Role of US leadership in stopping Gaza’s genocide, achieving peace

REALITY CHECK

- JEFFREY D SACHS AND SYBIL FARES

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, and his efforts toward peace in Ukraine, if successful, could help him earn one - but only if he also ends US complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Under Trump, as under former president Joe Biden, the US has served as Israel’s partner in mass murder, annexation, starvation and the escalating torment of millions of Palestinians.

The genocide can, and will, stop if Trump wills it. So far, he has not.

Israel is committing genocide — everyone knows it, even its staunchest defenders. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has recently made a poignant acknowledgment of “Our genocide”.

In foreign affairs, former US ambassador to Israel Jack Lew recently admitted that extremist parties in Netanyahu’s government openly aim to starve Palestinians in Gaza.

Lew frames his piece as praise for the former Biden administration (and for himself) for their supposedly valiant efforts to prevent mass starvation by pressuring Israel to allow minimal food entry, while blaming Trump for easing that pressure.

Yet the actual importance of the piece is that an ardent Zionist insider certifies the genocidal agenda sustaining Netanyahu’s rule. Lew recounts that in the aftermath of October 7.

Israelis frequently pledged that “not a drop of water, not a drop of milk and not a drop of fuel will go from Israel to Gaza”, a stance that still shapes Israel’s cabinet policy. T

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) can use Lew’s article as confirmation of Israel’s genocidal intent.

The genocide in Gaza, coupled with the annexation in the West Bank, aims to fulfil the Likud vision of a Greater Israel that exercises territorial control between the Sea and Jordan. This will destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state and any possibility of peace.