Trump supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestine

As reported by The Guardian on Tuesday and Wednesday:

Donald Trump has vowed that the US will “take over” war-ravaged Gaza and “own it”, effectively endorsing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, in an announcement shocking even by the standards of his norm-shattering presidency...

“The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative,” the president told a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the White House on Tuesday evening. “It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.”..

Arguing that Palestinians could live out their lives in “peace and harmony” elsewhere, Trump continued: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it, too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site.

“If it’s necessary, we’ll do that, we’re going to take over that piece, we’re going to develop it, create thousands and thousands of jobs, and it’ll be something that the entire Middle East can be very proud of.”

“If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure. I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza,” he said.  When asked where such places might be, he suggested they could be in Jordan, Egypt or “other places. You could have more than two."

“You’d have people living in a place that could be very beautiful, and safe and nice. Gaza’s been a disaster for decades.”  Asked about the reaction of Palestinian and other Arab leaders to his proposal, Trump said: “I don’t know how they could want to stay.”

 “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” he said.

Trump confirmed he was withdrawing the US from the United Nations human rights council and prohibiting future funding for the main UN agency serving Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Pressed on who would live in a redeveloped Gaza, Trump said it could become a home to “the world’s people”, adding: “I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy – but the Riviera of the Middle East … This could be something that could be so valuable, this could be so magnificent.”

Many of Trump’s allies support these settler projects, either politically or financially. The former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian who has denied that Palestinians even exist as a people, travelled to Israel during Trump’s first term to physically lay a brick in a settlement in the West Bank.

Last year, Kushner, a former property dealer married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.

The proposal is couched in the terms of real-estate development and "job creation," but lets call it what is is: ethnic cleansing (examples from history). More specifically, Trump's proposal is an extension of the Nakba instituted by Zionist leaders in 1948 when Palestine was a post-war mandate of the United Kingdon.  The process proceeded incrementally in subsequent decades, then was accelerated by the Netanyahu government, and now is being legitimized and accelerated by the Trump administration.

There was an excellent op-ed on this in The Guardian on Thursday:

“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus.

Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trump is calling it a real estate opportunity... While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trump said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved...

And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is in effect what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.

In October 2023, for example, Ma Gen Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”...

In simple terms, however, Reynolds thinks that Trump is clearly calling for a crime against humanity. Whether it is best to call that ethnic cleansing or forced displacement is somewhat more complicated. But, again, what Trump wants to do clearly violates international law and would be a crime against humanity.

Will Trump actually get what he wants? Who knows. But the fact that Trump is even voicing these plans, and many lawmakers are nodding along, speaks volumes about just how much Palestinians have been dehumanized.

I made an additional contribution to the World Central Kitchen today, specifying that my funds should be directed toward the Chefs for Gaza program.

"WCK is operating three Field Kitchens in Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Al-Mawasi, alongside a network of 80+ Palestinian-led community kitchens delivering meals to refugee camps, hospitals, and schools-turned-shelters.

We have secured an agreement with the Jordanian government for five daily aid trucks, with plans to scale up. Since October, WCK has transported more than 2,600 truckloads of food into Gaza from Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Italy, and Turkey.

We are also grateful to share that a high-capacity mobile bakery, generously donated to WCK by King Abdullah II of Jordan and supported by the Jordanian royal family and Armed Forces, is now producing 3,000 pitas per hour—a vital source of nourishment and comfort for displaced families."

For those interested in reading more about Palestine, the best book I know of is Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007), available from your library.

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