[Prefatory Note: The short assessment of Israel’s strategic objectives that are not addressed in the Trump Twenty-Point Plan was initially written in response to a question put to by a Brazilian journalist with a special interest in the Middle East.]

Reading Israel Katz’s comments on Annexation of WB, permanent presence in Gaza, and Policies of Disproportionate Reprisal

Israel Katz, Israel’s Minister of Defense, used blunt language to express his version of ‘Greater Israel’ that is alone an acceptable outcome of this long struggle culminating in the Gaza Genocide. What Katz proposes is at minimum the de facto annexation of the West Bank and Israel’s permanent presence in the 53% of Gaza that Israel now occupies, made irreversible by the establishment of Jewish settlements in Northern Gaza. Katz can be read as implicitly recognizing Israel’s inability to reach these goals de jure, which can be understood as an expression of Zionist realism as to the limits of Israel’s influence at any given time. Such remarks may have been unscripted, and not indicative of how Netanyahu proposes to handle this interaction between the Trump Plan and the Zionist Endgame.

This controversial language of Katz should be interpreted both as trouble ahead for the Trump diplomacy, an exhibition of Israel’s growing awareness that the contradictions between the further implementation of remaining fundamental tenets of the Zionist vision and the Trump diplomacy may collide in the future. In the past this gap between what geopolitical managers were willing to grant Israel and what Israel insists upon as the price of peace meant a frozen diplomacy. Before Katz spoke this acceptance of a de facto version of realizing Israeli goals had rarely openly acknowledged by a public official in relation to these expansionist and hegemonic ambitions.

This official silence in relation to Israel’s unattained strategic objectives may have been intended as a temporary expression of deference to the international consensus on an endgame for the struggle between Jews and Palestinians, which has been the case since the General Assembly 1947 Partition Resolution of 181, continues to support a ‘two-state solution.’ Such solution is not favored by a wide spectrum of opinion among the political elites and citizenry of Israel that currently affirm a commitment to a single Israeli state, often known as ‘Greater Israel’, but seemingly excluded from the Trump Plan. This helps explain why Netanyahu and other prominent Israelis have in recent months made their determined opposition to Palestinian statehood in any form. Also relevant is that criticism directed at Israel’s tactics of starvation and civilian targeting has been made by the governments most complicit with the genocide (except the US), including France, the UK, and Canada, that pointedly and stubbornly support the establishment of a Palestinian state. [See French-backed New York Declaration:United Nations High-Level International Conference – New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State solution (29 July 2025)]

A previous signal of Israeli one-statism was the refusal to declare existing territorial borders as final.  

Katz has made other disturbing comments in his official response to a deadly stabbing attack in the West Bank a few days ago. Katz declared that he has “ordered a military action against the home village” of the Palestinian attacker, a measure of reprisal contrary to international law in two respects: openly attacking a civilian village and inflicting collective punishment on an innocent community. Israel newspapers reports more measured Israeli responses to the incident of course labeled as ‘terrorism’ that may suggest that Katz’s provocative words should be partially discounted given his reputation as a stand-alone ‘hothead.’ 

All along Israel has opted for disproportionate and indiscriminate responses to any signs of armed Palestinian resistance. Israel formulated the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, first enunciated in 2006 as an articulation of Israel’s response to Hezbollah operating out of Lebanon in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. As Dahiya was long understood it was nothing new. It made explicit what Israel had been doing all along in the name of national security.

What may be noteworthy with respect to these utterances by Katz is their relevance to territorial sovereignty ambitions and the future of Gaza. It has long been agreed upon by expert observers of Israel that the current leadership of Israel to varying degrees adhered to Zionist ideology that included the prospect of West Bank annexation and further Judaification by way of the settlement movement as well as the partial annexation of Gaza reinforced by Jewish settlements situated in northern Gaza. That Zionist ambitions along these lines existed in Tel Aviv should not have come as a surprise in informed circles, although its open acknowledgement at this time is unexpected, especially as it rubs against the grain of US efforts to build wide international support for the Trump 20 Point Plan, which is strongly weighted in favor of Israel and dismissive of Palestinian grievances.

