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Trump Call for 'Obviously Illegal' Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza Sparks Global Fury
"The expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law," said Germany's foreign minister. "It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred."
Feb 05, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's call on Tuesday for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with American military force drew near-universal condemnation from the international community, with political leaders, United Nations officials, and human rights groups denouncing the outrageous proposal as inhumane and blatantly unlawful.
"Any forcible transfer in or deportation of people from occupied territory is strictly prohibited," Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement following Trump's remarks alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant after presiding over a 15-month-long, U.S.-backed decimation of the Gaza Strip.
U.S. allies and adversaries, including in the Middle East, swiftly rejected Trump's call for American ownership of Gaza and the total removal of the Palestinian population. Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Palestine's envoy to the U.N., Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and ordinary Palestinians in Gaza were among those who dismissed the U.S. president's proposal as unconscionable.
"These calls represent a serious violation of international law," said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "Peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, based on the two-state solution."
European nations also sharply criticized Trump's proposal, with France's foreign ministry expressing "opposition to any forced displacement of Gaza's Palestinian population, which would constitute a serious violation of international law, an attack on the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians, and also a major obstacle to the two-state solution and a factor of major destabilization for our close partners, Egypt and Jordan, and the whole region."
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said that "the expulsion of the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law."
"It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred," she warned.
"Once again, the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President."
Trump's call for a U.S. takeover of the Gaza Strip came days after the president said he wants to "just clean out" the Palestinian enclave by forcibly displacing the territory's population, which is living under a fragile cease-fire agreement and in the process of returning to homes left in utter ruins by Israeli and American bombs.
Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories, said at a press conference on Tuesday that Trump's proposal is "completely irresponsible." Even the act of floating ethnic cleansing in Gaza amounts to "incitement to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime," said Albanese.
"The international community is made up of 193 states," she added, "and this is the time to give the U.S. what it has been looking for: isolation."
U.S. human rights and anti-war organizations joined the chorus slamming Trump's proposal, with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O'Brien writing on social media that "removing all Palestinians from Gaza is tantamount to destroying them as a people."
Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War, said in a statement late Tuesday that "forcibly removing Palestinians from Gaza is ethnic cleansing."
"It is obviously illegal, deeply morally wrong, and incredibly dangerous," said Haghdoosti. "People in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond need a real end to the war, not permanent forced displacement. Instead, tonight President Trump proposed to send U.S. armed forces to Gaza to kick Palestinians out and act as security guards for [Jared] Kushner and friends as they cash in on what Trump called 'the Riviera of the Middle East.'"
"Once again," Haghdoosti added, "the man who claimed to be the peace candidate is showing himself to be nothing more than the War Profiteer President."
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'There Are Bodies in the Streets:' Israel Launches Attack on Jenin
"There is no cease-fire for Palestinians," said Palestinian writer Yara Hawari.
Jan 21, 2025
Israeli security forces on Tuesday launched an attack on the West Bank city of Jenin, just a day after U.S. President Donald Trump rescinded Biden-era sanctions that were levied on extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank accused of carrying out violence against Palestinians.
Trump moved to overturn the sanctions even after Israeli settlers in the illegally occupied West Bank carried out attacks against Palestinians communities earlier this week. The events highlight the threat of future violence in the West Bank.
A resident of Jenin, Asaad Salim, told the outletMiddle East Eye that the Tuesday attack on Jenin began with Israeli special forces infiltrating a neighborhood in the east of the city. Salim reported Israeli warplanes firing on the city and the Jenin refugee camp and armed clashes took place between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Israeli army, per Middle East Eye.
"There are bodies in the streets, and many people are injured, but no one can reach them. Ambulances can't move due to the intense and sudden assault," Salim told the outlet.
At least eight Palestinians were killed and 35 people were injured, per Reuters, citing Palestinian health services.
"There is no cease-fire for Palestinians," wrote Palestinian writer Yara Hawari, reacting to an Al Jazeera news alert that Israeli forces had attacked the Jenin refugee camp. Her remarks were in reference to a cease-fire deal that went into effect on Sunday, halting hostilities in the war-torn Gaza strip.
