Abubakr Al-Shamahi

Attacking Qatar shows Israel doesn’t want a Gaza ceasefire

 

Netanyahu keeps changing his position on a Gaza ceasefire, using different ploys to keep the war going.

For almost two years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has gone out of his way to avoid agreeing to a Gaza ceasefire.

In November 2023, a deal saw the release of 110 captives taken during Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.

But a week later, Netanyahu refused to extend the ceasefire, leaving the rest of the captives behind.

Since then, whenever a ceasefire has seemed to be within reach, Netanyahu has shifted the goalposts. In May 2024, Hamas accepted a proposed deal, but Israel denied agreeing and invaded Rafah instead. By September, Netanyahu had introduced a new condition – permanent Israeli control of the Philadelphi Corridor — the area between Egypt and Gaza — which both Cairo and Hamas rejected.

Later, after pushing the position that only a partial deal would be agreed to, Netanyahu changed the parameters and insisted that Israel would only agree to a deal that would see all the captives released – and not in return for an end to the war.

Even when allies advanced proposals, Netanyahu sidestepped them. Also in May 2024, then-US president Joe Biden announced that Israel had offered a ceasefire plan, but Netanyahu stayed silent, and no deal followed.

When a deal was agreed and implemented, Netanyahu ensured it broke down. In January 2025, under pressure from incoming US President Donald Trump, Netanyahu accepted a phased ceasefire deal that would continue until a final settlement to end the war was agreed. Yet by March, Israel unilaterally violated it, resuming bombardment and blockade.

And last week, as Hamas negotiators met in Doha to discuss a new US-backed proposal, Israel bombed them, effectively sabotaging the talks.

Plates spinning

The Israeli Government would insist that deals haven’t been reached because the Palestinian group Hamas has not been an honest broker, and must be eradicated because it will attempt to rearm.

But after the attack in Doha, Einav Zangauker, the mother of Israeli captive Matan Zangauker, who has been held in Gaza for almost two years, was clear about who was to blame.

“Why does the prime minister [Netanyahu] insist on blowing up any deal that comes close to happening? Why?” she asked rhetorically.

Why indeed.

Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. One of the reasons for his success is his ability to keep multiple plates spinning – to juggle different priorities, even if they are sometimes contradictory, without resolving them fully.

Being able to juggle these priorities allows Netanyahu to push away decisions that could lead to him losing support from the public or from his political allies. And in a country like Israel, where parliamentary politics is based on who can keep the biggest coalition, that is vital.

Netanyahu is also facing domestic legal trouble — he is on trial for corruption — and staying in power is most likely his best bet at avoiding prison.

Coming back to the question of a Gaza ceasefire, Netanyahu has a fundamental problem: he is beholden to the messianic far right to prop up his government, and they have made it clear: an end to the war at this stage will see them walk away from the prime minister’s coalition, almost certainly causing it to collapse.

The far right — Israelis like National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich — want to push Palestinians out of Gaza and bring in Israeli settlers to live in the land left empty by those ethnically cleansed.

Netanyahu might not be completely averse to that goal, but he also understands the difficulty in achieving it. Even Israel would be stretched militarily if it were to try to conquer and keep the whole of the Gaza Strip, and months or years of high-intensity conflict would cause more dissent from a military that is heavily reliant on calling up thousands of Israelis as reservists.

And, of course, such a brazen attempt at ethnic cleansing would further isolate Israel internationally.

What comes next?

Instead, Netanyahu keeps the plates spinning. He keeps Ben-Gvir and Smotrich on his side by never agreeing to end the war, strings along mediators by sending negotiation teams to discuss proposals he won’t accept, and never fully commits to the military fight that would be necessary to try to completely take Gaza.

He insists that Hamas cannot be allowed to rule Gaza and rejects the Palestinian Authority ruling the enclave, while also saying Israel doesn’t want to control it.

How long can Netanyahu keep this up? There were times when he struggled, and it almost came crashing down.

Trump did not want to take “no” for an answer in January, forcing Netanyahu to agree to a deal that had been on the table for more than six months. That led to Ben-Gvir resigning his government position and Smotrich threatening to resign his if the deal progressed and led to an end to the war.

As previously mentioned, it did not. And Ben-Gvir quickly came back. Trump says contradictory things about ending the war, only to never firmly tell Netanyahu to stop.

