Our Wednesday News Analysis | From Gaza to Venezuela, the US has been unmasked as the serial villain

For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.

The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people – and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of Western publics that they have been duped.

Here is my first prediction of 2026: this law enforcement role-playing is going to continue even after the Trump administration’s outrageously illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, over the weekend, and Trump’s admission that the US attack was about grabbing the country’s oil.

The path to Caracas – and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Canada, other targets of Donald Trump’s greed – was paved in Gaza.

It is worth standing back, as one year ends and another begins, to consider how we got here, and what lies ahead.

Criminals in charge

Washington – the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman – refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside.

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, Fifa, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural peace prize – an honour created specifically to stroke his ego.

Though the Nobel Committee could not bring itself to hand the peace prize directly to Trump, its judges did the next best thing. They awarded it to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who has publicly called on the US to invade her country and seize its resources.

The complete abandonment of long-standing international legal safeguards puts everyone in jeopardy – all the more so when technological developments mean states have near-absolute control over their citizens’ lives, and super-powers can use ever more sophisticated weapons to wreck countries at little cost to themselves in blood or treasure.

But paradoxically, the very act of dismantling the global system of international law is still being dressed up in the garb of law enforcement.

The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals.

Unlike the Hollywood version, neither of these real-world cops is in any way good. But there is a further difference: the spectacle is not intended for those the pair confront. After all, the Palestinians know only too well that they have been suffering for decades under the boot of a lawless, joint US-Israeli criminal enterprise.

No, the intended audience are the onlookers: Western publics...

Read more: From Gaza to Venezuela, the US has been unmasked as the serial villain

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ANALYSIS TRUMP ISN'T FOSTERING A CEASE-FIRE DEAL – HE'S WASHING HIS HANDS OF GAZA

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2026-01-03/ty-article/.premium/trump-isnt-fostering-a-deal-but-washing-his-hands-of-gaza/0000019b-75fd-d019-a9df-7fff54730000

By Jack Khoury
Published January 3, 2026

Behind Trump's headline diplomacy is a void: core questions on Israeli withdrawal, Hamas disarmament, and Gaza's future governance are postponed or outsourced. This isn't a peace effort but conflict management, preserving the status quo and leaving Palestinians without a political horizon

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump at their meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday night. Credit: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

"Ashem iblis biljanna" is a popular Egyptian expression that means "pipe dreams."

That is exactly how things stand right now for those still pinning their hopes for the future of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians in the coming year on U.S. President Donald Trump.

The optimistic voices, or at least those with the wherewithal to see a ray of hope, tend to focus on what is happening "behind closed doors" and largely ignore what's being said outside them: The praise showered by Trump on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, his almost complete adoption of the argument regarding Hamas disarmament as a condition for any change in Israeli control and his explicit threats against the organization if it does not surrender.

Trump used the expression "there's no smoke without fire" in relation to Iran and the possibility of an Israeli attack if the Islamic Republic again engages in a military buildup. But the same expression can also apply to the Gaza Strip. If Trump were really seeking a meaningful settlement, the conduct on the ground and in the political discourse would look completely different.

Those with sharp eyes and ears understand that the president, consciously or not, ignores the details. He talks in headlines – peace in the Middle East, improving the situation in Gaza, humanitarian aid, and regional stability. These are grand slogans, but empty of practical content. When he is asked for the particulars, he is quick to answer that "Steve and Jared will handle it," referring to his Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner...

Read more: Analysis Trump Isn't Fostering a Cease-fire Deal – He's Washing His Hands of Gaza

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OPINION | THE DEATH OF 'THE GOOD ARAB'

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-01-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/no-good-arabs-palestinian-citizens-of-israel-are-being-driven-out-by-despair/0000019b-9f4e-dd67-a9ff-9f4f569a0000

By Hanin Majadli
Published January 9, 2026

There isn't a Palestinian who doesn't think about leaving or who hasn't already left

A Palestinian woman in the West Bank in 2024.Credit: Naama Grynbaum

The dehumanization that is required to justify the mass killing in the Gaza Strip did not remain there; it leaks into the Israeli space, into the street, the language, and daily reality.

A society that is accustomed to seeing an entire Palestinian population as a legitimate target
for death struggles not to project that view onto the Palestinian citizens living within it.

The genre of "the good Arab" was always another expression of the same mechanism – a gesture that presupposes suspicion and grants legitimacy to those who were willing to show themselves to be outliers, exceptions that do not prove the rule.

A friend called me for our routine catch-up, and she did indeed catch me up on her decision to leave Israel at the end of the year. "It's no longer possible to live here, she said, between the rock of murderous crime and the hard place of fascism and the thriving genocidal consciousness. "Who understands this better than I?" I replied. There isn't anyone who doesn't think about leaving or who hasn't already left.

The conversation continued, and then she said, "Tell me, how is it that you still manage to work in news and in political writing? I'm no longer capable of watching the news anymore; everything is becoming too much to bear."

But it isn't only the news that I struggle with – even going into Jewish cities is no longer comfortable, and it feels onerous. I feel marked, exposed, preferring to avoid contact with Jewish society for now, even at the cost of a world that is increasingly shrinking around me to the point of a genuine sense of suffocation...

Read more: Opinion | The Death of 'The Good Arab'