DONALD TRUMP, the self-aggrandising showman, has no need of a praise-giver. He is his own PR machine and seizes every opportunity for boasting without the slightest sense of the ridiculous.

But if to the rest of the world he is seen as a clown, it is a dangerous clown, made even more dangerous as his latest proposal to give Ukraine long-range rockets confirms.

Appearing before the Israeli Knesset, he described the ceasefire agreement as a military victory for Israel. Challenged only by Knesset members Ayman Odeh and Ofer Cassif — both familiar to Morning Star readers — he gave voice to a truth accepted by every sentient being that Israel’s prosecution of this unequal war would have been impossible without US support.

Perhaps support is too mealy-mouthed a word for the never-ending subsidy, given increasingly unwillingly by US taxpayers, to Israel’s national project as the instrument of imperialism’s force projection in the region.

The physical outcome of any military encounter with Israel’s nuclear-armed and dollar-bloated military state and the lightly armed militias of the Palestinian people was never in doubt.

But Trump’s words obscure the truth that Israel, compelled to accept a ceasefire, has suffered a very substantial defeat and with it the US and imperialism as a whole.

A combination of steadfast Palestinian resistance — not least in maintaining the social fabric of Gaza’s society under intense bombardment and incurring casualties on a genocidal scale — and the global movement of popular solidarity hast compelled a ceasefire, not peace, not even a temporary cessation of hostilities but a pause, an interregnum before the struggle to realise the national mission of the Palestinian people is renewed.

Trump gives the impression that he brokered the ceasefire, but the reality is that he is the conduit through which the alliance of imperial interests that is centred on Israel’s role in West Asia has been compelled to take account of a changed balance of forces.

Some elements in Israel recognise that the US, and imperialism generally, has an interest in continuing its strategic relationship with the Arab states and sure enough, Cairo is Trump’s next stop.

The time will come when everyone will claim to have been opposed to Israel’s genocidal mission in Gaza. The time will come when statesmen will claim to have always worked to settle the claims of the Palestinian people for a state of their own.

Where once Nelson Mandela was a terrorist member of the South African Communist Party’s central committee, but was transformed by the end of apartheid into a person of universal admiration, so too, with the end of Israeli apartheid, will the Palestinian resistance, including Hamas, have their humanity recognised.

Israeli strategy has always depended on keeping the Palestinian resistance divided. This was the basis of its decades-long symbiotic relationship with the Palestinian Islamists (and, for that matter, its present-day patronage of the clan-based criminal forces presently challenging Hamas in Gaza).

This interregnum is the occasion for the Palestinian solidarity movement to maintain its vigilance, intensify its pressure on our governments and work not simply to aid the recovery of Gaza but to end the occupation of the West Bank, roll back the settler violence and intimidation, repossess stolen lands, and end Israeli apartheid conditions.

Our state and government are complicit in Israel’s actions and have enabled Israel’s role as imperialism’s proxy since the forced clearances and ethnic cleansing which accompanied the foundation of the state.

As security guards ejected courageous Knesset member Odeh, he said: “Only ending the occupation, and only recognising the state of Palestine alongside Israel, will bring justice, peace and security for all.”