The United States has increased its military aid to Israel, notably for the Iron Dome anti-missile system. During major clashes between Israel and Hamas in 2012 and 2014, the United States supported Israel’s right to defend itself. At the United Nations General Assembly, the United States voted against elevating Palestine’s status to a non-member observer state.
The arrival of Donald Trump and his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as well as his insistence on economic growth before a solution can be found to this century-old political problem, have made only embolden the right-wing led by Netanyahu. In 2017, settler leader Yaakov Katz thanked Trump and admitted that during his presidency, settler activity had increased at a rate nearly twice that of the Israeli population.
In 2020, during Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s official visit to a West Bank settlement colony, State Department Legal Advisor Herbert Hansell’s 1978 memo that deemed the settlements illegal Israeli troops beyond the 1949 armistice lines, was officially scrapped. .
From 1967 to 2017, more than 200 Israeli settlements were established in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem). Their current population, according to the report of the Israeli Information Center on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, amounts to almost 620,000 people!
In June 2023, the Biden administration attempted to slap Israel on the wrist by declaring that it would not transfer any funds to research institutes and technology projects in the West Bank. However, when asked whether Trump’s policy of encouraging settlements had been reversed, the State Department confirmed that “we have not taken that action.”
A concerted attempt is underway to show that violence has always been the favorite ploy of Palestinian resistance against Israel. This narrative was packaged into a case that could have read: “Islam and its followers are essentially prone to violence. »
Palestinian civil society’s call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was a peaceful movement, reminiscent of the Gandhian method of resistance. Given its early global success, the United States and NATO reacted with concern, attempting to criminalize BDS across Europe and North America, claiming, with the help of Zionist pressure groups , that the boycott of Israel was “anti-Semitic”.
