Trump and Netanyahu to “the abstention from the settlements” or “the resetting”
Written by Nasser Kandil,
The meeting which brought together the US President Donald Trump and the Head of the government of the occupation Benjamin Netanyahu has paved the way for the speculations and the questions about the possibility to translate the escalating rhetoric on which each one depends and how to translate it. Some people wonder whether the choice is the war either on Iran or Hezbollah, but this analysis ignored the fact that this meeting has occurred after many interventions in the Middle East where the US and the Israeli armies failed, because of their inability to make blood, but the reason of the failure was not the inaction or the cowardice of the US Presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama. The armies did not get out of the battlefields and gave the banner to the intelligence to create strife but only after they exhausted all the opportunities of investing on the destructive fiery surplus power, and the capacities of intimidation, to the extent of the inability to overcome the two obstacles for which America waged the war, and has occupied Afghanistan and Iraq to besiege them, namely Iran and Syria. Israel has shared the failure with America through its two big wars against the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine in 2006 and 2008.
Trump and Netanyahu met after the strategic slogan of Israel became the restoration of the deterrence ability, and after the war became the last choice for Israel to achieve this goal, so it hid behind a wall through which it disconnects the Palestinian areas to avoid the consequences of the Palestinian uprisings and behind the Iron Dome Weapon to avoid the rockets of the resistance movements, while Trump is preparing himself to hide behind the customs wall through which he protects the US goods from competition, that is related which the wall which he started to build on the borders with Mexico, and behind a media dome through which he shows himself strong through the declarations and positions, and whenever his position collides with his weakness, it is substituted with more flexible and less strict position as the safe zone in Syria, the transfer of the US embassy to Jerusalem, and the seeking to blow up the nuclear agreement with Iran, so his boastings move to other places once to Europe and once to Australia and once to China.
Trump and Netanyahu stand on the top of similar pyramids in configuration and culture, while the inability to make blood unites them in the language of war. The settlement was the origin of the emergence of their entities politically and demographically, the slogan of the Promised Land is the doctrine of the American and the Zionist dreams, but they share also the contradiction between the ability to go to war and the culture of arrogance which drives for escalation, between the weakness in the fields and its effect on the growth of extremism in the positions, where the ruling institution becomes weak according to the voters and becomes in need of a populist speech to regain their loyalty, therefore, the racism waves and the language of war spread, but when they collide with the ability they turn into negotiating cards. The problem of the two entities is the same; it is the inability to go to war and the inability to make peace, so today each one of them is protecting by raising the cost of his partnership in the settlements through the philosophy of the abstention from the settlements and the solutions, which the forces of the resistance have resorted to when they were at the state of weakness in making wars, and when the proposed settlements were inappropriate with the minimum limits of its constants. It is an exchange of positions and roles between the forces of hegemony and the aggression and the resistance forces.
What is going on in Washington between Trump and Netanyahu is resetting the files of the settlements from all the points of the axioms and the constants in order to begin from the zero-understandings, and the seeking to get a new cost for every step in the ladder of understanding. This is what is done by Trump toward Russia, China, and Iran and this is what is done by Netanyahu toward the Palestinian cause, but both of them need the negotiations as a path for confrontation and both of them are afraid from the cost of the negotiations which reflect the balances of powers so they try to simplify them. It is the time of resetting and linking the dispute, not the time of the war or the settlements.
Translated by Lina Shehadeh,