The timing of Katz’s utterances may reflect Israeli concern about the nature of Trump’s regional approach that seemed to preclude such territorial expansion. This might slow down Israel’s timetable, but would not likely inhibit the Israeli leadership, that Israel will move forward with its ‘day after’ diplomacy while paying lip service to the Trump Plan. Trump’s diplomacy has major benefits for Israel. It masks accountability issues, thereby ensuring impunity for Israel’s engagement with the criminality of genocide and apartheid, and possibly ecocide, exhibited daily in the past two plus years to the entire world. The Miami meeting scheduled for Monday, December 29 between Netanyahu and Trump may cast light on whether Katz’s comments touched on points of tension between Washington and Tel Aviv or were just a way of reminding the world of a major tenet of Zionist ideology at a critical moment when the non-Israelis were formulating the future of what has become known as Occupied Palestinian Territories.  Time will tell us more about the relative leverage of Israel and the United States in crafting a post-genocide future for the two peoples. In this sense, it is most unfortunate that no modality of Palestinian participation could be agreed upon during this period of Trump diplomacy.

As such thoughts linger, the people of Gaza have not been treated with dignity but mostly left homeless amid the rubble to cope with fierce Winter without heat, adequate food, and a conscientious Israel effort to abide by the ceasefire that it has consistently violated in ways that overcome any uncertainty. There is little reason to doubt that Israel’s annexationist and expansionist goals retain their position at the top of Israel’s policy agenda.

Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Politics

Prefatory Note: The post below is based on modified responses to questions addressed to me by Rodrigo Craveiro, a Brazilian journalist. The focus is what to expect in the weeks ahead to follow from the Trump dipomatic offensive to bring an Israeli crafted peace to fruition in Gaza, and broader stability to the entire Middle East}

1. There is a sense of joy but also of fury due to the fact all the bodies didn´t return to Israel. How do you see this?

Given the overall experience of the past two years, the attention accorded to the hostages by the Western media is misleadingly disproportionate, and as usual Israel-biased. And now the pain of those Israelis who seek the agreed return of the bodies of non-surviving hostages is an extension of this distortion that shifts global concerns away from the terrible carnage and ccontinuing suffering in Gaza, and the totally ravaged homeland of the Palestinians that is being subject to day after arrangements made by its tormentors without Palestinian participation, much less authentic representation selected by the Palestinian people. Legitimate Palestinian leadership does not presently exist even if there existed a commitment to identify and endow such individuals with appropriate roles. For sustainable progress toward a just future peace to be achieved the Palestinians must participate and be representative of their own choosing. Such a reality can only be decided by the Palestinians themselves, most obviously, in an internationally monitored competitive election among rival claimants to Palestinian leadership throughout Occupied Palestine.

Hamas evidently agreed to return the bodies of dead hostages in their possession, but given the difficulty of locating the bodies and collecting the remains, unless there is a genuine repudiation by Hamas of this underlying duty associated with the ceasefire, their good will deserves the benefit of the doubt. The disappointment of the families in Israel that suffered from this human loss is understandable, but it should be interpreted in ways that are subordinate to more relevant issues such as ceasefire violations. It was reported two days after the ceasefire went into effect that Israel killed by gunfire and missiles 7 Palestinians seeking to visit their destroyed home in Gaza City, a disturbing incident which seemed received scant, if any, coverage in international media or mainstream international commentary, and yet could be seen as evidence of the fragility of the ceasefire arrangements or an indication that Israel is ready to risk or is even seeking the collapse of the ceasefire by testing its limits. A carefree attitude toward the renewal of the violent encounter that rests on implied, or even secret, assurances of unwavering US support.

• Trump addressed the Israeli Knesset, where he said that his peace plan marks the “historic dawn of a new Middle East”. Do you believe this is something real or is he exaggerating?

