Mouin Rabbani

For reasons that have little if anything to do with US national security or foreign policy, Donald Trump has made clear he does not want to be diverted by a foreign crisis as he re-enters the White House. Given that several Israeli captives in the Gaza Strip hold dual US citizenship, Trump will not countenance presiding over a hostage crisis like the late Jimmy Carter, but insists on a resolution that has echoes of Ronald Reagan’s assumption of office in 1981.

Administrative detention is another British practice that Israel has adopted, imposing indefinitely renewable terms of imprisonment without charge or trial. Khader Adnan died in prison on 2 May, aged 45, after an 87-day hunger strike. A former spokesman for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement from the town of Arraba in the northern West Bank, Adnan had been repeatedly held in administrative detention since 1999. Despite vilifying him as a terrorist, Israel never charged him with involvement in military activities.

Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran al-Jazeera journalist, was a fixture on Palestinian and Arab TV screens for more than two decades. Intrepid, sympathetic, intelligent and trustworthy, she had reported on developments in the occupied territories since the late 1990s. She was shot dead by the Israeli military in the early morning of 11 May. There was shock, grief and outrage throughout Palestine and the Middle East. Israel has killed more than forty-five journalists since 2000, but the case of Abu Akleh has taken the practice to an entirely new level.

The Trump administration’s policies and initiatives towards the Arab-Israeli conflict – the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in 2017; the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in 2019; the Peace to Prosperity plan in 2020 – have been rightly denounced as premeditated assaults on international law and the international political consensus. Claims that such measures form a radical departure from traditional US policy are less persuasive, however. Since 1967, Washington has systematically aided and abetted Israel’s colonial expansion in the West Bank. Annexation, the ripe fruit of US as much as Israeli policy, is a formalisation rather than transformation of the resulting reality.