Previous Demonstrators march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge during a pro-Palestinian rally against Israel's actions and the ongoing food shortages in the Gaza Strip, in Sydney on August 3, 2025. AFP
No doubt the world’s primary superpower has both the ability and the will to continue supporting Israel with generous amounts of deadly weapons and bombs, and will continue to provide diplomatic cover at the United Nations Security Council, blocking all other 14 members as they demand an immediate end to the war in Gaza and the unconditional flow of urgently needed humanitarian aid, fuel and medicine as well as food.
Yet, even within the United States itself, more and more voices are speaking out, including prominent senators and house representatives who start their demand to bring the war to an end immediately by noting how they have spent their lifetimes supporting Israel and consider themselves to be Zionists.
However, by any objective standards the facts on the ground can only lead Israel’s closest friends to one conclusion. The deadly daily massacres against Palestinians, the images of starved children who are dying live on TV after being fed water instead of the milk blocked by Israel’s occupation army, cannot lead to victory in this nearly two-year conflict.
Killing an average of 80-120 Palestinians daily, half of them while seeking small amounts of food distributed at three or four death traps run by a US-Israeli company, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), can only confirm Israel’s status as a pariah whose top leaders are on the run from arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.
This is the reality which the Israeli people will have to live with for many years to come, even if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist cabinet act victorious after dealing deadly military blows to its staunchest adversaries in the region topped with Iran, Lebanon’s Hizbullah and the former Syrian regime of Bashar Al-Assad as well as Hamas. All those “victories” were obviously not enough to impose Israel’s conditions on Palestinians who have been fighting to end the racist occupation and to an independent state on their own land for nearly a century.
By continuing with the daily bloodbath in Gaza, even threatening attacks on a wider scale that will “open the gates of hell”, Netanyahu will only cause more suffering and death among Palestinians. But he can never claim to have achieved any victory. Calls by terrorist ministers such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Somtrich for revenge, forced eviction and rebuilding illegal settlements in Gaza will only lead to more and more countries such as Britain and the Netherlands banning them from entering their territories.
Recent polls published in the Israeli media pointed out that the majority of Israelis do not feel safe to travel abroad due to increasing world anger against Israeli war crimes and the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. In Greece, a very popular destination for Israeli tourists, several ships carrying Israelis were unable to unload because of demonstrations by locals protesting the horrific daily killing. Videos of Israeli tourists being asked to leave restaurants or cafes in various European destinations “because we don’t host killers” have grown common on the social media.
At the US Senate, nearly all 44 Democratic senators signed a letter urging US President Donald Trump to end the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and to look for alternatives to the food distribution system backed by Washington through GHF that proved to be a failure. The Democratic senators said it could not be credible that an advanced army such as that of Israel cannot control and maintain an efficient food distribution system over a small plot of land such as Gaza, hardly 360 square kilometres.
Thanks to determined efforts by progressive US Senator Barnie Sanders, 20 senators have signed a second letter to Trump asking him to stop providing Israel with weapons that are being used to kill Palestinians arbitrarily on a massive scale. A third letter was also signed by nearly a dozen representatives asking Trump to recognise Palestine as an independent state.
To Israel’s surprise, the outcry over its atrocities in Gaza has expanded to include some key figures in Trump’s MAGA movement who said they did not sign in for supporting the US president to have their country involved in wars that do not serve its interest. Right-wing MAGA leader, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote last week, “It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that October 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned, but so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
A few days later, Greene urged fellow lawmakers to halt funding to Israel’s “nuclear-armed” government, accusing it of “systematically cleansing” Palestinians from their land. She added that she spoke with a pastor from Gaza and emphasised that “there are children starving” and asked, “Are innocent Israeli lives more valuable than innocent Palestinian and Christian lives?” For Trump and his well-trusted Middle East peace envoy, Steve Witkoff, the answer to this simple question is: “Yes”.
Facing pressure from their populations and charges of complicity in war crimes, more and more European nations are also declaring they would soon recognise Palestine as an independent state, seeing this as the only path to restrain Israel from carrying out its daily massacres and causing starvation in Gaza, as well as opposing the current Israeli government’s plans to annex more occupied territories in Gaza and the West Bank, forcibly deporting Palestinians to neighbouring countries.
Trump, can belittle the impact of declarations made by France, the United Kingdom and Canada to recognise Palestine, joining more than 145 nations at the UN General Assembly. Yet, if such a key step by two permanent members at the UN Security Council, including Britain, which practically enabled the creation of Israel in 1948 when it occupied Palestine and America’s northern neighbour were insignificant, one wonders what led to such an angry reaction by the US president, going so far as to impose the highest tariffs on Canada as punishment for declaring they would soon recognise Palestine.
Indeed the key victims for every hour in delaying an immediate end to the war in Gaza will remain innocent Palestinians, of whom some 61,000 have been killed, topped by children dying of starvation. But when the war and the bloodshed end, no doubt Israel will realise that it was strategically defeated; its name will be forever and everywhere be linked to genocide, war crimes and brutal killings that will neither be forgotten nor forgiven.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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