My best guess is that historians looking back at those words will conclude that Trump had confused dawn with dusk. There is no prospect of a brightening of the dark skies casting a shadow on the countries of Middle East until Palestinian rights arerespected, and that includes honoring the international right of return of the seven million Palestinian refugees. There must be a campaign to obtain proper accountability for the Gaza Genocide. Until the costs of Gaza reconstruction are borne by the perpetrators of the devastation, accompanied by some process of reconciliation that does not whitewash the crimes of Israel and its enablers it will be impossible to create a peaceful future for the region. At the very least the vast devastation caused by the genocide must be physically overcome by a process of reconstruction funded by adequate reparations. The scope of reconstruction must include health, heritage and religious sites, educational and cultural institutions, residential neighborhoods, UNRWA facilities, and much else. The most painful losses of loved ones and body parts can never be compensated by material means and are an enduring negative legacy of the Gaza Genocide. Even recognizing pragmatic constraints on peacemaking given political conditions a ‘peace’ crafted to please the perpetrator of genocide and its most complicit supporter, is highly unlikely to proceed very far. The Trump 20 Point Plan is not a break with the past, but an effort to induce forgetfulness necessary to attain credibility in proposing post-conflict arrangements. To grasp the ironies of this Trump Plan we should imagine our reactions if the Nazi survivors of World War II had been put in charge of designing the future of the international order, or even of just post-war Germany. It would not have seemed like a step toward a peaceful future regardless of the language used to obscure the perverse underlying reality.  

3- Trump and the three mediating governments signed the peace plan for Gaza at the Sharm el-Sheik Summit. Given this development, what can we expect to happen in the future?

It is almost universally believed that the ceasefire should remain operative even if violations of the underlying plan occur or its further implementation stalls. Beyond this it is a matter of how much leverage is exerted by the US to advance the governance proposals in Part II of Trump‘s Plan. Whether Hamas and Palestinian resistance forces are subject to being coerced by further threats of Israeli renewal of its genocidal assault is unclear. It is also uncertain if the US would go along with an Israeli unilateral departure from the Trump Plan. Israel is quite capable of fabricating claims that Hamas is violating the ceasefire and related obligations leaving it no choice but to resume its military operations. It would appear at this time that Trump would allow Israel to exercise such an option. At the same time, Trump is so mercurial and narcissistic that it possible he would regard Israel’s action as undermining his claims as peacemaker, and repudiate the Israeli resumption of large-scale violence in Gaza. In an odd way Israel and Trump may turn out to have different goals. Israel has not given up its quest for ‘Greater Israel,’ which means absorbing not only East Jerusalem, but Gaza and the West Bank within its sovereign territory. Trump may still strangely believe he can obtain the Nobel Peace Prize if his Plan is operationalized in Gaza and the two conflicting parties accept the arrangements.

Overall, it is clear that peace and stability will not be the future of the Middle East until Israel respects Palestinian rights, drastically redefines or repudiate Zionism and apartheid in a manner consistent with international law, and agrees to the establishment of a Peace & Reconciliation Commission to acknowledge Israel’s past criminal violations of Palestinian rights and to announce a new dedication to the creation of an independent commission that assists the Palestinian/Israeli leadership to build future relations between Jews and Arabs on the basis of equality, dignity, and rights as the foundation for sustainable patterns of peaceful coexistence. For a truly new and stable Middle East Israel  must agree to the establishment of a nuclear free zone, including itself and Iran.

4- What are Risks of Clashes between Hamas and Gaza Clans and Factions?

These issues are murky, with contending interpretations and explanations of their recent prominence in the midst of this most ambitious effort to develop the current ceasefire pause into a framework for long-term conflict resolution by implementing, perhaps with modifications, the advanced phases of the Trump 20 Point Plan. In this context, Israel seems to welcome these tensions within Gaza, by various means including subsidies, to allow them an option to exit from this series of developments that might challenge their annexation plans in the West Bank as well as Gaza. It is possible that the Netanyahu government agreed to the ceasefire only to secure the return of the hostages, and never assented to any wider interference with its militarist approach, and may have had assurances of Trump’s support no matter what.  If this plays out Israel would actually welcome the collapse of the conflict-resolution part of the framework in a manner that would find tacit acceptance, if not outright approval in Washington. Such a manipulation of reality requires pinning the blame on Hamas that is currently taking the form of criticizing Hamas for seeking to destroy those armed groups in Gaza that collaborated with the Israeli military operations.

Such a line of interpretation is reinforced by Israeli unreasonably shrill complaints about the Hamas failure to return all of the bodies of the dead hostages. On its part Hamas claims it has returned all the remains it could discover with its existing equipment, given that some dead hostages remain trapped far beneath the rubble. This seems a reasonable explanation as Hamas has little incentive to retain the remains of dead Israeli hostages or of taking steps that provide an excuse for Israel to resume bombardment and other forms of violence in Gaza.

