A price on the US's head

Trump's announcement of a US takeover of Gaza has made the country a target for terrorists the world over.

As if the new Trump presidency was not already putting the US at risk of societal and economic collapse, announcing that the US will takeover the Gaza strip and turn it into a resort has put Trump, every US citizen overseas, and the country itself into a target for terrorist attacks. And this coupled with plans by Kash Patel to neuter the FBI, and thus its role in preventing such attacks, will make the US a very precarious place to live, as if its lax gun laws were not already doing that.

However, the US will be a legitimate target because it is now going to be actively committing genocide of Palestinians in concert with Israel. While many of the wold's political leaders may be dismissive of Trumps's rhetoric as just throwing verbal hand grenades, that is not what populations and resistance movements around the world will treat them as. Effectively, Trump has just justified their every reason to treat the US as a terrorist state itself, and thus free game for every means to take down its president and damage the country.

Every politician in every other country that supports, or even hedges their comments on, Trump's proposal has also earmarked them and their countries as terrorist targets. Now is not the time to play diplomacy with the US, but to stand with humanity and refuse to agree with any of such a plan for Gaza. The plan is clearly testing how corruptible many politicians have became, so many will see the dividing line between unbridled greed, wealth and corruption, and the needs of humanity being made more clear to them, and thus what they really need to support for their own wellbeing and sanity.

2025 is the year that we will see the working out of the choices of previous years, not only by politicians but everyday citizens. For the latter, the previous choices have been to basically accept the neoliberal doctrine that their comfort and wellbeing is more important than the exploitation of the rest of the world's people, and thus that that exploitation, and the extreme violence, hunger and death that results from that, is justified, even if they do not want to acknowledge that.

Now we are seeing that those who have been driving such a narrative are being brazenly open about it, assuming that they now have the support of enough of their populations to engage them directly with their plans in the open. The live-streamed Gaza genocide has made many more aware of what the real toll of middle-class comfort involves, and made the real choices that need to be made to have real peace clear. But the elections of right-wing politicians and approval of their nationalistic and selfish narratives means that many do not believe supporting humanity is worthwhile.

But despite what large numbers of voters may choose, polls show majorities of the populations in those countries generally want the genocide to stop, though how much they are willing to sacrifice to actually do what will make it stop beyond short-term ceasefires is unknown. Until they actually vote in politicians who will stand up to the bullying of the major powers, we will be living with genocide for longer yet. Displacing problems is not an answer, but displacing sentiments with palpable actions are.

Unfortunately, some of those actions will likely be violent, just because there do not seem to be ways to make worthwhile changes happen any sooner than years. The only viable non-violent actions available to the general public before the next voting cycles are civil disobedience, where people choose to obstruct, either by their physical presence or by intentional bureaucratic mishandling, the systems in a country supporting genocides, making those systems too expensive to persevere with.

The only real path for a short-term handling of the Palestinian situation is for a UN force to occupy the whole of Israel, and begin to dismantle the regime. Unfortunately, most of the UN Security Council permanent vetoing countries support the genocide continuing. Thus, it would have to be a extra-judicial force of a great majority of the UN doing another off-the-books action to secure the country, while fending off likely substantial naval forces of Western countries trying to again protect Israel from the consequences of its actions.