The United States passed the Taylor Force Act in March 2018 which prohibits the U.S. from giving funds to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continues its “Martyrs’ Payments” to terrorists who killed and injured Americans or Israelis. The PA flatly refused to stop the payments for years, with PA President Mahmoud Abbas saying that he would prioritize giving terrorists and their families money even if he had only one penny left.
In the aftermath of Palestinians’ loss against Israel in the war Gazans started on October 7, 2023, Palestinians are desperate for money. Still, US President Donald Trump is halting the generous flow of money and support to various Palestinian groups and is making it very difficult for the PA’s other sponsors like Iran and Qatar to continue to fund the decimated Palestinian Arabs as long as they support terror.
Rather than halt the extremely popular pay-to-slay program, Abbas announced on February 10 that he will transfer the responsibility of terrorist-tribute from his Ministry of Social Development to a separate agency, the Palestinian National Foundation for Economic Empowerment. Abbas thinks that this slight of hand to a foundation whose trustees are appointed by him, the PA president, will somehow confuse the United States to turn on the money spigot.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
The unpopular PA president is caught between Palestinian Arabs who seek the destruction of Israel and murder of Israelis, and the United States which accounts for a majority of Palestinian aid, now headed by an administration which will not countenance genocidal jihad, especially on its dime. Abbas prays that this farcical shell game will confuse US President Donald Trump as if he were former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Palestinians are starting to get the message that they must stop supporting terror. The issue is that the masses would rather live in rubble with “dignity” than coexist with the Jewish State.
The war between Hamas and related Palestinian militant groups in Gaza with Israel has evoked many passions. Defenders of both sides point to either the barbaric October 7 massacre and the taking of hostages on one side, or the lack of freedom of movement, dignity and sovereignty on the other.
Where the defenders of Gaza and those in Israel agree is that Hamas has not been completed eliminated and its ideology remains popular among Palestinian Arabs. Lost among Gaza’s defenders is that their comments and philosophy condemn any prospect for peace and should prevent any rebuilding efforts.
Palestinian Arabs believe that ALL of the land is being “occupied” and that Jews are foreigners with no rights as illegal invaders. They oppose the existence of Israel and that peace with Israel is a disgrace and insult to their dignity.
Unmentioned is the Palestinian Authority, deeply unloved by local Palestinians. The United Nations and American Democrats pretend that the PA President has support and power among the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) but he doesn’t. Even The New York Times finally shared opinions of a range of Palestinian Arabs from around the world who mock the PA as worthless and must be reconstituted to include the voices of the “resistance” against Israel, like Hamas.
The New York Times Opinion piece sharing voices from Palestinian Arabs who mock the Palestinian Authority and support Hamas and its viewpoints
Even after a war in which Hamas and Gaza got obliterated, its supporters of Hezbollah in Lebanon had to sue for a ceasefire and Iran became defanged, Palestinian Arabs still refuse to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish State. After the local failures to destroy Israel, SAPs pray for global efforts from the United Nations and antisemites worldwide to end the “Zionist project” and enable Arabs to retake all of the Jewish Promised Land.
The United States under President Trump has made clear that it will not let that happen. Trump has pulled money and the U.S. out of United Nations groups which condemn Israel. He has expedited military equipment to Israel. And he has made clear that he expects American allies to do much the same.
Hamas’s defenders want the war against Israel to continue, which will likely delay any rebuilding of Gaza and holding elections which would likely see Hamas gain power. Those opposing Hamas do so silently, and focus on pushing the world to embrace the charade of the Palestinian Authority to fast-track aid into Gaza.
Palestinian Arabs have condemned themselves to an ongoing ‘Nakba’ since they continue to reject the Jewish State. Until that ideology ends, the only rebuilding of Gaza that should happen is the wall separating the enclave from Israel.
The Bible’s Garden of Eden is the prototypical paradise. God’s first hand creation of nature in balance with man is the dream of many, a place of bliss and innocence. Philosophers and biblical commentators ponder what would the world have been like had the snake never teased people into disobeying God’s command of eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Would mankind be simple and peaceful, enjoying God’s grace?
