00:00Let's get the analysis and bring in Hussein Yibish, senior resident scholar at the Arab
00:03Gov States Institute. Hussein, thanks for being with us in France 24. We always appreciate your
00:08time. Pleasure to see you, sir. We have a truce, but we don't have a truce. That's the situation,
00:13isn't it? No, it's not a truce. It's a truce in name only. It's a Trumpian thing, right? So this
00:19is what Donald Trump does. He makes big, spectacular, headline-grabbing diplomatic initiatives that,
00:25you know, dominate the news, and full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. So we have 500
00:30Palestinians killed. That's not a ceasefire. 24 yesterday, at least seven of them children,
00:36three of them babies. Ceasefire by foot. There's no ceasefire, and there hasn't been one. It's not
00:43a ceasefire. There is a partition, but there is also an ongoing war. And as for phase two,
00:49which Trump says is in place now, there is no sign of it, except the Rafah crossing issue that
00:56Emerald was just reporting on very well. And it's a trickle of aid and a few ragged people going back
01:02and forth. That's all. It really amounts to almost nothing. Everything is very tightly controlled on
01:08every level by Israel, regardless of any aspect we're looking at here. 360, the whole tour,
01:15everything is completely stage managed and controlled by Israel. I'm wondering, from your
01:20perspective, how can Palestinian civilians expect any kind of progress in rebuilding their lives,
01:26in getting their families back together, in actually getting the kind of things that we all take for
01:29granted? I really wish I could give you the least bit of hope, but I can't, because there's a radical
01:37disconnect between the diplomatic kabuki show that Trump is running with Jared Kushner's, you know,
01:45fantastical Dubai, Singapore style plan for rebuilding Gaza with industrial parks and data centers and
01:52agriculture, you know, sports and tourism and beachfront properties, just bizarre. As if he didn't
01:59know, the whole place was reused to rubble. And that also was full of major historical and cultural and
02:06religious sites that date back to the ancient world, because Gaza has been a very important place for like
02:125,000 years. And he doesn't seem to know that. In addition to which, neither Israel nor Hamas wants
02:19anything much to do with phase two, because phase two would require making a rule for the Palestinian
02:25Technocratic Governance Committee, which is Fatah dominated. And both Israel and Hamas prefer to deal
02:32with each other than to deal with Fatah, because Israel fears Fatah might establish a Palestinian state.
02:39They know Hamas can't do that, doesn't want to do that. They don't fear that it's going to interfere
02:44with their annexation ambitions. They think they'll help it. And Hamas is, you know, basically in a in a
02:52binary zero sum power struggle with Fatah. Hence the ongoing Israeli campaign in the West Bank.
02:58Exactly. So that's what's going on. I would say for anyone who wants to watch the future between
03:05Israel and the Palestinians, despite all the suffering and pain and carnage and chaos and death
03:12and destruction in Gaza, the actual real story, the real action is in the West Bank, right, where Israel
03:18is going to try to annex the E1 area, which runs right across, absolutely right from east to west,
03:26across the center of the West Bank, completely cut off Jerusalem and the northern part of the West
03:32Bank, from southern West Bank, and absolutely nixed any possibility of Palestinian statehood. And that
03:38is the stated goal, by the way, according to the... That area E1, that's the one beyond Ma'il Adumim,
03:44if I pronounced that correctly, if I remember correctly. It's far beyond it. Ma'il Adumim. It's called Ma'il Adumim,
03:50and it's far beyond that. It goes... E1 goes almost to the Jordan border. It cuts the West Bank in half.
03:57And the plan is to call the project there Trump 1, if I remember correctly.
04:02Well, I think they were toying with naming after Trump. They named a city in the Golan Heights
04:07after him, after he acknowledged their annexation of it. But I don't know if they're actually going
04:11to do that. The point is, he's told them not to annex the West Bank, because he has this deal with
04:17the UAE that they wouldn't... That Israel wouldn't annex for five years back in 2020. And the UAE reminded
04:27Trump that that's five Trump years, not Biden years. So we're actually in year two, not year six.
04:36And Trump said, oh, yeah, you're right. Biden doesn't count. So he's clearly told the Israelis,
04:40no, we're in year two, so you can't annex anything. But he's not stopping them from de facto annexation.
04:46And that's where the real, I think, the real action is. And the prime directive, if you want
04:52to understand Israel's policies, understand their prime directive is annexation of the West Bank.
04:57And if you want to understand Hamas' policies, their prime directive is to take over the
05:02Palestinian national movement from Fatah and change it from a nationalist, secular movement
05:07into an Islamist one that they control. That's what's driving these two parties. That's why neither
05:12of them is interested in phase two. And that's why both of them are actually hunkering down
05:17to make the current yellow line partition, right, into a semi-permanent reality with almost
05:24all the arable land and none of the people in Israel's possession, and almost all the people
05:28with the destroyed towns and cities and, like, sandy beach areas in control of Hamas. And I think both
05:35Israel and Hamas can live with that rather than let Fatah come in and fix things, because only Fatah could fix
05:41things.
05:43Husseini Abish, it's always enlightening speaking to you, sir. Thank you very much indeed for
05:48giving us that breakdown on how these things are. It really is how it is. And thank you
05:53for giving us that very clear analysis. Husseini Abish, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf
05:58States Institute. Thank you, sir. Pleasure to see you. All the best. Thank you.
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