Zionists Underwrite ‘Native Informants’ to Fuel America’s Wars

by Matt Wolfson | Feb 11, 2026

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/zionists-underwrite-native-informants-to-fuel-americas-wars/

On the evening of Tuesday, January 13, 2026, ten days after the Donald Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, The Wall Street Journal ran an exclusive report asserting that “the support of the Venezuelan opposition led by Maria Corina Machado for U.S. action to oust Nicolás Maduro helped President Trump’s legal case to overthrow him.” The report cited “people familiar with the matter” who in turn cited redacted portions of a December 23, 2025 opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) which the Justice Department had released that Tuesday afternoon. According to these sources, who had read the redacted portions of the opinion, an unredacted footnote to “the last paragraph of Page 6…cites Machado’s comments stating that escalating U.S. pressure was the ‘only way’ to free Venezuela.” These comments allowed the Office of Legal Counsel to argue in the actual redacted text of the last paragraph of Page 6 that “the opposition’s lobbying ‘could be construed’ as a request by Venezuela’s legitimate government,” namely Machado’s opposition party, “to depose a usurper in Caracas.” It was this request that “the Justice Department memo…partly relie[d] on…as a legal justification” to kidnap Maduro in violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and international law.

What does this mean and why does it matter? From facts like these, it seems hard to say, and this is not by accident. A problem with foreign interventions since America became an empire is that the players are too myriad and our imperial complex too labyrinthine (not to mention too concealing) for information “from the inside” to be interpretable to the cursory reader without context. But when it comes to this particular intervention and the broader networks that pushed it via Machado, there is plenty of context at hand. Unearthing this context shows that Machado’s “slipped note” to the OLC was not just a one-off, a helpful hint picked up by government players to justify a particular course of action. It was part of a decades-long push from overlapping groups with the interlocked aim of using America’s resources to affect regime change in their home countries. All of these groups, what’s more, owe their influence to Zionists.

The reason this broader push is especially important to understand now is that it has been turbocharged in the second Trump administration. Foreign operators underwritten by Zionists are urging interventions not just in Venezuela but in Nigeria and Iran and Cuba to the ultimate benefit of Israel. Understanding their role may prove crucial in the coming months to understanding the trajectory of our government’s policies abroad—who they benefit, who they harm, why they’re happening, and what the blowback on the rest of us might be.

Among the groups who have prominent members operating in this way over the last quarter century and longer are Lebanese Americans, Nigerian Americans, Iranian Americans, Cuban Americans, and Venezuelan Americans. These groups emigrated relatively (or in Venezuelans’ case very) recently to America in small numbers. A disproportionate number of them are upper-middle class or elites who benefited from American-backed regimes then left their countries after Muslim or communist governments overthrew those regimes. They accessed America thanks to immigration and refugee policies meant to attract foreign elites to service America’s military corporate complex, and they have paid back their debt to our empire and benefited in the process. They are active in pushing America’s government into operations against their home countries’ governments based on their “specialized” and “inside” knowledge of these countries; and they are also all connected, directly or at some degree removed, to each other.

If many of these operators call themselves freedom fighters, there’s a less flattering phrase for them, one supplied most memorably by the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That term is “native informant”: non-Western imperial operators cut off from their countrymen who gain status in western capitals via access to academic or media circles, then gain influence telling imperial operators what they want to hear about the countries they want to invade. In Said’s brutal rendering, they are people who speak of America as “an imperial collectivity which, along with Israel, never does anything wrong.” Said coined the term “native informant” in April 2003, a month after the W. Bush administration invaded Iraq. He was describing the Lebanese American academic and Iraq War booster Fouad Ajami, whom he called one of the few “accredited Middle East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy”—and Ajami’s career in many ways sets the model for the native informant breed.

Like Maria Corina Machado in the autumn of 2025, Ajami’s career culminated in the autumn of 2002 when he supplied an American presidential administration with the native and expert justification to invade a sovereign nation. According to a much-cited speech that Vice President Richard B. Cheney gave seven months before the war:

“…the Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami predicts that after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.’ Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart. And our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced, just as it was following the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.”

Ajami’s pick-up by Cheney did not come out of nowhere. It reflected briefings Cheney and his Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, along with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, had received from Ajami. Ajami’s availability for these briefings, in turn, came out of Zionist networks. Ajami was an institutional presence in Washington DC thanks mostly to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where he led the Middle East Studies program and overlapped with Paul Wolfowitz when Wolfowitz was dean of SAIS. He was a public presence in Washington thanks mostly to The New Republic magazine, where he was a favored contributor of Martin Peretz, the magazine’s publisher, and Leon Wieseltier, its literary editor. Ajami served the university and the magazine, which had been founded by members of powerful imperial networks run by WASPs, at a time when they were being put to the purpose of Zionism and its attendant priorities: expanding American empire by directing it against enemies of Israel and for Israel’s allies. These priorities were reflected by Ajami’s backers’ careers.

