President Trump and Peace in the Middle East
Our new president’s policies for the Middle East, are, I’m sorry to say, a disaster for those of us who support a non-interventionist foreign policy. A war between Israel and Hamas has been going on for over a year. A fragile truce is in place as I write, but who knows how long it will last? Gaza is now a desolated area, because in its ruthless campaign to destroy Hamas, Israel has killed many civilians, destroyed their homes, and reduced others to starvation. Disease is rampant, but hospitals have been bombed, impeding a medical response to the outbreak of disease. Here is an account by the renowned historian Adam Tooze of what has happened over the past year: “Before the onslaught, Gaza was a compact space with clusters of dense urban settlement. It is comparable in population and size not to Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, but to neighboring Omdurman, Sudan’s second metro area. Omdurman has a population of 2.3 million spread over 230 square miles. In Gaza 2.1 million people live in 139 square miles. Into the most densely populated parts of Gaza’s urban areas, the Israeli military have unleashed extraordinary firepower. Already in December 2023 John Paul Rathbone, the Financial Times security correspondent, concluded that Israel was inflicting on Gaza one of the heaviest and most concentrated bombardments in military history. By April 2024 Euro-Med Civil Rights Monitor put the figure for munitions used at 70,000 tons of explosives. For sake of comparison that is ten times greater than the tonnage dropped in the notorious bombing raid on the German city of Dresden in February 1945. It is four and half times the explosive force of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima in August 1945. In November 2024 the Environmental Quality Authority of the Palestine Authority estimated that in barely more than a year, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had delivered no less than 85,000 tonnes of explosives. The result in Gaza is destruction of an intensity rarely seen in the history of warfare. It is unimaginable in Sudan’s civil war, which is fought with far less military equipment. Nowhere in Sudan has suffered anything like the concentrated destruction meted out to Gaza. What has enabled this concentration of firepower are not only Israel’s own resources but unstinting US aid. Enthusiastically promoted by the Biden administration and supported b
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
