United States President Donald Trump had the time of his life on Monday at the Israeli Knesset, where he was welcomed as “the president of peace”. His captive audience showered him with applause, laughs and too many standing ovations to count. A single protester undertook a brief outburst but was swiftly bundled out, earning the president more laughs and applause for his remark: “That was very efficient” . . . .
Trump’s Knesset appearance was occasioned by the ostensible end – for the moment – to the US-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, which has over the past two years officially killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Some scholars have suggested that the real death toll may be in the vicinity of 680,000. . . .
Trump’s Knesset performance included numerous sales pitches for the Abraham Accords, which he noted he preferred to pronounce “Avraham” because it was “so much sort of nicer”. Emphasising how good the normalisation deals have been for business, Trump declared that the four existing signatories have already “made a lot of money being members”. . . .
To be sure, any expansion of the Abraham Accords in the present context would function to legitimise genocide and accelerate Palestinian dispossession. As it stands, the surviving inhabitants of Gaza have been condemned to a colonial overlordship, euphemised as a “Board of Peace” – which Trump has hailed as a “beautiful name” and which will be presided over by the US president himself. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.