Peretz, an ardent Zionist, spent the late 1960s agitating to send American forces to help swing a civil war between Muslim Nigerians and Christian (Biafran) Nigerians for the Christian side for strategic reasons based on what he saw as shared group traits. (From Peretz’s memoir: “The majority of Biafrans were from the Igbo tribe and were well educated, westernized, and Catholic. They had been colonial Nigeria’s political and intellectual elite, favored by the British. They were also called ‘the Jews of Africa.’ Now they were being murdered by the new Muslim-dominated national government.”) Peretz then spent the early 1980s running cover in Washington for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in its campaign against Yasser Arafat’s PLO—a campaign that, like Biafra, inserted Zionists on behalf of Christians against Muslims in what had been an intra-country conflict. Along with Wieseltier, also a Zionist, Peretz spent the mid-1980s supporting elements of the Iran-Contra play to co-opt Israel’s main rival Iran.

Nine days after September 11, 2001 and five days after Wolfowitz, a Zionist, made good on a decade of advocacy and urged George W. Bush to attack Iraq—another play whose ultimate aim was to marginalize Iran and neuter the Palestinian resistance movement—Peretz and Wieseltier signed onto an open letter along with a number of Zionist veterans of Iran-Contra urging just such an invasion. Within a few months, preparations were underway for just such an invasion at the hands of Wolfowitz and “Scooter” Libby: the Chief of Staff to the Vice President, a Zionist, a longtime friend of Wolfowitz’s and a close friend of Wieseltier’s who had only recently helped secure a pardon for the Jewish Zionist financier Marc Rich, an ally of Jeffrey Epstein’s. (This pardon was facilitated by both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and by Peretz’s New Republic co-owner and hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt, the founder of the pro-Israel think tank the Foundation for Defense of Democracies at which Libby later went to work.) Wolfowitz and Libby began pressuring the CIA to support the invasion and secured the help of John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel to justify it. By 2003, Peretz and Wieseltier were ardently pushing the invasion in the pages of The New Republic. And Ajami had entered the White House to consult with Wolfowitz and Libby and Cheney and Rice.

Ajami’s distinction in these circumstances, as Edward Said intimated at the time, was being a certified intellectual actually from the region America wanted to invade. He was born in 1945 in a Lebanese village called Arnoun which he described to friends as a “rocky hamlet that grew stunted tobacco plants” and a place where Arab intellectualism never penetrated. He became an American citizen in 1964, where he attended university. By this point, the fading British Empire and the rising American one were already actively recruiting Arab intellectuals to produce mass media justifying oil extraction in the Middle East. But, unlike Ajami, these earlier intellectual recruits were mature thinkers with ongoing acquaintance with their homelands who produced realistic material turned to the purpose of propaganda. Ajami, who was younger and left the Middle East, lacked the benefit of maturing or existing in the region he chose to write about; nor was his work directed to people who lived there. Instead, from his time at the Eastern Oregon College and the University of Washington to his time at Princeton and Johns Hopkins and The New Republic, this son of what he saw as the “stunted” landscape of Arnoun identified with America, which for him was imperial institutions, and increasingly wrote for audiences of Jewish Zionist elites who were fairly sure what they wanted to hear.

One result of this perfect circularity between performer and audience, where the intellectual becomes the kept pet of players of power and their mutually generated aims and “ideas” substitute for engagement with ground-level realities, was the embarrassment of 2003. Contrary to what Cheney via Wolfowitz and Libby called Ajami’s “expert” prediction, the streets of Basra and Baghdad did not “erupt in joy” after the invasion. The other result of this circular imperial influence was that these networks didn’t stop after their failure. They experienced a diminution of political influence from roughly 2003 to 2025: “Scooter” Libby, for one, was sentenced to prison for obstruction of justice related to his actions bolstering the case for the invasion of Iraq, receiving the sentence despite “impassioned” public pleas for clemency from Ajami and Wieseltier. But they also perpetuated themselves and expanded, incubating new generations of Zionist operators who in turn incubated a wider array of native informants to push regime change policies that advance Israel’s aims. This meant that, when the White House became occupied by a president interested in resource extraction abroad and staffed and funded by Zionists—namely, Donald Trump in his second term—these networks were ready to act.

