With a smiling Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, United States President Donald Trump announced on February 5 that the US would take over the Gaza Strip, displace the Palestinians (ethnic cleansing) and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Israeli government officials took turns praising Trump’s plan. Netanyahu’s opponents even expressed openness to the idea — something once only advocated by the far right.
Trump said that the Palestinians would willingly leave Gaza to be dispersed into surrounding Arab countries — mainly Egypt, as he stated later on —something Palestinians and Egypt reject.
Trump is sticking to his plan despite domestic and international outrage. He dismisses international agreements and laws preventing the displacement of peoples — which cannot be enforced.
The New York Times described the plan as “the latest example of how government officials on the right in both the United States and Israel now speak publicly about a shared goal: the takeover of Palestinian land”.
According to the NYT report, Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to Washington said: “It’s the most rightwing government we’ve ever had in Israel — and there never was a US administration that shared these views to this extent.”
The “two-state solution” supported by the US for decades — a fig leaf that never got off the ground — has been relegated to the dustbin of history by Trump.
Trump’s proposal has shaken the Arab countries. Hours after his announcement, Saudi Arabia said there would be no normalisation of relations with Israel, since it remains firm that a precondition is Palestinian statehood.
To understand what Trump means when he says the Palestinians would willingly be displaced, we should recall Trump’s previous statement that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza.
Taken together, it means that the US will give 100% backing to Israel to use any means to intensify its genocide and physical destruction of Gaza when its war resumes, to the extent that remaining Palestinians will have no choice but to leave.
Israel began to use starvation as a weapon against Palestinians, but backed off when the US said it was going too far. Now, this will be resumed. Food and other humanitarian aid to the Gazans will again be restricted, or eliminated, if Israel so deems, in the full knowledge that it has US backing.
Already, the administration’s drastic downsizing of the United States Agency for International Development means food, tents and medical treatments for Palestinians have been cut.
Under this scenario, when Gazans have been so ground down that they have no choice but to flee, this will put pressure on Egypt to accept them. By then, the US will use whatever means necessary — from cutting off economic aid to imposing sanctions — to force Egypt to do so.
Trump is also working with Israel to accomplish the same outcome in the West Bank, by forcing the Palestinians into Jordan. Like Egypt, Jordan rejects this plan.
According to the NYT, Trump said he will make an announcement about his West Bank plan in the coming weeks. There is little doubt that this will include recognition of Israeli annexation.
Trump’s administration has ordered all government documents and statements to expunge any reference to the West Bank and Occupied Territories, and to refer to these areas as Judea and Samaria, the biblical terms Israel uses. He also reversed (the toothless) sanctions Biden put on Israeli settlers using violence to terrorise Palestinians and seize their land.
A few years ago, the Israeli Knesset adopted a law that says that in all of “Eretz Israel” (Biblical Israel), only Israeli Jews have the right to self-determination. Trump officials echo this definition of the “land of Israel”. While vague, it includes, at a minimum, the land the current Israeli state rules — from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stafanik, says that Judea and Samaria are a part of Israel.
According to the book of Genesis, God gave the land between the Euphrates River and the Nile to the Jewish people. As such, Israel has never recognised any borders, including the “Green Line” demarcating its borders with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, established following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Israel has already annexed the Syrian Golan Heights and has failed to withdraw its troops from Southern Lebanon following the recent ceasefire.
Today, the annexation of the West Bank and the Occupied Territories is on the agenda. De facto (in practice) or de jur (in law) annexation will allow Israel to intensify its confiscation of Palestinian land and increase its military campaign with the aim of making life for Palestinians so miserable that they will “willingly” flee into Jordan.
The only way Trump and the Israeli government can be stopped is by mass resistance. First of all, by Palestinians themselves.
The temporary ceasefire in Gaza revealed that Hamas is very much alive, as the videos of young Hamas resistance fighters controlling streets has shown. This is an example of when a whole people are attacked, the “killing of one fighter causes two more to join”.
Sections of the US mainstream media have reluctantly recognised that Hamas remains the only government in Gaza.
The same fact of continued resistance is true of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Fighters in the West Bank, from a number of organisations, also continue to resist Israeli occupation.
The Arab peoples have been aroused, shaking even the comprador bourgeois governments, who fear their own people. They are an ally of Palestinians and will make their voices heard.
The pro-Palestinian movement in the US and in the West has been proven to be correct and should mobilise en masse once again.
There is now new ammunition to counter the false charge of antisemitism used to repress the movement. Opposing Israel’s occupation is not antisemitic.
The Israeli-US axis of evil in the Middle East can be defeated.