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The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain

Trump tariffs: No deal for Netanyahu!

by our Arab Affairs correspondent

Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington hoping that Trump would lift the penalty tariffs on Israel that the USA is imposing on the rest of the world. But the Israeli leader went home empty-handed after meeting his master in the White House this week.

Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to meet Trump since he announced his new tariff war last week and his followers in Tel Aviv clearly expected Washington to cut or even lift the new 17 per cent import tax on Israeli goods. But Netanyahu got nothing. And to add insult to injury Netanyahu had to take part in a joint Oval Office press conference in which Trump did most of the talking – much of it not to the liking of the Israeli leader.

President Trump reminded Netanyahu on camera that Israel receives billions of dollars in US aid and down-played Israeli concern over the Turkish intervention in Syria that threatens to derail the Zionist plan to break the country up into sectarian statelets under Israeli control. Trump praised the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, saying “I happen to like him, and he likes me and we’ve never had a problem” and told Netanyahu that “if you have a problem with Turkey I’ll fix it, as long as you act reasonably”. And that’s not all. Trump’s surprise confirmation that the USA was conducting se cret talks with Iran clearly caught Netanyahu off-guard – although back in Tel Aviv he claimed he’d been briefed beforehand.

“We’re dealing with the Iranians, we have a very big meeting on Saturday and we’re dealing with them directly,” Trump told reporters. And this was confirmed in Tehran by the Iranian Foreign Office – although they claimed the talks with Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, in the Gulf state of Oman would be of an “indirect” nature.

During his first term of office Trump derailed the Obama nuclear deal with Iran and imposed crippling sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Now he’s had second thoughts and the Iranians, who want the lifting of the imperialist sanctions regime, are also ready to talk.

Meanwhile, Israel’s renewed offensive against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continues to take a deadly toll of innocent civilians. No food, no water, no medicine. Israel has turned Gaza into a modern day concentration camp. Women and children and the elderly, everyone suffers.

Although a senior Hamas delegation is heading to Cairo for new Gaza ceasefire talks, Egypt’s efforts to end Israel’s renewed offensive have largely been ignored by the Trump team. The Egyptian proposals revolve around a plan for a further prisoner exchange linked to a 40 to 70 day cease-fire with guarantees for a permanent truce and the complete withdrawal of all Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip.

This reflects the ideas projected by Witkoff during the last push to end the fighting but now the American emissary is concentrating on trying to seal a deal with the Iranians with the usual cocktail of carrots and threats that’s become the trade-mark of diplomacy the Donald way these days.

In any case, the Americans have bigger fish to fry at the moment with the Trump team fo cusing on secret diplomacy with the Russians that they hope will end the Ukraine war and enable them to get their greedy hands on the country’s vast mineral wealth that they covet.