The case in point when it comes to Zionist underwriting during the second Trump administration is Bari Weiss. Weiss’s family is tied into Zionist networks via her father Lou’s participation in a nonprofit incubated by the Zionist and Jeffrey Epstein patron Leslie Wexner, a close ally of Peretz’s New Republic co-owner Michael Steinhardt. Bari Weiss arrived at Columbia University at 18 and almost immediately became a Zionist activist, pushing for the firing of a Palestinian professor with anti-Israel views. After graduation, she incubated her career at the Zionist magazine Tablet, whose literary editor (and husband of its founder) David Samuels established his career (in dubious cultural supremacist fashion) at Peretz’s and Wieseltier’s New Republic. After an aborted stint at The New York Times, she used Zionist largesse to first secure the founding of The Free Press and then its sale to Larry and David Ellison, who also put her in the editor-in-chief’s chair at CBS News.

Like Peretz and Wieseltier had Wolfowitz and Libby as Bush White House connections, so too does Weiss have her connections to the Trump White House: via Larry Ellison, a close ally of Donald Trump’s; and Amy Chua, the law school mentor of J.D. and Usha Vance. She seems to make editorial policy for CBS based on deference to the White House, especially when it comes to foreign policy and to the Jewish Zionist Stephen Miller. Based on its roster of contributors and its stream of powerful guests, Weiss seems to have made The Free Press into “the” magazine of the Washington-New York elite; and CBS News still enjoys, for now, its reputation as the gold standard of investigative broadcast journalism. Against this backdrop of deep Zionist influence, widespread media clout, and clear White House ties, Weiss’s moves since Donald Trump’s June 2025 strikes on Iran are significant. They seem to amount to a gathering of the “native informant” clans to push policy through these powerful venues on Washington DC.

Since June, Weiss hired as an “expert” on CBS H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser and current Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, whose director is Condoleezza Rice, who had used Ajami to justify the invasion of Iraq. Weiss began regularly featuring in The Free Press and on CBS the “superstar” Iranian dissidents Masih Alinejad and Roya Hakakian, the latter of whom advocated for regime change in the Joe Biden White House and lent crucial support to lesser-known Iranian exiles’ campaigns to purge from American academia Iranian scholars who disagree with regime change in Iran. Weiss also began featuring in The Free Press the Nigerian scholar Ebenezer Obadare, supporting Donald Trump’s threats of American intervention on behalf of Christians against Muslims in Nigeria. Starting in October, Weiss featured Maria Corina Machado three times in two months in The Free Press making the case for regime change in Venezuela, and, in the aftermath of Maduro’s kidnapping, on CBS. And Weiss chose to fill Walter Cronkite’s old chair as CBS’s evening news anchor Tony Dokoupil. A native of the Cuban exile stronghold of Miami, Dokoupil, in in his first week as CBS anchor, raised eyebrows when he visited the city, “fought back tears” about it, and closed his broadcast with a paean to Marco Rubio. Rubio is the son of Cuban-Americans opposed to Havana’s government and the highest-ranking Cuban-American official in American history, who, the week Dokoupil made his homage, had along with Stephen Miller shepherded the deposition of Nicolas Maduro using justifications from his longtime contact Maria Corina Machado via the Office of Legal Counsel.

There is history for all of these players. Like Ajami in the 1980s and 1990s, these Weiss-supported players’ path to prominence in the 2010s and 2020s has been paved by Zionists. H.R. McMaster’s entrée to Stanford alongside assuming the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellowship came via an endower whose father was a founding director of Larry Ellison’s Oracle. Alinejad’s and Hakakian’s Zionist backers range from the American Jewish Committee to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies to the Zionist magazine The American Purpose to the Ajami-founded Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. Ebenezer Obadare’s American career as a public intellectual was launched at the Council on Foreign Relations during the tenure of the Zionist Richard N. Haas. Maria Corina Machado has close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, and her longtime ally Marco Rubio is a longtime ally of American Zionists. And Tony Doukopil is a committed Jewish Zionist: an adult convert to Judaism before his first marriage to a Jewish Zionist (and, at his first wife’s request, an experiencer of adult circumcision, which he wrote about, wincingly, for The New Republic) who has been accused of bias in his past coverage of Israel.

