FREEMAN: U.S. and Israel Fuel Endless Despair

Ambassador Chas Freeman dismantles the neocolonial Gaza scheme announced by President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu as a stack of false assumptions: that Hamas has been defeated, that Palestinian nationalism and democratic opinion can be ignored while a government is imposed, and that Arab states will send troops and pay to rebuild what history shows Israel later destroys (05:01). Even inside Israel, Bezalel Smotrich has rejected the plan as one that “will end in tears,” Freeman notes.

On Tony Blair’s floated role, Freeman says the former British prime minister would reprise his “historic” function as a kind of colonial overseer who delegates rather than manages hands-on, presiding over Gaza “if this happens”—but he doubts it will (06:24).

Freeman points to Netanyahu’s United Nations address—delivered to a hall that emptied out—as proof of Israel’s deepening isolation (09:01). What struck him was the inversion: Netanyahu recited atrocities he attributes to Hamas while, Freeman argues, the same categories—rape, the taking of grandmothers and grandchildren, and people burned alive in bombed tent camps—are “crimes of which the Israeli Defense Forces are guilty,” adding, “We’ve seen the videos.” We are, he says, “living with this incredible set of lies,” and that is where the real story begins.