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The conversation on settler colonialism must not be limited to academic discussion. It is a political reality, clearly demonstrated in the everyday behavior of Israel.

Israel is not merely an expansionist regime historically; it remains actively so today. Additionally, the core of Israeli political discourse, both past and present, revolves around territorial expansion.

Frequently, we succumb to the trap of blaming such language on a specific set of right-wing and extremist politicians or on a particular US administration. The truth is vastly different: the Israeli Zionist political discourse, though it may change in style, remains fundamentally unchanged throughout time.

Zionist leaders have always associated the establishment and expansion of their state with the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, later referred to in Zionist literature as the "transfer."

Convicted felon Trump and, in practice, his co-president Elon Musk are engaging in efforts to radically transform the federal government, with the support of billionaires, the Republican Party, and his increasingly shaky “base” of millions of right-wing citizens. The Supreme Court gave him “immunity” while he is president. He thus has been given a judicial “mandate” to say and do just about anything while in office without any fear of punishment. So, he stretches the truth and lies.  

The Lies

For example, here’s what Linda Qui reported for the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/us/politics/trump-election-lies-fact-check.html).

“Before the 2020 election had even concluded, President Donald J. Trump laid the groundwork for an alternate reality in which he was declared the victor, falsely assailing the integrity of the race at nearly every turn.

The United States and other nuclear powers are now moving closer to resuming nuclear weapons tests, decades after testing ended. This highly disturbing trend must be halted.

Since the atomic age, 2,056 nuclear weapons have been detonated, 528 of them above the ground. The United States and Soviet Union accounted for about 85% of these tests. The explosive power of atmospheric tests equaled 29,000 Hiroshima bombs. Airborne radioactive fallout circled the globe, re-entered the environment through precipitation, and entered human bodies through food and water.

Cold War bomb testing was part of a massive increase in the number of nuclear weapons, which peaked at more than 60,000. Kansas City plays a major part in their production, with the Kansas City National Security Campus manufacturing more than 80% of the non-nuclear components that go into our country’s stockpile.

After nuclear war as barely avoided during the Cuban missile crisis, public pressure convinced leaders to ban all above-ground tests in 1963 — a treaty that has never been violated.

It’s with a very heavy heart that I watch Europe imitate the militarism of the United States, moving massive resources from human and environmental needs to weapons, celebrating proposals from good liberal civic groups to steal money from Russia and dump it into more weapons, cutting deals to have the ingredients for more weapons dug out of your soil by a distant empire that routinely spits on your head, moving nuclear weapons around and across borders like toys, discarding the rule of law and a vision of a survivable future.

President Donald Trump’s address to Congress and the nation on Tuesday night was remarkably devoid of any mention of why the United States continues to both enable and be complicit in the Ukrainian conflict with Russia as well as with the war crimes that are being committed by the state of Israel against nearly all its neighbors on a daily basis. The most recent abomination committed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of thugs is the cutting off of food, medicine and temporary housing to the Gazans who were bold enough to return to their ruined homes due to a ceasefire negotiated successfully by US presidential envoy Steve Witkoff in January. Now that Netanyahu has decided to come up with some false assertions to break the agreement, allowing him to continue his extermination of the Palestinian people, Trump as peace maker seems to have disappeared without a trace even though the US was in a sense a guarantor of the phased disengagement.

International law is fighting for relevance. The outcome of this fight is likely to change the entire global political dynamics, which were shaped by World War II and sustained through the selective interpretation of the law by dominant countries.

 In principle, international law should have always been relevant, if not paramount, in governing the relationships between all countries, large and small, to resolve conflicts before they turn into outright wars. It should also have worked to prevent a return to an era of exploitation that allowed Western colonialism to practically enslave the global south for hundreds of years.