The next Israeli elections have to take place before October 2026. Perhaps Netanyahu will be able to present enough wins to the electorate — he can already argue that he has weakened Hamas, defeated Hezbollah, and bombed Iran’s nuclear sites — to get enough support that he is no longer reliant on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich and can end the war on his terms, whatever they may be.

Or perhaps the war continues, potentially with pauses, only for Israel to return to bombing Gaza when it feels the need to.

Alternatively, continuing the war with no end in sight could increase both foreign and domestic opposition, ramping up the pressure on Netanyahu until he is either forced to make a decision on ending the war or faces defeat at the ballot box in 2026.

The Palestinians of Gaza — of whom Israel has killed more than 64,800 — are the ultimate casualties of the dragging out of this war, as well as the Israeli captives still held in Gaza.

For now, they will keep suffering – as Netanyahu keeps his plates spinning.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/attacking-qatar-shows-israel-doesnt-want-a-gaza-ceasefire/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

Stolen Homeland: Genetics Debunk the Zionist Myth of “Return”

Muhammad Hamid ad-Din

 

“A Tiny Peaceful State Against Arab Hordes”

This Zionist lie is not just a distortion of reality; it is a grotesque propaganda narrative, meticulously constructed and lavishly funded to justify blatant colonial expansion. Apologists for this myth paint a picture of an Israeli David fighting against an Arab Goliath, deliberately ignoring the fact that the roles were reversed long ago, and that “David,” with the West’s help, possesses one of the world’s most advanced nuclear arsenals and a military equipped with cutting-edge technology.

This “tiny peaceful state” is, in practice, the most powerful military enclave, whose drones, tanks, and total surveillance system control every square meter of historic Palestine—from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is not self-defense; this is a classic military occupation, lasting for decades and being the longest in modern history. They are the ones building walls, shutting out those whose lands they have annexed. It is their high-ranking ministers and members of parliament who openly dream of a “new Nakba” and call for “erasing entire cities” in the Gaza Strip, putting into practice the long-standing Zionist slogan of “driving the Arabs into the sea.”

Their rhetoric of “survival” is a cynical theater performed by a colonizer who is terrified of facing just retribution for its crimes. They have created an apartheid state where one people enjoys a full set of civil rights, while the other—the indigenous population—is deprived of all rights, driven into enclaves, and lives under the barrel of a gun. They talk about “terrorism” while being a terrorist state themselves, one that regularly carries out “targeted assassinations” (i.e., extrajudicial executions) and drenches entire neighborhoods of Palestinian cities in blood.

But the blame for this perpetual slaughter does not lie solely with the Israeli leadership. The political West, and first and foremost the United States of America, bears direct responsibility for igniting this conflict and keeping it in a perpetually smoldering state.

For decades, Washington has pursued a hypocritical, duplicitous, and fundamentally criminal policy of pitting Israelis against Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole. Under the pretext of “protecting the only democracy in the Middle East,” the US unconditionally supplies weapons, provides diplomatic cover at the UN, and blocks any attempt to establish peace based on international law.

This policy is a dead end with no future. It is based on an archaic, neo-racist logic of “managed chaos,” where the Middle East must forever be mired in wars to serve as a testing ground for new weapons and to justify the American presence. The Palestinian people are used as a bargaining chip, a hostage in a grand geopolitical game whose goal is not stability and justice, but dominance and control over resources.

The madness of the Western elite lies in the fact that, in trying to preserve its influence, it is creating a monster that has long been out of control 

The madness of the Western elite lies in the fact that, in trying to preserve its influence, it is creating a monster that has long been out of control. The “Greater Israel” project is not a project of peace and security. It is a project of endless war, expansion, and religious fanaticism that threatens the stability of not only the region but the entire world. By supporting it, the US is cultivating the very hatred it supposedly was sent to the Middle East to fight.

History will not forgive the Israeli hawks for their crimes, nor their Western sponsors for their hypocrisy. The apartheid wall will collapse, just as the Berlin Wall did. The unwavering faith of the Palestinian people in their right to exist and to justice is invincible. And a policy based on lies, occupation, and double standards is doomed to historical failure. The future lies in a single democratic state for all its inhabitants, where Jews and Arabs are equal in rights, not in the utopia of a “Greater Israel” built on the bones and tears of the innocent.