Alas, the world we live in today is a product of that fateful day. Mankind was expelled from the garden and soon knew of murder, and the snake became one of the most feared and hated animals to man. A steep price to pay for the knowledge between good and evil.
There are almost no countries on Earth without snakes today, as the reptile thrives in a wide variety of climates. New Zealand, an island far removed from most inhabited locations is one of those snake-free homes. Its natural beauty is beyond comparison, with a habitat with few predators; quite a world apart from its closest neighbor Australia with crocodiles, Great White sharks and killer spiders, jellyfish, snakes and taipans.
New Zealand’s beauty and lack of lethal animals offers an initial peer into the inhabitants’ innocence. Its government makes visitors declare every food item and more upon entering the country, less its fragile environment become threatened by the introduction of new harmful elements.
This Eden Without Snakes fosters a socially conscious and environmentally-friendly culture, at least according to the European colonialists who took control of the islands from the indigenous Maori. White Europeans now constitute just shy of 70 per cent of the nation, Maori 16.5% and Asians 15.3%. The colonialists cemented their rule on February 6, 1840 with the signing of the Waitangi Treaty in which the Maori essentially handed over their land to the Europeans. The country celebrates Waitangi Day every February 6, without pausing how the European colonists importation of various animals and trees to make it resemble Scotland, destroyed the Eden that existed before their arrival, almost bringing the native flightless birds like the kiwi to extinction.
Residing thousands of miles from the nearest country – with whom it has warm bilateral relations – has insulated the country from wars. Its national assessment of the risk of terrorism is low, quite different than Australia (probable) and the United Kingdom (substantial).
The clueless New Zealanders (no admitted relationship to Ben Stiller’s Zoolander) broadcast their ignorance when they attack Israel in its defense against antisemitic genocidal jihadists who live next door. The country passed laws sniffing out Israelis visiting the country, while the actual local Kiwi colonists seek out Israelis for harassment on the streets.
Posters all over Christchurch seeking Israelis on vacation (photo: First One Through)
No Western democracy deals with threats to existence like Israel. Israel exists on one extreme, a small sliver of a country surrounded by jihadists who seek to destroy the country as a matter of open public policy, while the remote Eden of New Zealand is on the other extreme.
Wanted poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on street of Christchurch, NZ (photo: First One Through)
To watch the Kiwis stand in judgment of the Jewish State is a pathetic display of virtue signaling by naive and entitled actual colonists, about a situation thousands of miles away which has no direct bearing on their peaceful existence. One is left with concluding New Zealanders are either idiots or antisemites.
We can also let them declare their every bias before they proffer their views to avoid contaminating other democracies.
For years, politicians tried to resolve conflicts via “shuttle diplomacy.” A senior official would act as mediator by running to one side of a conflict and take notes, then shuttle to the counterparty to relay information and take notes, all the while, attempting to bridge the gap between the parties.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry under President Obama was a classic example of this approach in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Convinced that nothing could be done that would upset the broad Palestinian Arab street, he hammered home that Israel, the stronger party, must continue to do more to placate Palestinian demands. His list of demands from Palestinians grew ever longer, never applying pressure on the Palestinian Authority.
Kerry is the prime example of a failed negotiator in shuttle diplomacy. He remained to the very end, too dense to consider how bad he approached the Middle East, making parting comments as he left office as if he had earned any credibility.
In Donald Trump’s first term in office, he immediately reversed the Kerry failed thinking of peace-making. He adopted an “outside-in” tactic of not letting the weak and ever-demanding Palestinian Authority stop broader peace in the region, and established the Abraham Accords, creating normalization agreements between Israel and several Muslim Arab countries.
Now in his second term, Trump made a bold announcement on February 5, 2025, tossing out the idea of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East in favor of something I call “Anchor Diplomacy,” in which Trump will use the broad reach and power of the United States to impose peace between the Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. He will not run back-and-forth between the two sides, but will get the various parties to come to him, and attempt to dislodge or soften his stance in which he put the United States – not the two parties – in the center of the discussion.
