Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – David Smith of The Guardian reminds us that Trump is a fan of World Wrestling Federation matches, in attempting to explain the sad spectacle at the White House on Friday.
Trump is demanding that Volodymyr Zelenskiyy, the president of Ukraine, “make peace” with Russia, accusing him of risking plunging the planet into WW III with his stand against the Russian invasion. Trump told Zelenskiyy, “you’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.” He meant by “deal” acquiescing in the Russian annexation of the Donbass and neighboring regions of Ukraine.
Democrats denounced Trump and JD Vance for the clearly rehearsed ambush. Léonie Chao-Fong at The Guardian quoted Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) as saying of Zelenskiyy, “Our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe.”
I don’t bring all this up to talk about the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine War. There are military analysts and political scientists who have argued for some time that given Russia’s advantages in size and manpower, an outright Ukrainian victory is unlikely. That said, emboldening Putin in this way is unwise, sort of like letting your rival at the poker table know you don’t have any face cards.
I would like to take the moment to point out that Trump’s demands of Ukraine are no different than the US and Western Europe’s demands of the Palestinians back in the 1990s, and that nowadays the West appears to expect the Palestinians simply to commit mass suicide.
Like Ukraine, Palestine was also invaded — in the latter case by the Zionist settler colonialists, who took possession of it and chased Palestinians out of their homeland. The newly dubbed Israelis expelled 57% of the Palestinian population from what became Israel, stealing their homes and farms and taking them for themselves. They even finished bringing in the crops the Palestinians had planted. Those Palestinian refugees were crowded into Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon in the main. Now the Israelis are coming after these refugees, expelling them once again.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has displaced 10.2 million Ukrainians, about 23% of the Ukrainian population as it stood before the war. So Ukrainians have suffered much less displacement than the Palestinians.
Moreover, in 1967 Israel invaded and seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, occupying the Palestinians all over again, both the refugees settled there and the Palestinians who had lived in those territories before 1948. There were over 300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank working abroad when the Israeli troops marched in, and Israeli authorities locked them out of their country forever.
Since 2014, Russia has invaded and occupied 19% of Ukraine.
Israel took 78% of Palestine in 1948 by military conquest and through deliberate ethnic cleansing campaigns that included premeditated massacres of Palestinian villagers to spread panic.
cordsmaxresdefault-1 – PICRYL
GetArchive
https://itoldya420.getarchive.net › amp › media
Download Image of Oslo-Accordsmaxresdefault-1. Free for commercial use, no attribution required. Euskara: Osloko itunak.. Dated: 13.09.1993. Public Domain.
So in 1993, the Palestine Liberation Organization did exactly what Trump is demanding Zelenskiyy do. They relinquished any claim on the part of Palestine the immigrant European Jews had grabbed and turned into Israel, accepting 22% of the old colonial British Mandate of Palestine on which to establish a Palestinian state. Israel pledged to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967, with a deadline of 1997. Benjamin Netanyahu derailed that plan completely, and the Palestinians received less than nothing for having given up so much.
Trump is demanding that Zelenskiyy accept the equivalent of the 1993 Oslo Accords that were acquiesced in by the Palestinians. Zelinskiyy pointed out that Putin might do the deal but then renege, and Trump and Vance shouted him down. But that is exactly what the Israelis did.
Americans who feel that what Trump is asking Ukraine to do is unfair are suffering from a blind spot when it comes to the Palestinians. I don’t know if it is racism — that many Americans code Ukrainians as “White” and Palestinians as “Brown.” But many Americans cannot see the Palestinians, cannot empathize with them, cannot understand them as fellow human beings.
Now Trump is asking Palestinians to leave Gaza, one of the few bits of Palestine on which they still can live. It would be like asking 17 million Ukrainians permanently to pick up and go to Poland and other countries, giving up on Ukraine forever, and allowing Russian colonists to replace them. Even Trump isn’t asking that of the Ukrainians. Yet.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved