The Witkoff Massacre: Slaughter Of Starving Palestinians Undercuts Trump Pretensions

As starvation spreads in the Gaza Strip under a genocidal Israeli assault, Palestinians have once more been subjected to a murderous onslaught–this time under the cover of humanitarian assistance. A much-trumpeted and politically-connected mercenary outfit leaking aid into the besieged territory instead opened fire on Palestinians who queued up at an aid site at Rafah. Along with killing dozens of starving civilians, the massacre also gave lie to the endlessly parroted idea that the United States would be a moderating influence on Israel: indeed, the supposed charity that was to provide the aid is manned by mercenaries of the sort increasingly prominent in American military campaigns throughout the Muslim world, and linked to anti-Muslim networks.

From Hope to Horror

What remains of the southern Palestinian city of Rafah, which is now no more than a landscape of buildings flattened by Israeli airpower, was the chosen site for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a misnamed and politically connected organization, to deliver what seemed to be a lifeline to Palestinians. Instead, the Palestinians who assembled to receive aid amid a crippling Israeli-imposed starvation were subjected to open fire. Several horrific videos, some of them sent to MuslimMatters by eyewitnesses, killed dozens of people, thirty at a single site and at least twice that number in other incidents, before the organization suspended its activity.

Palestinians have dubbed the latest atrocity in southern Gaza the “Witkoff Massacre” — a name that directly implicates US involvement in what many are calling a deliberate massacre of starving civilians in the city of Rafah. [PC: The Palestinian Information Center]

The rabidly anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian Likud party led by Benjamin Netanyahu-Mileikowski, which, through the neoconservative tren,d was a major influence in the American “war on terror” in the Muslim world, once pretended that organic pro-Palestinian sentiment was simply a tool of Arab autocracies to divert societal discontent. As the Arab uprisings in the early 2010s began, however, Israel increasingly saw autocracy as a useful tool to muzzle Arab and Muslim sentiment. From 2015, Netanyahu-Mileikowski began to exchange feelers with Gulf princes; a process that came out into the open when the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain began diplomatic and political links with Tel Aviv. A number of Arab autocracies followed, encouraged by both Donald Trump and Joseph Biden, with the impression that friendliness to Israel would strengthen their influence in Washington. Because this arrangement sought to cut out both the Palestinians and the masses of Arabs and Muslims that support them in these countries, this arrangement was dependent on tightened autocracy.

From Neoconservatives to Rightwingers: Superficial Differences

Most recently, Trump, a man of no fixed ideology or loyalty, courted the Gulf countries of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in a much-hyped speech criticizing the neoconservatives and praising the Arab princes’ own native initiative. Yet this was theatre: most of Trump’s followers cut their teeth in the neoconservative war on the Muslim world, and many of them retain the same anti-Muslim views with a different label. Current or former senior officials under Trump included the former soldiers Mike Pompeo, Pete Hegseth, Mike Waltz, John Kelly, Herbert McMaster, James Mattis, and Michael Flynn, as well as such civilians as Marco Rubio, John Bolton, Robert Kennedy, Nimrata Haley, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Stephen Miller. Though several of them fell out spectacularly with Trump, it was never over the issue of Israel and Palestine.

Though not as fanatically Zionist as Biden, Trump is surrounded by and beholden to networks with similar policy views on Israel and Palestine, particularly rightwing evangelicals. It was such a man who was recently appointed to lead the newly announced Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a supposed aid organization manned by mercenaries whose primary role appears to have been the appearance of aid to deflect from criticism of Israel’s genocide. Johnnie Moore was a veteran of anti-Muslim campaigns with a particular record of opposition to Qatar, one of the states with which Trump has been cozy through both political and personal links. For such an anti-Muslim character to lead an aid organization focused toward Muslims underscores the disingenuous nature of the operation, whose founder, Jake Wood, another former soldier-turned-businessman, actually quit over its unethical practice. Nor are these the only unsavoury mercenaries on which Israel has relied. Tel Aviv has found the one Palestinian group with which it can work: a notorious local militia led by Yasser Abu-Shabab, comprised overwhelmingly of criminals, some of whom have flirted with Daesh. In another iteration of Israel’s confederates committing the same crimes of which they accuse their opponents, the group has also been accused of plundering aid. Despite this, and in a manner familiar to American wars from Iraq to Somalia, the militia has been blandly whitewashed by its backers and their mouthpieces as simply a tribal force because Abu-Shabab has a Bedouin background.

This also underlines a potential friction between Trump and his often far more rabidly anti-Muslim lieutenants: yet on matters related to Israel and Palestine, the American leader tends to operate at least on the path of least resistance, if not full-throated Zionism. Like Biden, he has occasionally made superficial criticisms of Netanyahu-Mileikowski while shielding Israel in general, and echoed misinformation about the Palestinian militants’ campaign against Israel. The main difference seems to be that Trump is more reliant on private circles easily penetrable by anti-Muslim circles, including such mercenary militias as that which operates under Moore at Gaza.

Cooperation Punished and Rejection Rewarded

To be sure, Trump likes to give the impression that he is beholden to nobody, and his negotiator Steve Witkoff did at least momentarily stifle the Israeli genocide this winter–only underscoring Israel’s complete dependence on the United States. Yet the negotiations immediately favoured Israel; though the Palestinian negotiators gave a show of good faith by releasing an Israeli soldier of American nationality, and though Hamas offered to relinquish its control of Gaza, Tel Aviv balked at the idea that it not be permitted to restart the assault on Gaza: the entire point of the ceasefire. Underlining the twisted American stance toward Israel, Witkoff then joined the same Israeli government that had rejected his terms in castigating the Palestinians who had accepted them. It was in the aftermath of this that what many Palestinian activists have called the “Witkoff massacre” occurred.

The slaughter of starving people by mercenaries supposed to give them aid, is both tragic and grotesque -one of now countless massacres during this genocide. But it is also revealing, and to more than just the Palestinians. Theatrics and pageantry aside, under Trump almost as much as under Biden, the United States government is prepared to ignore the mounting internal and international consensus against Israel’s genocide, and itself take part.

–by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

Related:

– Podcast [Man2Man]: From The Frontlines Of Gaza | Dr. Jawad Khan And Omar Sabha

– Activism for Palestine in the West: Understanding the Agreement of Joe Biden and Jordan Peterson on Israel