Jared Kushner stands behind J D Vance. Who do they represent?
BY ED FELIEN
There is a Cease Fire in Gaza, but that probably doesn’t really mean much.
An Israeli settler drove a bulldozer over an unexploded ordinance and set it off killing two Israelis. Netanyahu used this as an excuse to claim Hamas had re-started the war and began a series of air strikes that killed at least 15 innocents including a journalist. Only after the Pentagon and the White House assured him it was an old mine from before the armistice, did he stop the bombing and resume allowing aid to continue.
Trump’s 20 point peace plan is an acknowledgement of the unconditional surrender of Hamas and the occupation of Gaza by Israeli troops.
Gaza will be governed by a Board of Peace, headed up by Donald Trump, that will supervise the appointment of non-political Palestinians to restore and administer public services.
He has big plans for development of Gaza:
“10. A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East. Many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas have been crafted by well-meaning international groups, and will be considered to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza.”
Trump recognizes the real estate potential of Mediterranean coastal properties. That’s why his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, representing billions of dollars of Saudi investment capital, is standing right behind J D Vance in 
Israel when Vance says, “Once we’ve got to a point where both the Gazans and our Israeli friends can have some measure of security, then we’ll worry about what the long-term governance of Gaza is. Let’s focus on security, rebuilding, giving people some food and medicine.”
In other words, let’s not worry about Palestinian self-governance until we’ve built a few luxury hotels.
The colonial status of Gaza has changed hands many times in the past four thousand years. Beginning as an appendage of Egypt, the name Gaza first appears in the military records of Thutmose III of the New Kingdom of Egypt in the 15th century B.C. As a result of the military adventures of Nebuchadnezzar, Gaza became part of the Babylonian empire in 597 B.C. 
Less than sixty years later, Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and, with the help of the Jewish expatriate community in Babylon, he sent expeditionary forces to take over the Babylonian colonies of Judah and Gaza. Most of the Jewish exiles didn’t want to leave the bright lights and hanging gardens of Babylon for the barren boondocks of the provinces, so they wrote stories and cautionary tales to help guide the expedition. They took the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah and the Flood from common Sumerian myths. They made up the tale of Moses getting lost in the desert for forty years as a cautionary tale to warn about shellfish and pork spoiling in the time it would take to cross the Syrian desert on the way to the Mediterranean. They were loyal colonial subjects: Isaiah 44:28—“I, who says of Cyrus, ‘He is my shepherd and will accomplish all that I please.’” When Alexander the Great conquered Gaza the Philistines became Palestinians.
What will be the fate of Gaza, Palestine and Israel?
The world has recoiled in horror at the genocide of Palestinians.
Two years ago, when Masha Gessen compared the conditions of Palestinians to the conditions of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazis in their essay in the New Yorker, many thought they were exaggerating.
Today, most people agree.
According to a recent poll, 60% of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza. 40% believe they have committed genocide.
Many are coming to believe we have been on the wrong side of history. An American Jew who went to Israel and lived on a kibbutz in their early days of independence, Bernie Sanders said recently, “The entire infrastructure of Gaza, hospitals, schools, water systems, wastewater plants have been destroyed under Trump. And by the way, what bothers me as an American: we have given under Biden and under Trump, $22 billion to Netanyahu‘s extremist government, which for the last month or two have been starving children. That has been their policy.”
History may well judge this moment as the time when the victim became the enemy, the innocent became the monster.