Such a line of interpretation is also consistent with Israel’s pattern of lethal violence killing Palestinians in several instances that have the clear appearance of being deliberate violations of the ceasefire agreement. Additionally, Israeli interference with the delivery of humanitarian aid by reducing the entry of relief goods by 50% is another expression of Israel’s unwillingness to allow even a conflict-resolving process weighted in its favor to go forward.  These are serious provocations by Israel, causing sharp criticism from some governments that had previously endorsed the Trump approach, but not yet even a whimper of disapproval from the US.

The gathering evidence suggests that Israel is accumulating grounds for repudiating the ‘peace’ process and resuming its military operations accompanied by a renewed clampdown on the further delivery of humanitarian aid, despite widespread hunger, disease, and trauma among the civilian population of Gaza.  The next week or so shall determine whether this pessimistic assessment dooms the ceasefire as well as the prospects for conflict-resolution by diplomacy rather than through further recourse to genocide. Israel since the return of the living hostages in Gaza holds all the cards and Hamas has none except for its incredible capacity of resilience.

As yet there is no signs pointing to a new dawn.

Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Politics

[Prefatory Note: Interview by Daniel Falcone on Sept 8 Israeli attack on Hamas

negotiating team residence in Doha ending diplomatic effort, at least temporarily, to reach agreement on a US proposed/ allegedly Israel approved ceasefire/hostage exchange arrangements. A disturbing development from many points of view, including the role of secure diplomatic settings for conflict resolution war-averting efforts.]

September 23, 2025

Israel’s Qatar Strike Undermines Sovereignty and International Law

Richard Falk – Daniel Falcone

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In the aftermath of this Israel-Qatar attack that seemed at first to threaten the Western interests in the Middle East, is a strange combination of verbal denunciation of Israeli violation of Qatari sovereignty with a political status quo in play.

Israel’s brazen September 8 missile strike on Doha in targeting senior Hamas negotiators has sent reactions all throughout the region, threatening to disrupt US brokered ceasefire talks. Further, it brought questions about Israel’s strategy and intent as well as their government’s disregard for global norms. Coming amid delicate diplomacy and on the soil of a key U.S. ally, the attack challenges assumptions about core-peripheral power, and underlines the ever-changing politics of the Middle East. In the Q/A that follows, Daniel Falcone interviews Richard Falk for insight into the consequences of this act and what it reveals about Israel’s objectives.

Daniel Falcone: Can you explain the incredible action of Israel in bombing Qatar? Why should we be surprised? Why shouldn’t we?

Richard Falk: At this stage an explanation seems premature, although not for media pundits. At best, we can venture speculations, but the complexities of the situation should encourage humility of interpretation. It would be naïve to give much weight to the words of top officials that issue from either Tel Aviv or Washington. Of course, the media stress so far is in three salient facets of the undertaking:

(1) Israel’s display of audacity in launching a missile against high value human targets in the capital of Qatar, location of the largest US military base in the region and the site of negotiations between Israel and Hamas.

(2) the unrelenting demonization of Hamas as a terrorist entity that deserves neither the protection of law and morality nor reactions of human sympathy for the loss of dedicated lives; and …

(3) the tightrope act of Donald Trump who combines his public disapproval of Israel for carrying out this military operation supposedly without a prior notification to the White House while reiterating his solidarity with Israel so far as destroying Hamas.

Obviously, Trump sheds no tears for the victims of the attack, nor is he incensed by Israel’s disregard of international law and morality at a time when it seemed an American ceasefire diplomacy proposal was on the brink of success. What Trump knew and said privately Netanyahu is high on the list of uncertainties.

From Israel’s perspective such a gathering of top Hamas leaders in Doha can be simply regarded as a target too tempting to forego, especially given their information about the location of their place of residence. If these top Hamas leaders had been assassinated, rather than apparently managing to avoid the missile strike, it would have allowed the Netanyahu government to claim a victory in relation to their post-October 7 commitment to exterminate Hamas for the attack, and diminished outrage at attacking an adversary negotiating team.

