Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with US President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday to plot the next stage of the Gaza genocide and US-Israeli war throughout the Middle East.
Netanyahu, who has an active arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, is waging an ongoing campaign of genocide, deliberate mass starvation and ethnic cleansing whose aim is to kill or displace the remaining Palestinians in Gaza.
At least 56,000 Palestinians have been killed in the genocide so far—most of them murdered by bombs supplied by the United States. With the backing of the White House and the endorsement of other imperialist powers, Israel is deliberately pursuing a policy of mass starvation, which has already led to thousands of cases of acute malnutrition among children. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an investigation featuring interviews with Israeli troops who said they were repeatedly ordered to open fire on unarmed crowds of aid seekers.
Netanyahu’s trip will be the first visit to Washington since the US and Israel launched an illegal and unprovoked war against Iran in May, using diplomatic negotiations announced by the United States just hours earlier to murder leading Iranian civilian officials, military leaders, and scientists. In the weeks since the attacks took place, it has become clear that most of Iran’s nuclear material was undamaged in the attack, prompting demands from within the US political establishment to “finish the job.”
On March 18, Israel unilaterally broke a ceasefire agreement with Hamas. It then proceeded to completely block the entry of all food, water, and electricity into Gaza, and set up “aid distribution” points at which Israeli troops have massacred at least 600 aid-seekers on over 20 separate occasions.
Ignoring the entire history of the ongoing genocide, the US media is presenting this week’s White House meeting as aimed at securing a “ceasefire,” which Trump is allegedly “pushing” for.
In fact, any “ceasefire” in Gaza would be a temporary pause, aimed at enabling Israeli forces to rearm and reload to carry out the next stage of the genocide and war throughout the Middle East. The real aim of the US-Israeli policy is the creation of an imperialist-dominated “New Middle East” in which the Palestinians are either murdered or driven from their land, and Iran is once again placed under direct imperialist domination.
John Bolton, an ideological architect of both the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2025 bombing of Iran, bluntly stated the real aims of the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu in an op-ed published Sunday in the Telegraph. “Monday’s most important outcome in the West Wing will be decisions on the possible further use of US and Israeli military force to achieve key objectives on both fronts,” i.e., in Gaza and against Iran.
Both Trump and the Netanyahu government have been perfectly clear about their objectives in Gaza. In February, Trump declared that “The US will take over the Gaza Strip,” “level it out,” and disperse the Palestinian population of Gaza to “other countries.”
In May, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, “Within a year... Gaza will be entirely destroyed, civilians will be sent to... the south to a humanitarian zone... and from there they will start to leave in great numbers to third countries.”
Plans for this horrific vision are already far advanced. Last week, the Financial Times reported on a secret strategy document drawn up by the Boston Consulting Group, a major US corporate consulting firm, for “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza. The FT reported that the Boston Consulting Group estimated a “23k savings on every Palestinian relocating.” This ethnic cleansing operation would “increase [the] value of Gaza to ~$324B from $0 today,” the secret document concluded.
In a front-page article Sunday, the Financial Times further revealed that the plan was created with the involvement of staffers of former UK Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. The FT reported, “The Tony Blair Institute participated in a project to develop a postwar Gaza plan that envisaged kick-starting the enclave’s economy with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.”
No doubt, the proposal revealed by the FT will be the subject of extensive discussions between Trump and Netanyahu, right down to the dollar value at which they price every Palestinian expelled from Gaza, or better yet, killed.
While the red carpet is being rolled out in Washington for the mass murderer Netanyahu, opponents of the Gaza genocide are being systematically persecuted and imprisoned.
In the most sweeping attack on anti-war groups to date, the British group Palestine Action has been branded a terrorist organization by the UK government, meaning that it is illegal not only to be a member of the group, but to share its posts on social media.
The prosecution marks the first time in British history that terrorism laws have been used against a civil disobedience organization. Members of the group, or anyone encouraging support for it, face up to 14 years in prison for exercising their freedom of expression, which is protected by UK law and international laws to which the UK is a signatory. On Sunday, British police arrested 29 people on terrorism charges simply for taking part in a demonstration in support of the group.
The British government is also seeking to prosecute the musical groups Kneecap and Bob Vylan on terrorism charges for their statements opposing the genocide. The Trump administration has followed suit, revoking the visas of members of Bob Vylan after they led chants protesting the Gaza genocide at the Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, England last month.
These actions are a warning: The imperialist powers are moving to criminalize all criticism of their foreign policy, no matter how flagrantly illegal the actions of Washington, London and NATO. Their response to mass popular opposition to the genocide is to criminalize any effort to impede or draw attention to their complicity in the genocide.
The systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, which is led from Washington and Jerusalem, is in fact supported by all of the imperialist governments. All of the “democratic” governments of Europe and North America are headed by war criminals or the accomplices of war criminals.
Definite conclusions must be drawn from the experience of the Gaza genocide and the criminalization of opposition to it.
The genocide is part of a global war. The imperialist powers—led by the United States and its allies—have set out to impose colonial shackles on Russia and China and the former colonial world. They are normalizing mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and starvation as tools of policy. The same barbaric methods used against the Palestinians will be used elsewhere.
This escalating imperialist war is incompatible with democratic rights. In every country, the ruling class is preparing for dictatorship. In the United States, the criminalization of opposition to genocide, begun under Biden and the Democrats, is inseparable from the erection of a presidential dictatorship under Trump.
There is growing opposition among workers and youth. Millions of people have taken part in protests against the Gaza genocide, and last month’s “No Kings” protests against Trump were among the largest protests in US history. The critical struggle is to unite the growing movement against war and in defense of democratic rights with the movement by the working class in defense of its social and economic rights, and to arm this struggle with a socialist perspective.