Trump announced that the United States will take over the rebuilding of the demolished Gaza Strip, and Gazans will be relocated out of the area into Egypt, Jordan and other countries during the reconstruction. Gazans may return or opt to stay in the new locations with a much better standard of living.
There are many points to unpack in the Gaza statements but the practicality of one or another point is an aside. Trump is making the Arab world come to him, not the other way round. The Arab world will be forced to make Hamas disappear from the scene to prevent a U.S.-takeover, instead of the U.S. being worried whether Hamas or other terrorist groups will scuttle any progress towards calm. The United Nations will be dislodged as a biased and awful actor in the region, as the Arab street clamors for U.S. to engage monetarily but not overly intrusively.
President Teddy Roosevelt once said “speak softly and carry a big stick.” Trump has chosen a new path to waive the large stick over everyone’s head and to lay down a marker of his own. He has long built a reputation being a very loyal friend as well as a menacing enemy. He knows that the regimes of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have much to gain from the United States – or they can turn Trump into an enemy and run to the embrace of a new sponsor, perhaps China.
Trump has so far been able to get countries like Colombia to eat their words and reverse policies when he threatened economic hardship, and obviously feels that Arab countries will similarly get on board with at least some of his Gaza proposal. At the very least, they will learn that the days of treating the U.S. as an open faucet of money to abuse with unrealistic demands will not stand under Trump.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump at White House February 5, 2025
Anchor Diplomacy, the muscle of entrenching a position and forcing the sides to react, can only be effective by a mediator with tremendous influence on each side. While pro-Palestinians/ anti-Americans will chant “imperialism” and “empire” in exasperation at Trump’s Gaza announcement, the shadows which will swing the outcome will be China and/or Saudi Arabia, who might magnify or counter American power.
The United Nations created a temporary agency in 1949 to care for Palestinian Arabs who left Israel during Israel’s founding. It’s called UNRWA, the United Nations Work and Relief Agency. The staff of over 30,000 people are almost all descendants of those Palestinian Arab “refugees” with a few White Europeans sprinkled on the leadership to make the organization appear as an international aid group, rather than an employment agency.
UNRWA has long abused its mandate, extending services to hundreds of thousands of people who are not descendants of “refugees”, essentially becoming a bank in distributing loans to local Arabs, and teaching millions of its Arab wards to hate Israeli Jews and that they will get to move into Israel with UNRWA’s help.
After years of perpetuating the conflict, Israel decided to ban UNRWA from operating in Israel as of January 30, 2025, as many of its members took part in the October 7 massacre and others worked for terrorist groups outside of Gaza, including in Lebanon. As UNRWA only operates in conjunction with the host country of operations, keeping operations in Jerusalem open after Israel declared it illegal would not just make it operating against Israeli law but its own principles.
So UNRWA acts defiantly, even though in knows full well that it is doing so illegally.
It is reminiscent of UN Security Council Resolution 2334 which made it illegal for Israeli Jews to live east of the 1949 Armistice Lines with Jordan (E49AL), including the Old City of Jerusalem. It is a patently antisemitic law, enshrined after nearly three-quarters of a million Jews already live in the area, so Israel ignores it and allows Jews to continue to buy and build homes in the area.
The press often labels Jews who live in E49AL as “settlers,” whether they live in new settlements or large cities. The term “settlement” is a wandering noun which travels with antisemites who label Jews as illegal trespassers. Media compounds the narrative, often appending language “which most of the world considers illegal” whenever discussing a “settlement.”
Will that same media now label UNRWA’s operations in Gaza and the “West Bank” as illegal? Or will it prefer to mock Israeli law, quite the opposite of its christening antisemitic UNSC Res. 2334.
Will members of the UN Security Council consider trading Israel’s ban of UNRWA with rescinding the antisemitic UNSC Resolution 2334 to facilitate aid to Gaza and promote coexistence? It has never been the modus operandi of the United Nations, but the times, they are a changin’.
The New York Times, Al Jazeera and other anti-Israel media often quote the number of people killed by Hamas on October 7 and then the number of Gazans killed in an effort to show a disproportionate figure in casualties. As described on IsraelAnalysis.com “The Quantitative Shield for A Qualitative Problem,” the intentions of each side is erased, with the Palestinian Arabs seeking a genocidal ethnic cleansing of Jews, while Israel attempts to keep the jihadists from being able to commit such atrocities again.