The seemingly “mainstream” operators all frame their public arguments for regime changes in their respective nations much like Fouad Ajami framed the invasion of Iraq, on terms popularized by “liberal America” as it’s been arbitered since 1945 by WASPs and then Zionists: tolerance, secularism, human rights. Their institutional credentials seem to make them impartial arbiters, or “experts.” Their apparently impartial verdicts at The Free Press or CBS can easily be picked up, as Maria Corina Machado’s have actually been picked up, by the White House to legally or ideologically justify invasions. But nowhere in these framings do significant engagement with words like “sovereignty” or “constitutional republicanism” or “majoritarian democracy” appear: anything alluding to the will of actual people in an actual nation and their right to resolve their problems internally and collectively. Their framings, in other words, run on the logic of empire, which erases sovereignty in the name of resource extraction and, in practice, relies on supporters or beneficiaries of authoritarian government.  Even more to the point, their success runs on access to empire: informal intersections between elite academic and media and nonprofit networks on one hand and America’s government on the other—Zionist-arbitered networks existing in plain sight that we cannot see because we don’t know where to look.

These networks’ longevity, and their informality, and their somewhat hidden character became clear to me from knowing native informants up close and personally in my years living in New York working with Zionists. This happened in part through a score of visits to an apartment near Riverside Park on the Upper West Side owned by Michelle Ajami: the widow of Fouad Ajami and the bearer, after his death in 2014, of both his ideological flame and, in retrospect more unsettlingly, of many of his political operations in America and abroad. I was in my twenties and respectful of the well-known guests, among them Masih Alinejad, whom Michelle Ajami invited for afternoon gatherings of six or seven people to discuss the state of the world, even as I was increasingly skeptical about the fact that none of their interests seemed actually American. What I missed, at the time and for a long time afterwards, was that these gatherings I eventually exited on social terms were not mainly social gatherings. They were strategic ones: circulation points, much as earlier New York addresses had been circulation points for earlier foreign networks, for native informants in America.

A few other locations I ended up frequenting were circulation points, too. One was a particular institute at Columbia University not far from Michelle Ajami’s address where I met Roya Hakakian via a mutual friend. Another was a townhouse in the West Village in Lower Manhattan owned by a Jewish Zionist supporter of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, where denizens of Michelle Ajami’s would pass through after sedate afternoons off Morningside Park for raucous evenings off Sixth Avenue. The people who frequented these locations were fellows at and founders of foreign policy nonprofits and freelance or staff journalists for Zionist publications and businessmen en route from the Middle East attending to unstated interests in America. These New York gathering spaces were their secure stop-offs. There, they traded information with each other and shared their views with establishment players from The Washington Post and The New York Times and the Brookings Institution, before they fanned out the next day to Steve Bannon’s townhouse in Washington or to the Hoover Institution at Stanford or to the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado or to the United Nations in New York to advance their agenda.

Their advancement of their agenda has only become more aggressive in the years since I left the native informant beat. As I finished writing this piece I saw a Wall Street journal op-ed by an acquaintance of mine from gatherings at the West Village townhouse, an op-ed that began widely circulating online in the days that followed. Titled “A Fractured Iran Might Not Be So Bad,” it was a proposal to “help secession happen” in Iran, based on the argument that the borders of the territory holding one of the world’s ancient civilizations are “artificial” and that a U.S.-backed partition would help ward off incursions by Russia and China. If this proposal is taken up by the White House, my old acquaintance, a native of the Middle East, might suddenly assume the role Fouad Ajami occupied in 2002 and Maria Corina Machado in 2025: the native justifier for an imperial dream. All of which is to say, the operators of the native informant cohort are still among us, and more influential than ever before. They are hungry from their years in the wilderness. They are eager for tangible influence. And they are poised, if all goes as they hope these next three years of Donald Trump, to use their dubious “native” legitimacy and their Zionist-arranged access to power to help expand American and Israeli ethnic supremacist empire to the detriment of citizens in America and the world.

Exclusive: Hamas Says It Will Not Unilaterally Disarm as Trump and Netanyahu Threaten a Return to Full-Scale War

Senior Hamas official Basem Naim: "It is clear that Netanyahu [is] searching for new justifications to continue the aggression against Gaza and resume the war."

Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad

Feb 16, 2026

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/trump-netanyahu-demands-hamas-disarmament-gaza-board-peace-negotiations-mladenov

As President Donald Trump prepares to convene the first official meeting of his speciously named Board of Peace on Thursday, he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have re-escalated demands that Hamas and other Palestinian resistance factions imminently disarm—with Netanyahu insisting that all small arms must be turned over before the Israeli military withdraws any of its forces.

