Since March 30th, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been demonstrating in the Gaza Strip against a 10-year blockade enforced by the Israeli state. Because of this blockade, the majority of Gaza's 1.85 million inhabitants survive on humanitarian aid, without any link to the outside world. To all intents and purposes, Gaza has been turned by the Israeli state into a giant detention camp, whose population has no hope nor can see a future.
This is why thousands of young and not-so-young protesters have been coming back day after day to the fence which separates Gaza from Israel, to vent their anger at being treated as prisoners on their own land. And this, in spite of the live bullets of Israeli army snipers who were shooting at them from the Israeli side of the fence.
By last Sunday, after six weeks of protests, the casualties were already shocking: in total, 51 Palestinians had been shot dead, 1,000 had been wounded by live fire and twice as many had been injured by the army's anti-riot gas shells.
But the Israeli army's bloody response reached a new climax this Monday. In just one day, 59 Palestinians were shot dead and 1,500 wounded. Why? Simply to drive home the point that Trump and his friends in the Israeli government wanted to make, by choosing that day to celebrate both the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Israeli state and the inauguration of the first ever US embassy to open in the town of Jerusalem.
A calculated provocation
For Trump, moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is supposed to be "merely" delivering on one of his election promises. But how much do American voters really care about this posturing? This, when their material conditions are going down the drain, while the "great American jobs" that Trump promised, have not only failed to materialise, but are disappearing fast?
No, the real reason is elsewhere. Trump and his pal, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, know exactly what they're doing and what an insulting provocation this “celebration” represents for the Palestinian people - and this is precisely the reason for their bloody game.
For the 12.4m Palestinians, half of whom live under the apartheid regime imposed by the state of Israel, while the other half have been scattered across the world as refugees, this anniversary is a reminder of the forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians from their land 70 years ago.
As to the inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem - purely symbolic, since this new US embassy has yet to be built - it is just another way for Trump and his partners in crime to make it clear that all the promises made in the past by the so-called "international community", were never worth the paper they were written on. Countless UN resolutions promised that the Palestinian town of East Jerusalem, which was occupied by the Israeli army in 1967, would eventually be returned to the Palestinians. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, is just a way of stating in no uncertain terms that, as far as the rich powers are concerned, this won't happen!
The capitalist screw against the poor
It is wrong to say, as some do, that all this is just due to Trump being a loose cannon or Netanyahu a crooked politician - even if both assertions are true. Just as it is wrong to claim that all this is driven by some sort of religious or racial hatred.
Behind the unsavoury buffoons who run the political show in this world, there are forces which carry far more weight than these puppets. And for these forces, religion and racism, just as war, are just means to an end - maximising their profits.
What is really at stake behind Trump's bloody posturing, are the interests of huge multinationals - oil companies, banks, arms manufacturers, etc., for whom the Middle East and its natural and human resources represent an enormous bounty, on which they have already grown fat for many decades. And they are determined to secure and tighten their stranglehold over this region, whatever the cost may be for its population.
For the money-possessing powers, the founding of the state of Israel - and the removal of the Palestinians at gunpoint that came with it - was just a way of ensuring that this new state would act as a policeman against the poor masses of the region in order to protect their interests - and it has. Likewise with Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran: the rich powers' policy in these countries has always been primarily dictated by the future profits of their multinationals, never by the interests of the populations, who've always paid for their policy with their blood.
So, yes, the world will be a much safer place for its inhabitants, once mankind has got rid of the root cause of this catastrophic situation - capitalism.