(LifeSiteNews) — Former U.S. president Donald Trump said Israel’s behavior in conducting its retaliatory attack on the 2.3 million people of Gaza has done tremendous damage to how the Jewish state is perceived around the world, putting them “in trouble” and encouraging antisemitism.
“You have to finish up your war. To finish it up. You gotta get it done,” Trump said to Israel Hayom, an Israeli daily newspaper founded by the late Sheldon Adelson. “Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support, you have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace, to get on to a normal life for Israel, and for everybody else.”
When the Israeli interviewer asked him about “a major rise in antisemitic attacks since Oct. 7,” Trump suggested this is a natural result to the devastation the Israeli army is inflicting upon tens of thousands of innocent lives along with enormous swaths of civilian infrastructure in the Strip.
READ: Col. Macgregor: The ‘top priority’ for Israel is to make Gaza ‘unlivable,’ expel all survivors
“Well, that’s because you (Israel) fought back. And I think Israel made a very big mistake. I wanted to call (Israel) and say don’t do it,” he said. “These photos and shots. I mean, moving shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza. And I said, ‘Oh, that’s a terrible portrait. It’s a very bad picture for the world.’”
On this point, the likely Republican nominee for president appeared to agree with Jewish Middle East scholar, author and activist Norman Finkelstein, who told Russell Crowe in January (48:48) that an increase in “animus towards Jews in general” (“antisemitism”) is an “inevitable spillover” of “the self-proclaimed ‘Jewish state’ which claims the genocide it’s committing in Gaza is in the name of the Jewish people.”
He provided parallels between this and his own father, who spent time in Auschwitz and, due to this experience, “hated” not only Nazis but Germans in general. Finkelstein also spoke of anti-American sentiment as a “spillover” from the actions of the U.S. government abroad.
Yet, mitigating such anti-Jewish animus, he observed, is the “number of self-identified Jews, in particular Jewish Voices for Peace or the organization Not in Our Name, who now stand in the forefront, the vanguard, of the opposition to this genocidal war.” Citing a friend, he agreed that “the best organized and the most aggressive opponents of the Israeli genocide are Jewish” (see here, here, and here).
Evidence of Israelis killing civilians with drones, sniper shots to children’s heads and more
With regard to the massive destruction, Trump continued, “The world is seeing this … every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people.”
Proposing an alibi for such destruction, the interviewer asserted “terrorists are hiding in those buildings,” to which the former president said, “Go and do what you have to do. But you don’t do that. And I think that’s one of the reasons that there has been a lot of kickback.”
Israeli soldiers themselves have uploaded their own social media videos from Gaza celebrating the detonation of widespread large explosives taking down vast areas of buildings. These clips are often set to music for the seeming enhancement of its revelry and entertainment value supposedly for Israeli audiences.
WATCH: Israeli soldiers celebrate the ‘torturing, humiliating, and mocking’ of Palestinians on social media
Additionally, as much of the world charges Israel with committing crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, other evidence of Israeli extreme brutality, torture, murder, rape and utter disrespect for human life and even the corpses of deceased Palestinians have emerged in media reports.
Last Friday, Al Jazeera released footage of an Israeli drone stalking and then firing upon four apparently unarmed young Palestinian men, killing them all with multiple attacks. The killings reportedly took place in January, were filmed by the drone and fed back to the Israeli command center (watch here).
Additional images come from testimonies like that of Dr. Irfan Galaria, an American physician who volunteered in January to treat patients in Gaza. Having worked in war zones before, the surgeon wrote, that what he witnessed “was not war — it was annihilation.”
In addition to performing many amputations of arms and legs, that would not have been necessary if standard medical equipment were available, he also described an occasion when “a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head,” and none survived.
Other atrocities include the desecration of multiple cemeteries in the Strip with bulldozers destroying tombs, stealing corpses and exposing others to be crushed into the ground with Israeli military vehicles.
And last month, officials from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights voiced alarm over reports of women and girls having been “arbitrarily executed in Gaza, often together with family members, including their children.”
These included “reports of the deliberate targeting and extrajudicial killing of Palestinian women and children in places where they sought refuge, or while fleeing. Some of them were reportedly holding white pieces of cloth when they were killed by the Israeli army or affiliated forces,” the UN officials said.
Palestinian woman shot by Israeli forces while evacuating
Exclusive footage for Middle East Eye shows the shocking moment a Palestinian woman was shot by Israeli forces in Gaza. The incident occurred as she and others attempted to evacuate the area, waving white flags amid the… pic.twitter.com/arZfiNevxG
— Middle East Monitor (@MiddleEastMnt) January 9, 2024
Other grave concerns include the arbitrary detention of hundreds of Palestinian girls and women in both Gaza and the West Bank.
“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers. At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence,” the officials said.
