Ahmed Moor
+972 Magazine / October 15, 2025
Trump aims to restore Israel’s legitimacy after two years of genocide. But as long as Jewish supremacy persists, so should sanctions and arms embargoes.
In early September, near-simultaneous Israeli attacks across the Middle East — a flotilla bombed off the coast of Tunisia and then attacked 75 miles from Gaza, an airstrike on Doha, warplanes bombarding Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, let alone the continuation of the genocide in Gaza — barely marked an escalation. Rather, these events signified the entrenchment of a status quo in which Israel is a rogue state, thanks to the impunity afforded by its patrons.
But status quos change. In May, Knesset member Zvi Sukkot boasted, “Tonight, we killed nearly 100 people from Gaza, and no one cares.” He was wrong: hundreds of millions of people around the world have been laying awake at night for the past two years viewing images of dismembered children on their phones. They’ve learned about the Nakba, heard Israeli leaders speak of Amalek and no innocents in Gaza, and seen TikToks of gleeful Israeli soldiers blowing up and bulldozing Palestinians’ homes. They cannot unsee what they’ve seen.
The overwhelming majority of Israelis who support the actions of their army and government seem unaware of the depth of people’s outrage and grief in response to the genocide. They do not yet understand the scale of the inevitable reckoning that awaits, or the meaning of the word “indelible,” and that memory is long and generational.
But if Israelis do not grasp the extent of their isolation, U.S. President Donald Trump appears to. His administration’s success in securing a ceasefire in Gaza, and his insistence that “the war is over,” is a clear effort to prevent any further erosion to Israel’s legitimacy — to restore the world to what it was, and unwind memories by two years.
“Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world. Now I am gonna get all that support back,” Trump told reporters before the ceasefire, a point he repeated during his speech on Monday at Israel’s Knesset. “[The Gaza war] was getting bad. Bibi, you will be remembered for this more than if you’d kept it going, kill, kill, kill.”
Yet, after two years of genocide, and with awareness of Israel’s apartheid reality at unprecedented levels, global momentum for an arms embargo, sanctions, and cultural boycott has approached a tipping point.
In the United States, the momentum for cutting off military aid to Israel has been driven in part by anger over the suppression of speech by people who prioritize Israeli interests over those of American citizens. Growing numbers on both the political left and right are increasingly resentful of this censorship — and of being made to underwrite the genocide. For a Democratic party in crisis, active resistance to the Israel lobby is beginning to look like a winning electoral strategy.
Across Europe, Israel is more isolated than it has ever been. Spain’s prime minister has described the kidnapping of flotilla participants by Israeli troops earlier this month as “a violation of international law.” The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is reportedly preparing to vote on suspending Israel’s participation, while Eurovision administrators have encouraged the Israeli delegation to withdraw voluntarily or risk a humiliating sanction: being forced to perform without a flag.
Perhaps most importantly, Jewish supremacy in Palestine — the core tenet of Zionism — is increasingly regarded as illegitimate across the globe. It is far too early to declare that the Zionist era in Palestine is over, but October 2025 portends a different future. If the genocide has rendered Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, it has also made the world newly inhospitable to Zionism.
A fragile reprieve
The most important element of Trump’s ceasefire is that Israeli soldiers have, for the most part, halted the mass killing of Palestinians. Over the past two days, 20 Israeli captives were exchanged for nearly 2,000 Palestinian men, women, and children. Aid is entering Gaza in greater quantities (though Israel announced it would restrict it until Hamas hands over all the remaining dead hostages), and Israeli troops have withdrawn from roughly half of the territory.
The implementation of this first phase of the ceasefire is positive. The joy apparent in videos emerging from Gaza is very real. After enduring a genocidal onslaught unparalleled in modern history — both for the inability of victims to flee and for the sheer volume of ordnance dropped, estimated at more than 70,000 tons — the people there deserve reprieve. The release of so many Palestinians from Israel’s torturous prisons and detention centers is worth celebrating, though there are notable absences from this list, including Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya and Marwan Barghouti.
But what happens next is uncertain, given Israel’s long record of breaking ceasefires. In March, when Israel reneged on its January ceasefire with Hamas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited “Hamas’ repeated refusal to release our hostages, as well as its rejection of all the proposals it has received” from the Americans. In reality, the agreement was slated to proceed to its second phase, during which more captives would be released. But Netanyahu resumed the assault on Gaza because his coalition’s survival required it.
On Monday, Netanyahu stood next to Trump in the Knesset and declared in English that the war is over, just hours after assuring Israelis in Hebrew that the genocidal campaign in Gaza would continue. “We have achieved tremendous victories but the campaign is not over; part of our enemies are trying to recover,” he told Channel 12. As Eran Etzion, former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council, warned Sky News on Friday, “Netanyahu is still interested in doing everything he can not to abide by this [ceasefire] agreement.”
On a more fundamental level, the next phases of Trump’s Gaza plan share the basic framework of every major peace initiative since the Oslo Accords: Israeli desires are frontloaded and guaranteed; Palestinian needs are acknowledged, but remain uncommitted.
Under the plan, the Israeli captives were to be released immediately, and Hamas disarmed and expelled. Meanwhile, around 8,000 Palestinian captives will continue to sit in Israeli prisons, where many have been subjected to beatings, rape, and starvation. The question of Palestinian self-defense is not treated at all, and “self-determination” is mentioned in the abstract. That formula has failed in the past, and it will fail again.