From a second perspective, the timing as well as the location of the attack is rather mystifying. These Hamas leaders were functioning as a negotiating team meeting in one place to prepare a unified response to the US proposal, unreliably reported as already accepted by Israel, to establish both a ceasefire and the return of the surviving ‘hostages’ in a prisoner exchange. Why would Israel undermine such a proposal by this sort of disruptive behavior when it had just days previously agreed to the negotiated solution, risking not only negative reactions throughout the region and beyond, but also, and more significantly, raising doubts about US unconditional support.

Although a US shift away from its long-term posture on Israel/Palestine remains a remote possibility, which cannot be totally ruled out given Trump’s style of egocentric and erratic leadership that is certainly capable of taking personal offense at Netanyahu’s subversion of Trump’s diplomatic initiative. Such a conjecture presupposes that Trump is being uncharacteristically truthful when finding himself betrayed by Israel, a country thought too dependent on the US to pull off such a diplomatic tactic. The alternative is that Trump is so beholden to Netanyahu that he conspired with him to project the image of diplomacy when the real plan was a counter-terrorist ploy to lure the Hamas leaders to Doha as a group, thinking they were going to put the finishing touches on a breakthrough agreement that will end the Gaza ordeal.

Yet from another perspective, apparently not yet discussed, but likely influential, is either Netanyahu or cabinet hardliners such as Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and Katz, opposed a ceasefire at this time before the Gaza City ground operation was completed or missing the opportunity to decapitate the surviving Hamas leadership, and made their political weight felt with Netanyahu as had happened previously. These Zionist extremists have seemed determined to seize the moment since October 7 to fulfill Israel endgame ambitions relating to land and people.

Recalling the early Zionist pre-Nazi whimsical airbrushing of the residents of Palestine by falsely contending that it was replacing ‘a people without land for a land without people,’ while just an ironic quip, can be retroactively interpreted as a start down a long path of Palestinian dehumanization and erasure in the 1920s if not before. What now defines the Zionist Project is to acquire for Israel as much land of Ottoman Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians living on it as feasible. Those Palestinians with the resolve to remain face the ensured prospect of suffering as a victimized, super-resilient minority in an Israeli apartheid state.

As with the timing of Iran’s ‘12 Day Iran War,’ June 13-24, 2025, as partly reflecting Israel’s successful effort to deflect attention from its increasingly condemned Gaza policies, the Doha timing may have partly been motivated by the hope of deflecting attention once again. These lines of interpretation are highly conjectural, difficult to either confirm or dismiss. This complexity is aggravated by the tendency of the main parties to the conflict to use public discourse as a propaganda tool rather than as truthful disclosures of national policies. Against this background and timing of the Doha attack it is plausible, if controversial, to argue that it should be regarded as another example of Israel strategy of deflection, shifting the focus away from Israel’s plan to demolish Gaza City or to divert the attention from the fate of the hostages or to show the world and prove to itself that Israel is able and willing to act without waiting for a green light from Washington.

Along these lines, some analysts now fear a second attack on Iran in coming weeks as Israel once more finds itself in a position where facing a rising tide of criticism and hostile pushback that it might once again possibly act to deflect attention from what now appears a provocative failure of the Qatar mission because the Hamas leadership somehow survived the missile attack. Whether Iran would act again so moderately in response seems doubtful, raising threats of a deadly regional war with strong escalation dangers and serious policy challenges to US foreign policy, whether as shaped by the White House or deep state.

Daniel Falcone: What is the end game for Israel? It looks like in the short-term negotiators are worth more dead than alive. Are there other motivations other than power?

Richard Falk: I think your question, with due account given to uncertainties and shifting priorities, points to the reality that Israel seems primarily concerned with establishing a one-state solution in all or most of Ottoman Palestine, administered in quasi-colonial fashion by the UK in the aftermath of World War I. As I have earlier observed, attaining this goal must be preceded by a Palestinian political surrender or better yet, the physical erasure of any significant Palestinian presence. Israel could partially reach such a goal diplomatically or even by the imposition of an extreme form of apartheid making life so unbearable for the Palestinians that many would soon leave if a refugee sanctuary was found, if for no other reason than to assure family survival, especially for children.

