AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has threatened to renew Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, saying the Israeli military will return to, quote, “intense fighting” unless Hamas agrees to release all remaining hostages by Saturday noon. This comes after President Trump said “all hell is going to break out” if the hostages aren’t freed. Hamas has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Trump on Tuesday met with Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House, where Trump repeated his threat to take over Gaza and displace the entire Palestinian population. Reporters questioned Trump about his Gaza proposal.

REPORTER 1: Mr. President, you said before that the U.S. would buy Gaza, and today you just said we’re not going to buy Gaza.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’re not going to have to buy. We’re going to — we’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza.

REPORTER 1: What does that mean?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: There’s no reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it.

REPORTER 2: Mr. President, take it under what authority? It is sovereign territory.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Under the U.S. authority.

AMY GOODMAN: That was President Trump, sitting next to a grimacing King Abdullah of Jordan, who later wrote that they will not accept the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And the president of Egypt, President Sisi, canceled his trip to the White House next week after these comments.

We’re joined now by Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, author of over 50 books, including, just out, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us on this side of the pond. But I do have to ask you: Mick Jagger wrote that Rolling Stones song for you, “Street Fighting Man”?

TARIQ ALI: Yeah, he wrote it and sent it to me, a handwritten version, saying, “Could you put this in the paper? I just wrote this for you.” I edited a radical newspaper at the time. “And the BBC are refusing to play this song.” So, we did publish the song. And, of course, a few weeks later, the BBC did play it. I mean, that was a time when politics and culture, radical politics, radical culture, were very mixed up together, in a good sense.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go back to Gaza. You have President Trump doubling, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down, saying he doesn’t even have to buy Gaza, he’ll have it, he’ll take it. He’s also said, originally said, “The world’s people will be there, yes, including Palestinians,” now, “No, Palestinians have no right of return.” Your response to what’s going on there?

TARIQ ALI: It is so appalling, Amy, what is going on now. Trump said, says it in public, what his predecessors used to say in private, that, effectively, they are going to let Israel have its way, both in Gaza and, believe you me, in the West Bank. They will both be ethnically cleansed. That has been Israeli policy for decades, and now they feel they’ve had leaders in the United States. Trump is, of course, shameless and open about it. Biden did exactly the same thing. For six months, Hamas had agreed to the ceasefire plan. Netanyahu didn’t want a ceasefire, and Biden backed him.

So, one problem we have today, that the reason you have Trump is because the previous administration was so weak-willed and so weak-minded, incapable of doing anything, whereas in this very country we had Reagan, Bush, Truman calling Israel to heel when they exceeded what was considered to be decent, honorable, according to United States policies. When they refused to obey, they were called to heel. Neither Biden and now Trump calling these people, “Enough. The whole world has seen what you’re up to. Enough. We will not tolerate it.” Netanyahu threatening to break the ceasefire, and the response of the United States president is what? The response is nothing to do with the ceasefire, but “We’re going to take Gaza. We can.” The Israelis have got it for you by killing over 100,000 people. “And now we’ll do with it as we please.”

I mean, if this is the way the United States Empire is going to carry on functioning, there will be more and more — not immediately — there will be more and more resistance. If even the king of Jordan and Sisi in Egypt, who have so far backed the United States, are getting slightly scared, it’s not because they’ve changed greatly. It’s they are scared there will be an uprising in their countries. Jordan is three-quarters Palestinian anyway. And the Egyptian masses are seething. So, you have a really extremely serious situation building up in the Middle East, where they publicly, in front of everyone, want to expel the Palestinians. No cover-up. Netanyahu says, “We’re going to do it.” The U.S. president supports him.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Tariq, the famous Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said was a friend of yours. You’re write about him in your memoir. Said was prophetic in many ways in terms of his skepticism of the possibility of a two-state solution. What is your sense of how he would have responded to what’s happening today?

