good job of explaining what a dark plan this is.

Also worth noting: An article in Ynet News, the English outlet of the popular Israeli newspaper Jedi’ot Acharonot, looking at one of Netanyahu’s propaganda claims about the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack.

Notes:

(1) Scahill, Jeremy (2025): Netanyahu: Gaza Aid Scheme Offers Israel Symbolic Cover to Finish the Genocide. Drop Site 05/19/2025. <https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/netanyahu-trump-gaza-aid-genocide-smotrich-ceasefire-hamas> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(2) Israel’s Gaza Trap: Starve, Lure, Kill—Jeremy Scahill Exposes “Final Phase” of Genocide. Empire Files YouTube channel 05/22/2025. <https://youtu.be/NDtwwSdur5I?si=pQLb16KhTPr8ckb> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(3) Israel Is Attempting to Execute a Final Solution in Gaza. Drop Site. Drop Site 05/20/2025. <https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/israel-united-states-hamas-genocide-gaza-drop-site-live> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(4) Kane, Alex (2025): Unpacking the Rift Between Trump and Netanyahu. Jewish Currents 05/21/2025. <https://jewishcurrents.org/unpacking-the-rift-between-trump-and-netanyahu> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(5) What Will It Take for Israelis to Acknowledge the Suffering in Gaza? Haaretz 05/22/2025. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-22/ty-article/.premium/what-will-it-take-for-israelis-to-acknowledge-the-suffering-in-gaza/00000196-f89c-db1f-a7b6-fabc6e6c0000?gift=ef08b241d88348249a7e51325e108d09> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(6) Samuels, Ben (2025): 'They Don't Look Like Humanitarians': Who Are the Opaque U.S. Military Contractors Hired to Guard the New Gaza Aid Project? Haaretz 05/22/25025. <https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2025-05-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/they-dont-look-like-humanitarians-the-opaque-u-s-companies-hired-to-secure-gaza-aid/00000196-f83e-d7c4-a9b6-fc3e755a0000?gift=fbcb67a1f775493eb2e4bfb24c57b165> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).

(7) Eyal, Nadav (2ß25): Mr. prime minister, the massacre was not carried out by a mob in flip-flops. Ynet News 05/22/2025. <https://www.ynetnews.com/article/ryz1rh2zgx> (Accessed: 2025-23-05).