Theft as a National Idea: From Homes to the Soul of the Palestinians

The Zionist project, from its very inception, did not stop at the physical expropriation of land. It methodically, with a cold appetite, set out to steal everything that constitutes the soul, history, and very identity of the Palestinian people, attempting to legitimize the occupation through cultural plagiarism.

They—the Israelis—stole our homes, throwing large families out into the street and moving in immigrants from New York, Kyiv, and Brooklyn, who hung mezuzahs on our doors, unaware that beneath their feet were floors our mothers had washed. They stole our fields, uprooting thousand-year-old olive trees—mute witnesses to our history—to establish their kibbutzim in their place, passing it off as “making the desert bloom.” They wiped more than 500 Palestinian villages off the face of the earth—Lydda, Ramle, Tantura—to build picnic parks and their own neighborhoods on the ruins, where tourists are told about the “ancient biblical land,” deliberately forgetting to mention its recent Palestinian inhabitants.

But the most monstrous and insidious theft is the systematic appropriation and destruction of our culture. This is not spontaneous borrowing but a targeted policy of spiritual genocide, an attempt to erase us from history and prove that we never had and do not have anything of our own.

Culinary Plagiarism: From Street Food to National Brands. At international exhibitions and in restaurants, they brazenly pass off Palestinian hummus, falafel, moussaka, and shawarma as “Israeli street food.” This is not just the theft of recipes. It is the appropriation of our very hospitality, our “karam as-sayd” (generosity of the hand), which is a cornerstone of our culture. They commercialize and distort our dishes, while our producers of olive oil and tahini struggle with blockades and export bans. A dish that our grandmother cooked for the family, they package in plastic and sell in supermarkets as “Middle Eastern exotic,” severing it from its roots and history.

Theft of National Dress and Crafts. Our traditional embroidered dress, the “thobe” or “tatreez,” where every stitch is a coded history of the region, our family, our people (the “julleit” embroidery from Hebron, “fillfill” from Bethlehem), is declared their “national costume” or shamelessly copied in fashion collections by brands like Maskit, without mentioning its origin. What is sacred heritage passed down through generations for us becomes an ethnic print for a fashion show for them.

Appropriation of Music and Dance. The Dabke—our collective dance, a symbol of unity and resistance, performed at weddings and celebrations—is now promoted at international festivals as an “Israeli folk dance.” Israeli music producers often use traditional Arabic maqams and instruments (oud, qanun), mixing them with electronic music and presenting it as an “innovative Israeli sound,” while Palestinian musicians are restricted in their movement and access to international venues.

Architectural and Toponymic Theft. They didn’t just take our houses—they appropriated our architectural style. Arab architecture with its arched vaults, inner courtyards, and thick walls of limestone (“Jerusalem stone”) is now widely used in Israeli villas and public buildings, passed off as “Levantine style” or “Mediterranean design,” but without its true owners—the Palestinians.
Hundreds of Arabic names of villages, mountains, valleys, and springs were deliberately changed and replaced with Hebrew ones to erase even the memory of our existence. Wadi al-Haratiya became Nahal Besor, Jabal an-Nabi Yusha’ became Har Nevo. This is an attempt to destroy the map of our memory.

Appropriation of Symbols of Resistance. Even our symbols of struggle are not safe. The Palestinian scarf—the keffiyeh—a symbol of national identity and resilience, has been commercialized. It is worn by Israeli hipsters and sold in Tel Aviv boutiques as a “fashion accessory,” stripping it of its political and historical meaning. Similarly, the image of the key—a symbol of the right of return to our homes—is used in Western art as an abstract symbol of the “Middle East conflict,” blurring its deeply personal meaning for every Palestinian refugee.

This is not innocent “cultural influence” or “exchange.” This is a strategic policy of erasure. First, they stole the land, then the homes, and now they have set their sights on the soul. The goal is to create a false reality in which a “new,” “modern” Israeli culture exists on “empty” land, and Palestinians are presented as either non-existent or primitive people without a rich cultural heritage. By appropriating our food, clothing, music, and history, they are trying to deprive us of the last thing we have left—our identity—and to prove that we are ghosts who never existed. This is not just theft. This is spiritual genocide, continuing to this day.

 

Muhammad Hamid ad-Din, a renowned Palestinian journalist

 

https://journal-neo.su/2025/09/14/stolen-homeland-genetics-debunk-the-zionist-myth-of-return/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.