The post-October 7 genocide, as underscored by accelerated settlement expansion in the West Bank, should end any beliefs that Israel is at all interested in a diplomatic compromise taking the form of a two-state solution, even if the designated Palestinian negotiators (the Palestinian Authority) seem willing to settle for a ghost state, which more resolute Palestinians insist would be no better than a renewal of ‘breadcrumb diplomacy.’ On further consideration it may turn out that the fragile Netanyahu coalition was unwilling to go along with the current ceasefire diplomacy because it viewed it as a trap that would block a full realization of the Zionist Project.

Considering such priorities, Israel needed to go to the blood-soaked end of its Gaza policy if it was to achieve its primary goals relating to the victorious end of the settler colonial undertaking. Netanyahu either shared this line of thinking in whole or part or accepted it as to avoid the collapse of his fragile coalition that might still lead to his facing long delayed charges of fraud and disgrace within Israel.

Of secondary importance was to extend the orbit of lawlessness by coercively removing present or near future threats within the Middle East to Israel’s security and hegemonic partnership with the US. This line of analysis best explains Israel’s recent multiple regional aggressions against Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. These military operations have been conducted with the alleged purpose of ensuring that unstable regional actors do not in the future become adversaries, which leads to the preemptive destruction of existing military capabilities with implied threats of future military operations should conditions change. Israel, despite possessing the only arsenal of nuclear weapons in the region, remains insecure, at least if security is assessed in defensive terms. More accurately perceived, Israel’s awesome deterrent capability in its regional neighborhood is conceived of offensively as well as preemptively as to avoid the rise of any regional power that might have a political disposition to challenge Israel’s hegemony or partnership with the US in managing the geopolitics of the Middle East. Whether an extra-regional challenge focused on economic penetration and energy politics is posed by China acting alone or with Russia, or in concert with a coalition of the willing in the Global South is still an over-the-horizon nightmare for the West.

Israel’s plans are most likely to be upset, if at all, from within as the status of pariah state sinks into the political consciousness of nations, the region, and the world prompting pressures from without and a pragmatic recalculation by elites within. This kind of dynamic led to profound shifts in the recalculation of the interests (although not the values) of South African apartheid elites in the 1990s producing an enduring embedding of constitutional democracy that were not even hinted at until given tangible expression until unexpectedly acted upon by the Afrikaner leadership.

Netanyahu’s unexpected remarks implicitly acknowledging Israel’s pariah or rogue status are an indication that international disapproval is now having major negative impacts. Recently Netanyahu confessed that “[We] will have to get used to an economy with autarchic features.” As well as declaring “[We’ll] have to be both Athens and Sparta, developing the capabilities to cope on our own.” Even a month ago such statements acknowledging Israel political and economic isolation could hardly be imagined as being uttered by such a combative and self-congratulating political leader as Netanyahu.

Daniel Falcone: Often Israel and the US are discussed as core regions whereas places like Qatar or even Sudan are considered peripheral. Does this event put this misconception on display in your estimation? Nothing looks peripheral when it comes to Israel.

Richard Falk: It is a tantalizing challenge to divide the states of the world up into those that are core and those that are on the periphery. Each historical era gave rise to its own distinctive patterns. World War II produced one pattern, the Cold War another, decolonization another and now the world is on the cusp of another rearrangement of core/periphery relations. The distinction between global geopolitical actors (currently US, China, Russia) and other states is another way of mapping the new world order emerging in tandem with the Ukraine War and the Gaza Genocide.

In a narrow sense, both Israel and Qatar were playing core roles in recent decades. Israel as a regional hegemon with questionable credentials as a sovereign state, although gaining legitimacy through its technological acumen and its skills as arms supplier and battlefield innovator. Whether it will retain its core regional geopolitical role despite perpetrating a transparent genocide viewed in real time is a major uncertainty, likely greatly affected by whether anti-pariah state pressures are exerted in a sustained and effective manner to ensure cooperative relations with the Arab states, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Arab League.

Although I suspect many would disagree, I believe Qatar’s core is rather stable, especially if it is assumed that the September 9 Doha attack was a one-off incident. To a surprising extent Qatar has become like Switzerland for diplomacy among adversaries, reflective of the power-shift from Europe following the collapse of French and British colonialism. This de-westernizing phenomenon has not received the commentary it deserves. This world order realignment of neutral diplomatic sites exhibits more responsiveness to historical circumstances than has the UN with obvious disappointing consequences for multilateral approaches to global problem-solving.

