In the days since a fragile ceasefire took hold, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza finally began returning to their homes. Survivors began searching through the remains of dozens of bodies recovered from the rubble of destroyed homes, desperate to find any sign of their missing loved ones.
Two things were happening at the same time:
- In the West Bank, Palestinians were being attacked by Israeli settlers and the Israeli military, including troops redeployed from Gaza.
- As Trump was being sworn in, his new BFF Elon Musk was giving what looked like a Nazi salute, and the ADL was coming to Musk’s defense.
Escalating violence in the West Bank.
Shortly after he was inaugurated, Trump issued a slew of destructive executive orders, including lifting sanctions imposed by the Biden administration on violent Israeli settlers.
With a green light to attack Palestinians with impunity, Israeli settlers raided Palestinian villages across the Occupied West Bank on Monday and Tuesday. Protected and enabled by the Israeli military, they terrorized local residents, setting vehicles and homes on fire and injuring at least 21 people.
At the same time, the Israeli military launched a large-scale operation in the Palestinian city of Jenin, killing at least 10 Palestinians and injuring dozens of others. Palestinians describe Israeli airstrikes, bulldozers being used to destroy roads, and Apache helicopters hovering overhead while snipers fired on anyone who tried to escape.
In one disturbing video, a man is seen walking down an empty road when he comes under Israeli gunfire. He tries to run before collapsing to the ground, dead.
Even before October, 2023 was already the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the U.N. began counting the dead in 2005. After October 7, Israeli violence in the West Bank skyrocketed: More than half of the over 500 Palestinians murdered in the West Bank in 2023 were killed between October and December of that year.
Trump, the right, and the ADL.
It will take billions to rebuild Gaza, assuming the fragile ceasefire agreement that came into effect on January 19 actually holds. Trump has already expressed skepticism that it will; his priorities lie elsewhere.
On Monday, Trump described Gaza — the site of a U.S.-backed genocide that has killed tens of thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of people — as a “phenomenal location on the sea,” echoing comments made during his election campaign that the besieged enclave could be “better than Monaco.”
Like his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump seems more concerned about the value of the real estate than what happens to the two million Palestinians who live in Gaza. That’s something he shares in common with Israel’s extremist, far-Right government, whose aim has always been maximum land, minimum Palestinians.
Trump and the Israeli government share the same right-wing agenda, and despite what they may claim, it has nothing to do with keeping Jews safe. Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Israeli settlers immediately earned him praise from Israel’s right-wing finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who once said that there is “no such thing” as the Palestinian people.
Pro-Israel groups in the U.S. are also making it clear that their loyalties lie with Trump’s anti-Palestinian agenda, turning a blind eye to the increasingly blatant antisemitism coming from Right-wing politicians. When Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk performed a Nazi salute at his inauguration on Monday, the Anti-Defamation League — a so-called civil rights group dedicated to fighting antisemitism — wrote it off as an awkward gesture. This is a shockingly casual posture, compared to their response to those who join a protest calling for an end to genocide. The ADL condemns those people (often Jews) as violent antisemites.
The ADL claims to prioritize the fight against antisemitism, but all they really care about is maintaining U.S. support for Israel. Increasingly, that means backing a far-Right agenda that makes Jews and all marginalized people less safe.
With Trump and his allies in power, the movement we’ve built together faces new heights of repression. It is up to us to resist Trump’s right-wing agenda, to turn the temporary ceasefire in Gaza into a full halt of the genocide, and to cry out with everything we have to stop Israel from expanding its campaign of total destruction to the West Bank. Enormous challenges lay ahead, but we also have a critical opening: The vast majority of U.S. Jews didn’t vote for Trump, yet U.S. support for Israel is increasingly a Right-wing project, which puts the contradictions inherent in Jewish support for Israel into even sharper focus.
The choice being presented by Israel’s Right-wing backers — between Palestinian freedom and Jewish safety — is a false one. The Right wants us isolated, to convince us that only our own struggles matter, and that others’ pain doesn’t exist. In reality, the only way to build a better future for all of us is to recognize each other’s humanity.
This text is published in JVP’s web page on 22nd of January, 2025. (https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2025/01/22/adl-defends-nazi-salutes/?utm_source=wire&utm_medium=email&sourceid=1001761&emci=f67471af-e1d8-ef11-88d0-0022482a9d92&emdi=df097d72-fbd8-ef11-88d0-0022482a9d92&ceid=69880