TARIQ ALI: Well, yeah, Edward was a very dear friend. We often discussed Palestine. And he felt, as did many others, that the only serious solution for that region was a one-state solution with equal rights for all its citizens — male, female, Jews, non-Jews, etc. — that that was the only way we could proceed, because a two-state solution had become a joke. I mean, if you look what’s been happening in Gaza for a year — an open genocide — if you see what they’re starting to do to the West Bank now, a two-state solution is impossible. No one will believe in it.

But a single-state solution has also now become very difficult, in my opinion. It’s the worst situation to confront the Palestinians. I mean, 70% — between 60 and 70% of the Israeli population backed Netanyahu. You have large numbers of Zionist citizens of Israel coming out and chanting once again, “Kill the Arabs!” just like many German fascists shouted “Kill the Jews!” What is going on? And the U.S., in my opinion, has completely abdicated its role to be an arbiter. It never was any arbiter, but now that’s just become a complete joke. So the situation seems grim to me. And whether it can be resolved simply within the area currently Israel-Palestine or whether it will have to expand and extend to the rest of the Arab world before people see sense is an open question.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering, as you mentioned the situation in Israel — clearly, we just had a segment talking about authoritarianism in Europe, as well the rise of fascists and right-wing movements, and especially anti-immigrant movements, throughout Europe. What is your sense of the role or the problems, in turn, that the left has had in confronting these movements?

TARIQ ALI: The real problem, Juan, is this, that all political parties, prior to the rise of these extreme-right parties that the professor was talking about, prior to that, we had a center-left and a center-right. Both of them supported the economic system we call neoliberalism, a very extreme, rampant type of turbocharged capital, which wrecked the social structure of many of these countries, privatized large industries, entered into the domains of health and most sacred and hallowed sections of the old post-Second World War state. And that collapse and the fact that parties of the center-left and center-right, whenever they came to power, did exactly the same thing — I wrote a book called The Extreme Center about these groups. They have now been shown to be what they were, which is useless.

So there’s a great hostility against these politicians. And there is nothing to the left of them in most places — France is an exception. And what people do now is turn to the right, saying, “We’ve tried all these jokers out. These guys are talking what seems to be our language. Let’s see what they’re like.” And from that point of view, this big turn to the far right, in a sort of curious way, it’s fitting that the champion now sits at the White House, the most right-wing president in recent years, especially on the domestic front. So, there is a symbiosis taking place between the European far right and the far-right government we seem to have got in the United States, and how they will work together.

I mean, one problem they have is — and this should be talked about — that Zelensky’s government in Ukraine, its hard core, are not just people who are far right, but they are actual lineal descendants of Ukrainian Nazis, who have been fighting. We shouldn’t forget that, too. It’s part of the picture. And just because the West is backing Ukraine doesn’t mean that these things are not going on there. So, it’s very difficult to give this a gloss.

What is happening in the West, as a whole, is pretty disastrous. It’s not just Orbán. He’s very open, like Trump. “Yeah, this is what we’re doing. We don’t care what you think. We’re going to do it. We’ve been elected. We have the power to do it.” There are people like that, but there are another layer of people, who supposedly oppose them, who, when it comes down to it, have policies which are not all that different. I mean, what the United States and much of Europe needs today is an opposition, which fights back politically, intellectually, with arguments, and, when necessary, comes out on the streets, extraparliamentary actions to defend democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds. The most important message, following up on that rising up at the grassroots, you feel people need to hear around the world now, from your decades of activism?

TARIQ ALI: I think we need activists more than ever before. I mean, one of the most amazing things has been this opposition by students in this country, occupations of universities in defense of the people, the Palestinians, and the people of Gaza. We now need to extend these movements to what is happening domestically.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to continue this conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Tariq Ali, Pakistani British historian, activist, filmmaker, editor of the New Left Review, latest book, You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024.

Happy birthday to Messiah Rhodes, Dante Torrieri and Rostam! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.