Daniel Falcone: Mouin Rabbani recently discussed the USS Liberty and the Israeli attack on America. Considering this alleged mishap, could we ever witness Israel attacking its allies in your view?

Richard Falk: The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War on June 8, 1967, killing 34 naval crew members, injuring an additional 171, severely damaging the ship. Objective scholarly treatments have long concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that the Liberty incident was not ‘a mishap’ but rather a deliberate attempt by Israel to prevent US surveillance of its military operations that conflicted with its public assertions. [For a persuasive account see Joan Mellen, Blood in the Water: How the US and Israel Ambush to USS Liberty (Prometheus, 2018)].

It is notable that the US Government chose to accept the Israeli apology and went along with a coverup narrative, despite the damning evidence that it was a deliberate and lethal attack on an American warship. This dynamic has been persuasively analyzed in Mellon’s book and to this day the US coverup is deplored by Liberty survivors. It is a revealing taint on the willingness of the US Government to throw the wellbeing, even the lives, of members of its own armed forces under the bus of diplomatic expediency.

Where Israel’s strategic interests are involved, however extreme, lawless, and inhumane, there is little doubt that the present and many of its past leaders would not hesitate to repeat the USS Liberty disaster/tragedy if the strategic stakes were high enough. More than almost any state, Israel’s allies, including the US, are not beyond suspicion, attitudes acutely inflated by security paranoia that falsely views latent antisemitism as a universal phenomenon. I entertain the wish, however slim, that Israel is capable of internally transforming its identity in ways that confer future legitimacy and achieve a stable normalcy. For this transformative scenario to have any reasonable chance of reshaping the future presupposes mounting international pressure.

Even so, if Israel were to shed its Zionist ideology of Jewish exceptionalism, such developments would be a spectacular instance of the politics of impossibility. Its enactment would help ensure peace and justice, but it has no chance of happening unless the world finally musters the will to impose strong economic sanctions on Israel, as reinforced by civil society activism that mobilizes support for cultural and sporting boycotts, demands an armed protective force under UN auspices, and urges suspension of Israel’s participation in the UN.

The politics of impossibility walks a tightrope between wishful thinking and such unlikely transformative events as the South African abandonment of apartheid, the Soviet collapse, and China’s remarkable developmental ascendancy coupled with unprecedented rates of poverty reduction. Negative events are also possible as with the signs of an American abandonment of democracy and embrace of fascistic styles of governance.

Daniel Falcone: Has the visit to Israel and Qatar by the American Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, altered your understanding of the US engagement with recent developments, especially the attack on the Hamas leadership in Doha?

Richard Falk: The Rubio visit did underscore some vital points in addition to reassuring Israel of US continuing support and Qatar, as well as the Gulf countries, of unwavering security commitments. Rubio tried hard to show that the US was still backing Israel all the way while also promising to be a trusted protector of Arab governments should they face their own security threats. His underlying expression of this dual relationship seemed to rest on the demonization of Hamas, calling this center of Palestinian resistance “agents of barbarism” and insisting that “[As] long as they’re around there will be no peace in this region.”

As Ariel Hayon insisted in an article, “Dangerous Prophecy,” when the microphones are off, every European and Arab leader knows that Hamas’s clones pose a threat to them just as much as this terror organization poses a threat to us. [Published online, September 16, 2025, S. Daniel Abraham, Center of Middle East, News Update.] Hayon, like Rubio, is trying to overcome the divisiveness of the Arab/Islamic Emergency Summit in Doha following the attack by stressing the common supreme interests of both Israel and the Islamic world (or at least of the governing regimes) in counterterrorism, otherwise viewed as popular resistance.

In the aftermath of this Israel-Qatar attack that seemed at first to threaten the Western interests in the Middle East, is a strange combination of verbal denunciation of Israeli violation of Qatari sovereignty with a political status quo in play. On the outside, but not to be discounted, are a series of civil society campaigns and solidarity initiatives that are reacting to the cruelties and injustices of the ongoing genocide. The release at this time of the report of the UN Commission of Inquiry that confirms by evidence and analysis allegations of Israeli genocide in Gaza is another facet of the overall situation.

This interplay will be tested by the way states participate in the forthcoming General Assembly session devoted to celebrating the 80^th anniversary of the UN.

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Tags: Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Palestine, Politics