“Very importantly, Hamas must uphold its commitment to Full and Immediate Demilitarization,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sunday.

This demand is being presented as a condition for any reconstruction to begin in Gaza, with no guarantees for Palestinian security or sovereignty. A senior Israeli official also claimed Monday that Trump is considering imposing a two-month deadline for Palestinians to surrender their weapons. Both Trump and Netanyahu have threatened that a large-scale war against Gaza could resume if Hamas refuses to capitulate.

Meanwhile Hamas has not been part of any formal negotiations for several months. Amid media reports of new drafts and U.S. preparation for negotiations, Hamas leaders say there has been nothing formally presented to the movement and that no official meetings have been held with the group to discuss possible scenarios.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas leader who has been deeply involved with ceasefire negotiations, told Drop Site that Hamas will not accede to sweeping demands that the Palestinian resistance unilaterally disarm, nor will it submit to a total demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. He reiterated that the group is willing to negotiate on disarmament of resistance forces only if it is linked to a long-term ceasefire that restrains Israel and is accompanied by a political process that leads to the establishment of a Palestinian state and armed force capable of defending itself.

“Our position on this matter is very clear,” Naim said. “Before speaking about disarmament or confiscation of weapons, we believe it is necessary for Netanyahu and his extremist government—along with the mediators and the American guarantor—to ensure full implementation of everything agreed upon in the first phase, so that there can be a fundamental change in the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”

“Palestinian resistance and its weapons are a legitimate right, and disarmament is rejected and will not be accepted by any Palestinian,” Naim continued. “The problem is fundamentally political, not security-based, and its solution lies not in the weapons of the resistance but in [ending] the Zionist occupation. Gaza is not a real-estate project; it is an integral part of the Palestinian homeland.”

Netanyahu has regularly and falsely claimed—often backed by Trump and other Western leaders—that Hamas agreed to a total disarmament of the Palestinian resistance as part of the limited-scope first phase of the “ceasefire” deal signed in October. He has justified the killing of more than 600 Palestinians since the “ceasefire” was signed by claiming Hamas fighters and civilians alike are violating the agreement. In reality, Hamas did not sign any terms having to do with disarmament, asserting that they could not unilaterally make an agreement on future governance or armed resistance on behalf of all Palestinians.

“It is clear that Netanyahu and his extremist government are searching for new justifications to continue the aggression against Gaza and to resume the war, despite all the regional and international positions rejecting a return to fighting,” Naim said. “Hamas also is exerting all efforts to avoid the return to war again. Until recently, Netanyahu used the issue of [Israeli] captives to justify continuing the assault on the Gaza Strip, refusing to withdraw, open the crossings, and allow aid in.”

Throughout the Gaza genocide, Israel has demanded a total surrender not only of Hamas, but of the Palestinian cause of liberation. Hamas officials have told Drop Site that while the group rejects total disarmament, it is open to negotiating the issue of weapons, including an internationally-verified warehousing or decommissioning of some “offensive” weapons on the condition that a Palestinian security force is established in Gaza.

Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad officials have maintained that the armed resistance would only disband in the context of the establishment of an internationally recognized Palestinian armed force capable of defending its territory and people. The Trump plan calls for the destruction of “offensive infrastructure, including tunnels and weapon production facilities” and a longer term vision for “an agreed process of decommissioning” other weapons.

“Life in Gaza today is unsustainable,” Naim emphasized, noting that the reported proposal and demands do not make any guarantees for Palestinian security. “How can there be talk of disarmament while the aggression continues and Netanyahu does not commit to the ceasefire? Armed gangs are being formed, supported, and backed to carry out dangerous security operations such as kidnappings and killings. How can disarmament be discussed while [nearly] 60% of the Gaza Strip remains occupied by Israel?”

Mutual Security Pacts

As Drop Site has previously reported, Hamas repeatedly suggested to regional mediators a solution to the weapons issue wherein the Palestinian resistance would agree to store or “freeze” its weapons and not deploy them in any attacks against Israel. This configuration, which would be part of an internationally-enforced long-term ceasefire, would come with the endorsement of the Palestinian resistance groups themselves. Violating such an agreement, especially one endorsed by large numbers of Arab and Islamic countries, would carry grave consequences for the broader Palestinian struggle. The key to its success, Palestinian officials cautioned, would be compelling Israel to respect the agreement. Israel has consistently violated ceasefire deals not only with Palestine, but also in Lebanon where it continues to bomb on a nearly daily basis despite a ceasefire signed in November 2024. Hamas’s proposals went nowhere and since Trump officially launched his board, there have been almost no substantive discussions with Hamas leaders.