The Israeli army and Shin Bet security service announced Tuesday's operation, calling it a counter-terrorism measure codenamed "Iron Wall," according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. It will continue "as long as necessary," the outlet reported.
According to Reuters, Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that the operation was the beginning of a "strong and ongoing campaign" against militant groups "for the protection of settlements and settlers." Smotrich earlier had said he was pleased with Trump's decision to lift sanctions on settlers who are accused of violence against Palestinians, per Reuters.
At multiple points last year, Israel launched attacks on Jenin, and just last week Israeli airstrikes killed three people there, according to Palestinian officials. In December, forces with the Palestinian Authority—which administers parts of the West Bank—stormed the Jenin refugee camp and began a crackdown on armed groups in the camp, which has long been a site of armed struggle and resistance to Israel.
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Any Seeds of Hope Beneath the Rubble in Gaza?
They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.
Jan 12, 2025
Watching, on the one hand, the Israeli soldiers’ video confessions of their genocidal intent and acts and, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ livestreaming of their own deaths and devastation, it is ever so easy to throw one’s hands up in the air, to despair, to want to shut the cruelty out, to find solace in oblivion and disengagement. But, it is not only ethically wrong to surrender to despair – it is also factually wrong that nothing good can be expected. Things change every day and, yes, the seeds of hope are already planted on the blood-soaked soil of the ancient land of Palestine. They may be only seeds, but that’s how new life is born.
So, let’s take a look at the seeds of hope that are taking root underneath the rubble.
1. Israel is not winning on the battlefield
Gaza has been destroyed. Its population is on death row. And yet the smart people in the Israeli military know full well that the destruction they wreaked does not translate into a victory. Fifteen months after they re-invaded the open prison that has been the Gaza strip since 1948, they still cannot control more than a small portion of it at a time. Armed resistance, including the regular blowing up of Israel’s mighty tanks, is continuing. Israeli military officers also know that their political leaders’ stated aim, of eradicating Hamas, can never be demonstrably achieved, however many Hamas fighters they kill. As a former Israeli general put it to me: “Even if we kill most the Gazans before we declare victory, a single teenager raising the Hamas flag over a pile of rubble will prove that we failed.”
Similarly in Lebanon. Yes, Israel has killed much of the Hezbollah leadership and, yes, the ceasefire it imposed on Hezbollah succeeded in stopping the Hezbollah missile launches in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance further south. However, the ceasefire was also forced upon Israel by its army’s inability to venture without massive losses by more than a few kilometres into Lebanese territory. And, lest we forget, it is simply not true that Hezbollah had to accept the ceasefire because its missile arsenal was destroyed: Israel signed the ceasefire hours after missiles hit Haifa, and indeed Tel Aviv.
The past year, in other words, will be remembered as a cruel paradox: Israel destroyed Gaza and much of South Lebanon, mainly from the air, but failed abysmally to control the ground. The time is fast approaching when Israeli society will realize that the thousands of Israeli soldiers who died or were seriously injured were the victims of a leadership that, ultimately, placed the Israeli people’s interests very low in their own list of priorities. This is also confirmed by the readiness of Israel’s government to lie through its teeth about its own casualties on the battlefield: compare the low number of casualties officially admitted with the more than twenty thousand soldiers that Israel’s health authorities say have been admitted to veteran rehabilitation centers.
2. Israel’s economy has entered a ‘spiral of collapse’
Turning now to the medium and long term impact of the war on Israel’s economy (which is of great importance from the perspective of the apartheid state’s capacity to reproduce itself through war and devastation financially), it is instructive to read a letter signed by Israeli economists, including Dan Ben-David who explain how Israel’s economic miracle hinges on a hi-tech sector that numbers at most 300 thousand people (including doctors, scientists, academics etc.) His point? If only 10% of these people leave the country, say thirty thousand, Israel’s already hugely indebted economy will fade. In Ben-David’s even starker words,
“We won’t become a third world country, we just won’t be anymore. Only 0.6% of the population are doctors, but who trains them? The senior staff in research universities are 0.1% of the people. High-Tech workers are 6% of the population. Altogether it’s 300,000 people. It’s enough that a critical mass of this group chooses not to be here tomorrow morning, and the State of Israel leaves the developed world.”