The issue of the quantitative telling is also grossly misleading.
The New York Times deceptively frames the conflict of Israelis killed and Gazans killed
The anti-Israel propaganda uses a number of deliberately misleading tactics and phrases to inflame anger against Israel in its defensive war. The tactics include:
Israel’s dead are only from a single day, while Gazan dead are totaled over 15 months
Gazans are separated from their popular leadership of Hamas in describing the attackers as from “Hamas,” while the Gazan dead are “Palestinians”
Israel is described as launching the war in response to the Hamas attack, rather than Gazans launching the war
Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and several Palestinian Arab terrorist groups east of the 1949 Armistice Lines (E49AL) are part of the Iranian proxies war against Israel; this is not a war of one local militant group against Israel
Hamas is never highlighted as a declared terrorist group by the United States and several western countries
Qatar-owned Hamas propaganda outlet Al Jazeera describes the war as being launched by Israel
Many Israelis have been killed since October 7, 2023, but those hundreds of dead soldiers are excluded in the anti-Israel account. The multifront war with 10,000+ projectiles fired at Israel is completely ignored in trying to make Gaza look like the single, small party in a fight against Israel.
Hamas is not just a “group” or “militants.” They are the ruling the government of Gaza. They were popularly elected to 58% of the Palestinian parliament in 2006 and continue to hold such representation. They continue to be the most popular Palestinian political party in every poll, and a majority of Gazans supported the October 7 massacre of Israelis. The war wasn’t just led by Hamas militants but a genocidal war supported by Gazans.
And the war was also supported by jihadists around the Middle East including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the government of Iran and the Houthis in Yemen. Each launched numerous missiles against Israel in support of the Gazan genocidal war.
A proper accounting of the history of this war will show several jihadi armies attacking Israel and killing well over the 1,200 people murdered on the first day of the war, with each army routed by the Israeli Defense Forces. It will show that the initial perpetrators of the war hid like cowards underneath their families for fifteen months, and Israel managed to keep the civilian death toll much lower than the 74% of Gaza which are women and children under 18 years old.
History will also judge the socialist-jihadi alliance which waged a propaganda war against Israel, and the gross misstatements made repeatedly to fan the flames of antisemitism from Australia to Canada.
U.S. President Donald Trump asked the governments of Egypt and Jordan to take in Gazans so the repair of the region could be expedited. Trump acknowledged that Jordan already had many Arabs who had come from Palestine in the country – over half the country’s population, including the king of Jordan’s wife – but “I said to him that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess…. I don’t know, something has to happen, but it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there, so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.”
Jordan has a large Palestinian Arab population because it invaded Israel in 1948 and ethnically cleansed Jews from the west bank of the Jordan River all the way through the Old City of Jerusalem. It then illegally annexed that region in 1950 and granted all Arabs – specifically excluding Jews – Jordanian citizenship in 1954.
Statements by Egypt and Jordan dismissed Trump’s suggestion. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that “the deportation or displacement of the Palestinian people is an injustice in which we cannot participate.” The Jordanian monarch made similar comments.
Social media lit up as well. As hundreds of thousands of Gazans moved back to their towns in northern Gaza, The call of “return!” was echoed.
It’s a strange dynamic. The United Nations and its arm in the region, UNRWA, has insisted that 73% of Gazans do NOT belong in Gaza but in towns inside of Israel where grandparents left during their war to destroy the Jewish State in 1948. Yet now they insist that these same Arabs cannot be dislodged from Gaza, after they got decimated in a war initiated by their government.
The victim mentality is such an ingrained deformity in Palestinian Arab culture (courtesy of the United Nations), that attempts to efficiently rebuild infrastructure is met with the same tired complaint of “ethnic cleansing” as a “displacement plan” rather than a rebuilding plan.
Now is the time for Gazans to internalize that Gaza is their home, not Israel, as a condition to taking billions of dollars in aid in global charity.
First One Through 