On Sunday, Netanyahu sought to front-run any potential technical negotiations with Hamas that would permit Palestinian fighters to retain even small arms, declaring that the Gaza Strip must be entirely demilitarized as a condition for Israel to move to the second phase of a deal.

“What has to happen is that Hamas must first be disarmed and then Gaza must be demilitarized. Disarmed means that it must give up weapons,” Netanyahu said in a speech at the conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in Jerusalem, dismissing the notion that any negotiations on decommissioning should take place. “There are practically no heavy weapons in Gaza. There’s no artillery, there are no tanks, there’s nothing. The heavy weapon, the one that does the most damage, is called an AK-47, okay, that’s it. That’s how they execute people. That’s how they shoot our people. That’s what they used, assault rifles. That’s what they used in the massacre of October 7,” he added. “That’s the main weapon, and that has to go.”

On Monday, Yossi Fuchs, Israel’s Cabinet Secretary and a senior aide to Netanyahu, claimed that the Trump administration had asked Israel for a two-month window to force Hamas to disarm before Israel re-launched a large-scale military assault on Gaza. ​​”We are currently preparing for a period of around 60 days during which Hamas will be given the opportunity. We are in complete coordination with the Americans, this is their request, we respect them,” Fuchs told a media conference in Jerusalem. “This process will be examined, if it goes well, great. And if not, the IDF will have to return and complete the mission.” Fuchs said he did not know when the 60-day deadline would begin, but predicted that if full disarmament did not happen by June, Israel would renew its total war against Gaza.

“Does talk of disarmament mean the absence of any reciprocal security arrangements, leaving Israel free to operate in Gaza Strip wherever, whenever, and however it wishes?” asked Naim. “Attempting to portray the problem as the existence of weapons in Palestinian hands—light weapons that cannot be compared in any way to the conventional, chemical, biological, or nuclear arsenal possessed by Israel—[ignores] what was witnessed over two years of genocide in the Gaza Strip. These light weapons in the hands of the Palestinian people are fundamentally for self-defense, not for aggression against anyone. Therefore, such a measure is rejected and cannot be allowed to pass, as they claim or demand.”

Naim said that Hamas’s position is that any proposals regarding weapons or disarmament must center around mutual security pacts, not unilateral demands put before the Palestinian side. “Israel must be restrained from continuing the aggression, and it must be ensured that a multi-year ceasefire—three, five, or seven years—runs parallel to the political process,” he said. “During this period, the resistance would commit—under Palestinian, Arab, and international supervision—to the ceasefire. In this time, the weapons would be removed from the field and stored, and full opportunity would be given to the Palestinian government or the administrative committee to manage all civil and security affairs in the Gaza Strip without interference from anyone.”

This position has been consistently articulated by Hamas officials since the signing of the October agreement at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. Despite the pervasive false characterizations from U.S. and Israeli officials that Hamas agreed to all of Trump’s terms, Hamas and other Palestinian factions did not sign an agreement beyond a ceasefire, exchange of captives, and an initial framework for the redeployment or withdrawal of Israeli forces from some parts of Gaza. Officially, there is no deal on a “second phase.” Palestinian negotiators made clear that demands impacting the future of a Palestinian state, the weapons of resistance factions and other existential issues would require consultation with a broad cross-section of Palestinian political parties and factions.

“We have discussed a comprehensive and holistic approach. First, the humanitarian track must be entirely separated: the daily life of the people—their food, water, and medicine—cannot remain at the mercy of this fascist government and its political agenda, whose stated goal is to resolve the conflict by force in favor of the entity and to erase Palestinian existence,” said Naim. “There must also be a serious, time-bound political process that begins and ends with the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. At that point, the weapons and fighters of the resistance would become part of that state and its army.”

“Either disarmament or war”

Last weekend, Trump announced that he had received more than $5 billion in commitments for his board and that partner nations have pledged thousands of troops to deploy as part of an International Stabilization Force (ISF). While Trump did not name specific countries, Indonesia became the first nation to publicly declare its participation, announcing it was preparing for a potential deployment of up to 8,000 of its troops. Many nations have said they will not send troops if the mission includes disarming or clashing with Palestinian resistance factions.

Hamas has said it welcomes an international force, but only to serve as a neutral buffer between Israeli forces and Palestinians in Gaza. “Indonesia’s participation is not intended for combat missions and not for demilitarization missions,” read a February 14 statement from Indonesia’s foreign ministry. It added that the “mandate is humanitarian in nature, focusing on the protection of civilians, humanitarian and health assistance, reconstruction, as well as training and capacity-building for the Palestinian Police.” The statement declared that Indonesia would “terminate participation if the ISF’s implementation deviates” from that mandate.

