Christian Right Aligns With Zionists to Fulfill Colonial Aspirations
By Abu Ali Bafaquih
Mar/Apr 25
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R) has introduced a Senate bill mirroring the HR 7552 House bill introduced last February by New York Republicans Reps. Claudia Tenney and Anthony D’Esposito, alongside Randy Weber (R. Tex.).
The bill mandates that all official U.S. federal government documents refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the terminology which they claim aligns with Israel’s historical and biblical claims to the territory.
In doing so, Cotton has regurgitated what several Congress members on both sides of the aisle have previously stated, “The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria go back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.”
The name West Bank is a translation of the Arabic term ad-Duffah al-Gharbiyyah, given to the territory west of the Jordan River. Gaza and the West Bank are two Palestinian territories that were a small part of Mandate Palestine and were part of the swatch of territory captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. On the ground, however, Israel has rendered a two-state solution including the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel impossible with the establishment of more than 300 settlements with a population of approximately 700,00 on occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.
Effectively, this the U.S. congressional move aims to erase Palestinian identity, and cements U.S. complicity in Israeli expansionism. It also gives the blatant greenlight for further, illegal settlement expansion.
Cotton’s interest, however, is most interesting. According to the Jewish Virtual Library published by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, his state’s Jewish population was 4,000 in 1899 rising to 5,090 in 2024, just 0.17% of his state’s overall population. However, his deep interest in Israeli policies should be seen through the lens of his receipts from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Code Pink says that he has received $237,077 from AIPAC. The New York Times announced that the amount of this financial assistance was around $2 million. This is while some informed sources in the US say the AIPAC lobby has spent $4.5 million for Tom Cotton to insure his winning against “Mark Pryor” in the 2014 Senate elections.
Israel is headed by a fragile ultra right-wing coalition that holds 64 seats out of a 120-seat Knesset. The ruling western-armed Israeli junta has, since Oct. 7, 2023, and as always since the British planted this colony in 1948, striven to eliminate all non-Jews, because they claim they have a “birthright” in the territory.
On July 24, 2024, the head of this ethnocracy, Benjamin Netanyahu visited the U.S. Congress where had pledged in a scathing and combative speech to achieve “total victory” against Hamas while denouncing American opponents of the war in Gaza as “idiots”.
Speaking for nearly an hour in which, he was applauded 79 times, 58 of which were standing ovations from sycophantic members of Congress, Netanyahu said, “America and Israel must stand together. When we stand together something really simple happens: We win, they lose.”
In essence, Netanyahu was verifying that his colonial occupation of Palestine is American made.
To this end, it serves Netanyahu that those of us watching the release of the Israeli hostages notice the extensive damage all over Gaza, but not the Palestinian jubilation over the release of their hostages, or the surviving strength of Hamas.
It was ordained that Hamas demonstrate clear control of these scenes while transferring previously held Israelis to the ICRC without any indication that the occupation had caved in.
Netanyahu is banking on a Palestinian revolt against Hamas so that the U.S. and Israel can install a more pliant regime, like the ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank.
The Anadolu Agency’s Abdelraouf Arnaout, citing Israeli analyst Avi Issacharoff, wrote in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Jan. 20, 2025, “Even after 15 months of war, Hamas remains in place… Although the government of Benjamin Netanyahu said it will eradicate Hamas, the group not only survived militarily but also retained its rule intact.”
True to their bias, Reuters reported, “But, in the days since the ceasefire took effect, Gaza’s Hamas-run administration has moved quickly to reimpose security, to curb looting, and to start restoring basic services to parts of the enclave, swathes of which have been reduced to wasteland by the Israeli offensive.”
The much-heralded ceasefire between Israel and Hamas (The Islamic Resistance Movement – an Arabic acronym Romanized from Arabic: Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah), loudly and falsely claimed by the American president as his own achievement, is merely a 42-day arrangement.
Still, Netanyahu continues his war in Gaza by refusing Israeli withdrawal from the denuded enclave. His coalition partner, Bezalel Smotrich, vows to bolt the coalition if stage two of the ceasefire is agreed upon. Consequently, Netanyahu will likely conduct a provocation, either in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem, that could be interpreted as Hamas breaching the ceasefire thereby creating an excuse where Trump would re-assent to Israel’s renewal of the slaughter of innocent Palestinians.
The Israelis and the American right-wing consider the question of who rules Gaza as the key to ending the war which would lead to the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. If Hamas remains in control of the Gaza Strip, there will likely be no reconstruction permitted. As it is, both the state of Israel and their U.S. backers have maintained a purely colonial mindset which may well lead to further ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The Trump Administration is very vocally pursuing Egypt, Jordan, and even Indonesia and Albania are being pressed to take in the intended to displace Palestinians from Gaza.
Foreign ministers of five Arab countries, the PA, and the Arab League (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar) have issued a joint statement rejecting the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land “under any excuse.”
The statement, released on Feb. 1, 2025, presented a unified stance against Trump’s call for Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
However, Trump reiterated his illegal position on Jan. 30, 2025, saying, “We do a lot for them, and they are going to do it.” This is in apparent reference to the abundant U.S. aid, including military assistance, to Egypt and Jordan, two countries who, along with Israel, have been exempted from the American aid cutoff initiated by the autocratic Trump.
Israel and its western partners envision the Palestinian Authority taking over control of the Rafah crossing, and eventually Gaza. But will Hamas, which survives despite all the propaganda and bombs, agree to the PA taking over a major thoroughfare in their territory?
Gershon Baskin Ph.D., an Israeli blogger and self-styled negotiator, says that the Israelis are banking on creating the facade of a new temporary government in Gaza by some pliable figures such as Dr. Nasser Alkidwa, the former PLO ambassador to the UN and former PA minister of foreign affairs (he also happens to be Yasser Arafat’s nephew).
For their parts, regional Arab governments have been compliant since the British installed them to replace the Ottoman rule after World War I. To his credit, Trump, who visited the region in October 2018, correctly stated to cheers at a rally in Mississippi on October 2, “We protect Saudi Arabia — would you say they’re rich? And I love the king, King Salman, but I said, ‘King we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military, you have to pay. . .”
According to opinion polls published by Gallup in 2009, the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia was strongly objected to by most of the world’s Muslim population.
This is the reality of the present-day Muslim majority countries, organized under the obviously dormant Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Given their compromised position owing to the billions flowing in their direction from the United States, their immoral silence over the Gaza Genocide is understandable.
When will Arkansas, or any constituency of American voters, ask that their politicians focus on the U.S. like they do Israel? In the absence of that call, a joint U.S.-Zionist owned Gaza is far more sacrosanct than any human life, let alone the collection of 7 million Palestinians living on the land between the River and the Sea.
Abu Ali Bafaquih is a freelance writer.