Our Wednesday News Analysis | Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu: The Odd Couple

As the war widens, growing voices across the region question Washington’s role and its alignment with Israeli strategy. (Photo: Wikimedia. Design: Palestine Chronicle)

… no amount of presidential bravado or social-media posturing can obscure what has become undeniable:

under Donald Trump, American foreign policy has served Netanyahu’s Israel-first agenda, not America’s.

“He’ll do whatever I want him to do,” Donald Trump declared recently about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This may be one of the most revealing statements Trump has ever made—not for what it says about Netanyahu, but for what it reveals about Trump’s psychology. It was intended as a display of strength. Instead, it exposed the opposite.

Trump has built a political persona around hyperbole, self-aggrandizement, and declarations of superiority to cover up for an oversized inferiority complex; he only knows its extent. When he insists that Netanyahu is acting at his command, he is projecting an authority he does not possess. The louder the boast, the more apparent the insecurity beneath it.

If there is one lesson since the election of Trump, it is that Netanyahu, not Trump, has consistently dictated the pace of America’s wars in the Middle East. Trump may occupy the White House, issue ultimatums, and proclaim himself the master negotiator, but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Again and again, Netanyahu acts, and Trump adjusts.

For years, Netanyahu worked relentlessly to pull the US into another made-for-Israel war, this time against Iran. Successive administrations, despite their deference to Israel, stopped short of falling for the scheme. Trump, however, proved far more susceptible to the influence of his Israel-first donors and to Netanyahu’s chicanery. Yet he continues to portray himself as the one calling the shots.

Last week, Trump proudly recounted a phone call in which he supposedly instructed Netanyahu to halt a planned Israeli attack on Beirut. It took little time after Trump’s statement for Israel’s defense minister to announce that military operations “will continue under all circumstances.” True to that pledge, Israel launched fresh attacks on hospitals and villages in southern Lebanon, killing and wounding civilians despite the so-called Trump’s war cessation.

Two days later, on Wednesday, June 3, Lebanese and Israeli delegations meeting in Washington announced another ceasefire. The third such extension since last April. One day after reaching the agreement, Israel resumed strikes on ​South Lebanon and said it would neither withdraw nor allow Lebanese civilians back to their homes in the south. Instead, it ordered residents in five Lebanese villages to evacuate their homes, expanding its occupation deeper into south Lebanon...

Read more: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu: The Odd Couple

___________________

DRONES AND DECOMPOSING BABIES: WHAT’S IN UN REPORT ON ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/drones-and-decomposing-babies-whats-in-un-report-on-israels-genocide-of-palestinian-children/

Sondos Asem reports in Middle East Eye on 25 June 2026

Israel has killed over 20,000 Palestinian children since 7 October 2023. The UN has detailed instances of torture, rape and murder in a landmark report

Israel has killed over 20,000 Palestinian children since 7 October 2023. The UN has detailed instances of torture, rape and murder in a landmark report

“...it became very clear… that babies were special targets,

When you shoot a 10-day-old baby breastfeeding on his mother… through his head,
you can by no means label such a baby as an enemy of the State of Israel and justify these kinds of attacks.

That children were specifically targeted is clear
from the number of “instances of babies with gunshot wounds to their head and neck to cause maximum damage.

… babies were aimed at with “tiny cube-shaped pellets” that “spread like a cluster of ammunition and destroy all the internal organs.”

Israeli forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children as a central element of their genocide in Gaza, the UN’s top investigative body on Palestine and Israel concluded this week.

The finding comes in an 88-page report examining the full scope of harm inflicted on children since 7 October 2023, from precision shootings by snipers and drones to torture in detention, reproductive violence and the destruction of schools and hospitals.

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, chair of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel.

“Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law,” the Indian lawyer and judge said.

The commission, which previously concluded that Israel bore responsibility for genocide in Gaza, found that children were targeted in two ways: directly, through precision weapons including quadcopters and sniper rifles, and indirectly, through the systematic destruction of the conditions necessary for their survival.

It named specific Israeli military units responsible for killings and urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prioritise crimes against children in its ongoing investigation. Below, we highlight the report’s key findings...

Read more: Drones and decomposing babies: What’s in UN report on Israel’s genocide of Palestinian children

___________________

THE QIBYA BLUEPRINT

Source: Vashti Media
https://www.vashtimedia.com/the-qibya-blueprint/?ref=new-from-vashti-newsletter

By Raphael Mimoun
Published June 24, 2026

Israel has been massacring civilians and lying about it since its inception.

Image: Palestine Survey, British Mandate Government, 1944.

"Some Jews, albeit few, stood against the depravity of Israeli atrocities.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli public intellectual and Orthodox Jew, called Qibya a
“cruel mass punishment of innocent people for the crimes of others” and wondered“
what produced this generation of youth, which felt no inhibition or inner compunction in performing the atrocity”.

“It's Bibi, not Israel.” No phrase better encapsulates the liberal Zionist response to the destruction of Gaza following October 7th.

While most Zionist Jews inside and outside of Israel genuinely believe in the justness of Israel’s war on Gaza, liberal Zionists have had to walk a tightrope: disavowing Israeli actions in the strip while at the same time defending the legitimacy of the state of Israel. And to absolve Israel and Zionism of the destruction of Gaza, there is no better culprit than Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel’s atrocities in Gaza do not reflect who we are, the common refrain goes; it’s Bibi and his far-right coalition. The problem is not Zionism; it is a version of Zionism that has been corrupted by messianic extremists. In other words, what the IDF has done in Gaza since 7 October does not represent the “real” Israel.

Yet, a look at history shows the opposite: the indiscriminate murder of Palestinian civilians has been inseparable from Zionism since at least 1948. And few events demonstrate this better than the Qibya massacre of 1953, when, in retaliation for a Palestinian attack, the Israeli army killed dozens of innocent Palestinian civilians in a carefully planned massacre. Qibya demonstrates that the Gaza genocide is consistent with Israeli history from its beginnings – that the destruction of Gaza differed only in degree, not in nature, from earlier Zionist policies and actions.

A systematic extermination

The early 1950s were a time of frequent military confrontations and skirmishes between Palestinians and the newly independent state of Israel. These clashes stemmed from the fallout from the 1948 war, in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes and villages. Declassified documents from the Israeli army show that Palestinians overwhelmingly left because they were expelled by Zionist militias, and, in the aftermath of the war, this population was yearning to return home. In response, Israel enforced a strict policy to prevent these now-refugees from returning to their villages, regardless of the context in which they left or whether they took part in hostilities. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, left little room for ambiguity when he proclaimed in April 1949 that the “government line is that they may not return.”...

Read more: The Qibya blueprint