The Trump plan also calls for a Palestinian police force to be formed under the banner of a newly-established technocratic governing body known as the National Committee for Administration of Gaza (NCAG). Composed of 15 Palestinians, the NCAG is the only component of Trump’s board that includes Palestinians and is situated on the lowest rung of the Board of Peace hierarchy. When Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, presented a slide deck at the launch of the Board of Peace in Davos, Switzerland on January 22, a slide titled “Demilitarization Principles” stated, “Heavy weapons decommissioned immediately. Personal arms registered and decommissioned by sector as NCAG’s police becomes capable of guaranteeing personal security.” The section concluded: “The end state: only NCAG-sanctioned personnel may carry weapons.”

A top official in Trump’s Board of Peace likewise indicated that efforts to disarm Palestinian resistance groups would occur as part of the establishment of a Palestinian security force and not as a formal surrender ceremony. That Trump officials appeared headed toward a slower process of disarmament than Netanyahu has demanded was also reinforced by a report in the New York Times describing a draft U.S. plan that would require Hamas to “surrender all weapons that are capable of striking Israel, but will allow the group to keep some small arms, at least initially.”

Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Dr. Khalil Al-Hayya, met recently in Cairo with Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for Trump’s board, though a senior Hamas official told Drop Site that no official proposals for disarmament were presented at the meeting. “In some meetings, the topic was put on the table in general,” the official said. “Until now, no official discussion with us has been launched.”

At the Munich Security Conference on February 13, Mladenov was asked where he wanted to see the situation in Gaza a year from now. “I hope that we will be significantly advanced on deploying a new security force of Palestinians inside Gaza and Hamas would have given up a significant part of its weapons so that we are moving forward to the point at which Israel can withdraw from the yellow line,” said Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat who served as the UN’s top envoy to the region from 2015-2020. “These are conditions that I think are critical if we are ever to return back to the political resolution of the Palestinian question because the political resolution to the Palestinian question requires negotiations, it requires one Palestinian leadership over the entire occupied territory, and it requires a dialogue that is facilitated—not overseen, but facilitated—by the United States, Europe and others as it has been in the past.”

While Mladenov’s theoretical timeline appears to contradict Netanyahu’s demands for immediate disarmament, he also acknowledged that no serious reconstruction or Israeli military withdrawals would occur unless the resistance was disbanded. On this issue, Mladenov said that not only Hamas’s armed wing would need to disarm, but also Islamic Jihad and all other armed factions. He called Trump’s plan “the only option for going ahead with anything that makes sense in Gaza and that stops this war and doesn’t allow a return to violence.” He added, “Gaza needs to be governed by a transitional authority as authorized by the Security Council resolution under which it needs to take on the full civilian and security control of Gaza and that includes the disarmament of all factions in Gaza, not just Hamas.”

Mladenov said that is the condition for Israeli forces to withdraw and for reconstruction to begin. “The reality is that all of this needs to move very fast,” he said. “Let me be absolutely clear about the risks that we’re facing here: The first risk is that we are not going to implement the second phase of the ceasefire, but we’re going to go to the second phase of the war and that is a serious threat.” He said that if Israel resumed the war, there would be no place for the Board of Peace “until we see what is left and pick up the rubble, potentially, at the end of it.” Mladenov warned that if Phase 2 was not implemented swiftly, the Israeli division of Gaza into two halves and the treatment of Gaza as a separate entity from the West Bank and not as two parts of the same occupied territory would be “cemented.”

Naim, the Hamas official, blasted Mladenov’s statement. “It is a disgrace to hear some American or international politician like Mladenov saying, ‘Either disarmament or war’ because this makes him a spokesperson for the Israeli government, instead of being a representative of a body working to create peace.”

That coercive ultimatum constitutes the centerpiece of Israel’s campaign to ensure it maintains full control of the eastern half of Gaza, an ability to strike at will in the western areas and to impede the minimal concessions offered to the Palestinian side. Phase 2 of Trump’s plan envisions a large-scale reconstruction plan, expanded freedom of movement for Palestinians through the Rafah crossing with Egypt, the empowerment of the Palestinian transitional technocratic committee, under the direction of Mladenov, to assume basic governance duties and the gradual deployment of a Palestinian security force in Gaza. It also includes terms that call for the withdrawal of Israeli forces to a perimeter encircling Gaza, rather than the status quo of Israel occupying more than half of the enclave.