Israel has lost most of the world, due to genocidal destruction, U.S. isolated
For such reasons, Trump went on to assert that “Israel’s in trouble right now it’s in trouble.”
“You have a lot of people on the outside that are not friendly to Israel, and they’re never going to be friendly to Israel. And you have to be very careful. You’re in a very treacherous neighborhood,” he proposed.
In a late January interview, U.S. Col. Douglas Macgregor said the populations in the Middle East Arab nations such as Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Turkey “are so angry and so enraged, they’re ready to fight, regardless of what the costs are, to destroy Israel.”
“As a result, increasingly across the Middle East, everyone who is in power or authority is privately saying … we will no longer tolerate this Israeli state and they are moving towards a state of war across the region, which will culminate, I think, in the destruction of Israel,” the decorated combat veteran warned. “And I don’t think we (the U.S.) can stop it.”
READ: Col. Macgregor: Israel’s actions in Gaza could cause its own destruction, WWIII
Since last October, the national government members of the United Nations have voted in overwhelming majorities multiple times demanding a ceasefire in the conflict (October, 121-14; December, 153-10) and 172-4, also in December, affirming the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Additionally, the United States has been profoundly isolated casting multiple vetoes on the UN Security Council against otherwise near unanimous judgments supporting a ceasefire.
In January, the International Court of Justice – the highest court of the United Nations – delivered a preliminary ruling finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible” and refused to dismiss the case as Israel had demanded. In February, an overwhelming majority of nations testified to the same court that the “root” cause of the conflict, the 57-year Israeli occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territories, was “existentially illegal.”
READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?
Since besieging the Strip after the October 7 attack by Hamas, reports indicate the Israelis have killed at least 33,138 people, including 32,682 in Gaza (14,280 children, 9,340 women), and at least 435 in the West Bank (115 children), with injuries numbering 74,188 in Gaza and 5,000 in the West Bank (725 children). Additionally, an estimated 7,000 more individuals are reported missing and are presumed dead and buried under the rubble (4,900 women and children).
Moreover, 1.7 million (75%) of Palestinians in Gaza are displaced, and 2.2 million are facing crisis, emergency, or famine levels of food insecurity with at least 31 deaths (27 children) being reported thus far due to malnutrition.
READ: Warnings of ‘mass starvation’ in Gaza as Western powers freeze UN relief funds
Finally, with hundreds of American-made 2,000-pound bombs being dropped on this most populated region in the world, an estimated 50% to 62% of all buildings in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed by the end of January alone (watch video).
Trump, Biden ‘firmly in Israel’s camp’ due to donations from Jewish, Christian Zionist groups
Yet, after months of silence on this issue, Trump also affirmed two weeks ago that he was “firmly in Israel’s camp” with regard to the conduct of the assault. And despite polls showing American voters’ strong support for a permanent ceasefire (67%), and for conditioning military aid to Israel including allowing displaced Palestinians to return to their homes (59%), and committing to peace talks regarding a two-state solution (52%), Trump told Israel Hayom that under similar circumstances he “would act very much the same way” the Israelis have in conducting the war.
Considering the enormous damage and precipitous loss of innocent human life being inflicted on the Palestinian people, along with the near-universal condemnation of such atrocities by the nations of the world and the resulting isolation of Israel and the United States on the global stage, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi explained how high-level domestic donors continue to defy the popular will of the citizenry.
In a Tuesday interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano, the expert in international security said, “Biden knows — and certainly Donald Trump also knows — that to come down hard on Israel means the loss of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions coming from both Jewish organizations that support Israel, no matter what, and from Christian Zionists who have the same sentiment.”
READ: Journalist Max Blumenthal breaks down Israel’s massive influence over US foreign policy
“So, this is hardball politics coming against what is absolutely right to do, which is to stop this war in Gaza, stop supporting Israelis with weapons and with money and turn the game around,” Giraldi opined. “But they don’t have the courage, these people don’t have the integrity.”
In recent years, the Israel lobby has been increasingly acknowledged as the driving force that has invincibly secured the virtually unconditional support of the United States for Israel’s ongoing violations of international law, both financially and diplomatically, despite polls in the U.S. finding such largess to be unpopular.
As columnist Caitlin Johnstone summed-up in a Twitter/X post, “It says so much about US politics that Biden’s most vulnerable political weak point is the fact that he’s sponsoring a genocide, but Republicans can’t attack him on that point because they support the genocide too.”
It says so much about US politics that Biden’s most vulnerable political weak point is the fact that he’s sponsoring a genocide, but Republicans can’t attack him on that point because they support the genocide too.
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 11, 2024
Editor’s Note: This article was updated April 1 removing a live interview conducted by Al Jazeera Arabic the contents of which were later disputed and could not be substantiated by LifeSiteNews. Other material relating to a February 19 statement of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights was added.
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