The Path to Caracas Was Paved in Gaza
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For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.
The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people—and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of western publics that they have been duped.
Here is my first prediction of 2026: this law enforcement role-playing is going to continue even after the Trump administration’s outrageously illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, at the weekend, and Trump’s admission that the US attack was about grabbing the country’s oil.
The path to Caracas—and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Canada, other targets of Donald Trump’s greed—was paved in Gaza.
It is worth standing back, as one year ends and another begins, to consider how we got here, and what lies ahead.
The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals.
Unlike the Hollywood version, neither of these real-world cops is is in any way good. But there is a further difference: the spectacle is not intended for those the pair confront. After all, the Palestinians know only too well that they have been suffering for decades under the boot of a lawless, joint US-Israeli criminal enterprise.
No, the intended audience are the onlookers: western publics.
Ban on aid groups
The US “honest broker” myth should have perished long ago. But somehow it persists, despite the evidence endlessly discrediting it. And that is because western capitals and western media keep propping the myth up, treating it as a plausible description of events it simply cannot explain.
Nothing has disrupted the official “policing” storyline in Gaza, supposedly against Hamas “law-breaking.”
It is now echoed in Trump’s outlandish claim that his self-declared oil grab in Venezuela is really about bringing Maduro to justice for supposed drug trafficking—or “narco-terrorism” as the administration prefers to call it.
Why has Gaza dropped off the front pages? Only because the “good cop” declares it has brought hostilities from the “bad cop” to an end.
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