“The U.S. is playing the good cop in this moment to Netanyahu’s bad cop position. They are talking reconstruction and peace while he keeps the threat of war hanging. So I see them doing a diversionary tango that constantly moves Hamas further and further into a corner,” said Sami Hermez, a political analyst and professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. “I don’t think we can separate the U.S. and Israel or Trump and Netanyahu into two different strategies versus partners in one overall strategy working in tandem. It is naive to think otherwise or to follow the media narrative that Trump is not seeing eye-to-eye with Netanyahu every now and then.”

Devastation in Gaza

Despite the overarching colonialist structure of the Board of Peace and Trump’s constant deference to Israel’s agenda, Netanyahu continues to publicly reject any plan that would allow Palestinians to remain in Gaza with even a semblance of autonomy or an ability to rebuild homes, hospitals, roads or schools. Israel has systematically refused to uphold the terms of the October agreement. Over the four months since the so-called ceasefire took effect on October 10, approximately 1,620 Israeli violations have been recorded, according to the latest figures from Gaza’s Government Media Office. These include hundreds of shooting incidents, repeated shelling and airstrikes, incursions into residential neighborhoods, and the demolition of homes and buildings. These violations resulted in the killing of at least 603 Palestinians and the wounding of more than 1,600.

Israel has also refused to allow in the agreed-upon levels of food and other life essentials stipulated in the agreement. Although 600 aid trucks per day were supposed to enter the Gaza Strip, the average has been only around 260 trucks per day. Fuel deliveries have been especially restricted, with just 861 trucks entering out of the 6,000 agreed upon. Israel has severely restricted passage in and out of Gaza at the Rafah crossing since its partial reopening last week, allowing roughly a quarter of the expected number of Palestinians to depart or return to Gaza. As Israel continues to move its forces deeper into Gaza than permitted, it has also been constructing infrastructure in areas of eastern Gaza that indicate long term plans for open-ended occupation.

In the bigger picture, Netanyahu is manufacturing a state of chaos in Gaza that relegates Palestinians to fragile tent encampments and limited access to basic life necessities. He has made no secret that Israel’s aim is for Trump to empower ongoing Israeli attacks, severely limit any improvement to living conditions or the hope of reconstruction and to encourage the large-scale removal of Palestinians from Gaza. By making a boogieman of the small arms of the resistance, Netanyahu is maintaining a political justification to continue a low intensity war—that Amnesty International has deemed a continuation of the genocide—with the spectre of resuming larger operations.

“The longer Netanyahu can keep Gaza unlivable the better, the longer he can stall any reconstruction and relief the better. The idea of total disarmament is a good way to ensure nothing gets done in Gaza because he knows it is an unrealistic demand,” said Hermez. “To a great extent, the US and Israel are following the same playbook they used in the West Bank for decades: they talk peace and the US even funds peace initiatives, while the troops on the ground make life hell for Palestinians and continue to squeeze them. All in the name of some future promise—it was statehood post Oslo, it is mere reconstruction in Gaza. The wild card, of course, is Hamas and the resilience of life on the ground.”

Naim said that the unfolding events underscore the continuance of Israel’s multi-decade campaign to annihilate not only the aspirations for a Palestinian state, but an intensification of the war to force Palestinians entirely from the land. He pointed to Israel’s ongoing siege of the occupied West Bank, replete with regular Israeli military invasions, the expansion of illegal settlements, and the terror being unleashed on Palestinians by state-backed settlers on a daily basis. He also cited recent judicial actions that allow Israel to register land in areas of the West Bank as legal property of the state for the first time since 1967.

“The Palestinian experience over more than 33 years since the Oslo Accords—which were supposed to end with the establishment of a Palestinian state—shows how Israel, especially during Netanyahu’s tenure since 1996, used every means to destroy that opportunity, weaken and undermine the [Palestinian] Authority, and expand annexation by all means. Recent decisions bypassing previous Israeli laws and obligations toward both Palestinians and Jordanians and canceling Jordanian law and the administrative capacity of the Palestinian National Authority, amount to de facto and legal annexation,” he said. “This experience confirms that the problem has never been the Palestinians or the resistance, but rather the Israeli colonial settlement project aimed at erasing Palestinian existence and ending the Palestinian cause in favor of a Jewish state between the river and the sea.”

Naim added, “What Netanyahu and his army have failed to achieve over the course of two years, they will not succeed [in attaining] by any other means—regardless of the support he may receive from any party.”