Are they leaving? You bet they are – leaving behind them more influential, more dominant than ever before the low-productivity bigots who are driving the fascist settler movement. And, the more dominant these low-productivity bigots are in government and in society, the greater the exodus of the high-tech, secular more liberally minded Israelis. This is the definition of a spiral of collapse.
Israel has lost in the court of public opinion – the illusion of a liberal democratic state is gone
Meanwhile, the genocide of Palestinians, and in particular the manner in which so many Israeli soldiers and politicians celebrate it in videos, speeches and posts, has claimed what is left of the illusion of Israel as a European liberal democracy embedded in a hostile Middle East. That illusion has been a central underpinning of the propaganda that helped Israeli lobbyists succeed in Washington and Europe. Now it is gone. It has drowned in the sea of flesh and blood the Israeli military has strewn all over Gaza – and the trail of destruction, hatred and viciousness that the settlers have unleashed in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Once Israel’s cleverly constructed reputation was gone, sullied, it cannot be reclaimed. And that is good news in the sense that the first step toward a just peace is the ethical fall from grace of the aggressor.
The situation in the Occupied Territories
Turning now to the situation in the West Bank, it is heart-wrenching to watch the non-stop violence against the Palestinians living under brutal apartheid conditions there. The violence against them comes from three quarters: From the Israeli military. From Israeli settlers. And, most tragically, from the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) own security forces who are, in the midst of the genocide of their people by the apartheid state, are cooperating fully with the security forces of that apartheid state. Why the army is doing this, we know. Why the settlers are doing it, we also know. But why is the leadership of the PA doing it?
This is not the first time the PA has cooperated fully with the Israeli occupiers who steadfastly reject any prospect of a Palestinian state – the stated objective of the PA. Sure enough, the PA’s leadership have been doing this for years. But, now, in the face of the fully-fledged genocidal campaign by Israel, the PA’s excuses are becoming transparent. The unelected, unrepresentative, patently corrupt leadership of the PA is behaving as if to impress Netanyahu and Trump that they can do their dirty work for them, with a veneer of legitimacy courtesy of being Palestinians themselves. That they have a role to play. It is a pathetic plea to the genocidal US-Israeli establishment to give them a job to do against the Palestinian Resistance now that the Palestinian people has seen through them. Nothing else explains why they are turning even against Fatah members who continue to resist in Jenin and elsewhere.
This is the saddest, most depressing, aspect of the Palestinian tragedy. So I shall not dwell on it further except to reiterate the urgent need for the election of a representative and thus legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people. No peace can be imagined, let alone negotiated, otherwise. I hope and trust that the Palestinians will find a way to speak with one non-sectarian voice. Nothing short of succeeding in this will curb the genocide they face. As for the rest of us, we must stand by to help give this voice, their voice, a chance to be heard.
Summary
To sum up, days before Donald Trump enters the White House – a man who has never not liked any war crime aimed at eradicating the Palestinian resistance, the Palestinians as a people native to Palestine – we are at a crossroads. Mega Death and uber destruction on the ground wreaked by a US-armed and EU-supported Israel. A spiral of collapse within Israel’s social economy. Arab countries split between complicit regimes and enraged citizens. A Global South that is becoming increasingly powerful and intolerant of the Western-Israeli self-awarded right ethnically to cleanse the non-Jewish native population. And a Western public opinion that can no longer pretend to not know. What is the upshot of these ingredients?
If I were to issue an educated guess, it would be this: Things will get even worse for the Palestinians in the short run. But, in the longer run, the possibility of liberation, of a just peace for both Palestinians, who refuse to go gently into the good night, and for Israelis, who understand the trap into which Netanyahu has ensnared them, seems stronger than it has been for 30 years.
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