Even if Israel is unable to resume the war and complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, it has already succeeded in making the Strip uninhabitable. There are no remaining schools, hospitals barely function, universities have been systematically destroyed, and water and sanitation plants have been dismantled. Where there was once a society, among the oldest urban centers in the world, now there is only rubble. It will take decades to clear, if ever. Rebuilding, which UN development experts assessed will come at a cost of $70 billion and could take decades, appears a pipe dream.
And so, Israel’s two-year effort to depopulate Gaza may now come to resemble its long campaign of ethnic cleansing and settlement of the West Bank and Jerusalem: a dull grind in the same direction. Many Palestinians will decide to leave Gaza once the opportunity arises, perhaps to Turkey, Egypt, or the Gulf. The gradual effort to consolidate total Jewish control from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, and even over large tracts of Syria and Lebanon, will continue.
Trump’s plan will likely not end the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine. Only massive sanctions and a comprehensive arms embargo can do that. These are the necessary conditions for justice.
Cracks in the machine
Two years of unabated genocide mean that international diplomacy is a dead letter, along with the so-called rules-based order. What remains is what has always existed: naked power. Trump’s plan excavates that self-evident truth. Netanyahu and his people have only slowed their annihilatory efforts in Palestine because Trump demanded it.
Trump may have been motivated to end the genocide by the splinters within his MAGA coalition. A growing number of Americans — not only on the left — are repulsed by the political power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a foreign lobby which has refused to register as such in violation of U.S. law.
If the genocide does end, Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, who have emerged as some of the most prominent conservative critics of Israel, may capture fewer headlines. Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential right-wing commentator in America today, may stop attacking figures like Mike Huckabee for being less than “America First” in their unyielding support for Israel, or questioning why Americans are forbidden from speaking about the Israeli bombing of the USS Liberty in 1967, a bête noire of the Israel lobby.
Carlson’s appeal to Trump’s America First sensibility — that he stop allowing Israeli leaders to manipulate the U.S. government — could also be a factor in Trump’s willingness to buck the Israelis, something no American president has succeeded in doing since Ronald Reagan.
The strength of an American president who is willing to assert his prerogatives heightens the contrast with the weaknesses of the European Union, a monetary and labour union constrained by the respective fiscal and defense prerogatives of its member states. Each country decides how much to spend, even though these choices affect the welfare of the whole. Each state also exercises authority over its army.
The EU’s weaknesses have amounted to a catastrophe for the Palestinians. Germany, a country whose elites have participated in or sanctioned four genocides in the past 120 years, has reportedly prevented the union from taking meaningful steps to sanction Israel, as it effectively wields a veto through a consensus mechanism. The country’s leaders are also calling for a return to ordinary relations with Israel. It is too much to hope that Germany may learn from the past, but individual member states may choose to chart their own path — reclaiming their foreign policies and exercising the power they wield individually.
Belgium is leading the way. At the beginning of September, Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prevot announced sanctions including “a ban on importing products from the settlements, a review of public procurement policies with Israeli companies, restrictions on consular assistance to Belgians living in illegal settlements under international law, potential judicial prosecutions, bans on overflights and transit, [and] the designation of two extremist Israeli ministers, several violent settlers, and Hamas leaders as ‘persona non grata’ in our country.”
Spain, the Netherlands, and Slovenia have all imposed full or partial arms embargoes on Israel. Those countries also joined Ireland in prohibiting imports from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a mostly symbolic effort which may presage broader economic sanctions.
Breaking with Jewish supremacy
At best, Trump’s plan will put an end to the kind of daily genocidal horrors that defined the past 24 months. Yet ending the immediate violence won’t dismantle apartheid or Jewish supremacy, the core tenets of all Zionist political parties supported by the majority of Jewish-Israelis.
As Dahlia Scheindlin recently wrote in Foreign Affairs: “Both the anti-Netanyahu public and the main opposition parties differ little from the current leadership on the future status of Palestinians, the inevitability of ongoing Israeli occupation in general, and the acceptability of denying self-determination, or alternately, democracy and civil rights to Palestinians in the territories.”
In other words, even with a ceasefire, Israelis remain committed to Jewish supremacy. A supermajority has endorsed genocide for two years, and all young people are conscripted to enforce occupation and apartheid.
A Zionist regime will also protect war criminals and genocide perpetrators. More than 400,000 Israeli men and women participated in the mass murder of Palestinians over the past two years. Any effort to hold them accountable in court will almost certainly fail in a society fundamentally committed to the idea of inequality before the law. Indeed, a campaign to whitewash soldiers’ war crimes is likely already underway.
This cover-up effort only strengthens the basic argument for boycott and sanctions: Israelis will not end the occupation and apartheid on their own. Therefore, individual countries must sever economic ties with Israel and Israeli companies wherever possible. States that recognize universal jurisdiction should support the effort to prosecute reservists and conscripts who participated in the genocide. Sanctions must also target the government and its cabinet ministers, along with the nightly commentators who incite mass murder.
History offers an analogue. South Africa’s apartheid regime faced a massive cultural boycott: travel bans, aviation restrictions, exclusion from international sporting events, and suspension from the UN General Assembly. All of that is appropriate for Israel today.
Beyond economic boycotts and arms embargoes, a cultural boycott could uniquely contribute to deradicalizing Jewish Israelis, hitting them where it hurts and making them feel the price of their country’s actions. A broad and comprehensive effort to prohibit travel, cultural exchanges, and participation in sport could help trigger the kind of break with Jewish supremacy that a just future in Palestine requires.
Ahmed Moor is a writer and fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace
