On ethnic cleansing and colonisation
Saying something "won't happen" doesn't mean the idea won't cause terrible damage
I happened to wake up about thirty miles from the Gaza Strip on the day that the news of Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing and colonial occupation of the Gaza Strip hit the airwaves. I’d been spending a few days in Israel and Palestine (only East Jerusalem, sadly) for a work project. In Jerusalem’s Old City last Sunday, the absence of tourists only added to the atmosphere in that most atmospheric of places, where the ongoing tensions of the wider territory are seen in microcosm. Israeli settlement in the Old City takes the form of individual houses in the Muslim Quarter being acquired by the Israeli government and then transferred to nonprofit organisations that have been settling Israelis in this contested space. Having done this, certain parts of the Old City are now only accessible to Israeli Jews, as we found when turned away from a particular passageway by an IDF soldier.
With the ceasefire holding, the evidence of the Gaza conflict was more subtle. Memorial stickers to Israeli soldiers are pasted on bus shelters and other public places. The youth of the fallen, many of them born this century, is what strikes you. And there are lots of signs calling for the release of the hostages. What you don’t see is memorials to the 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Trump’s Gaza plan for a “long-term ownership position” by the United States and a complete expulsion of the Palestinian population has been rapidly dismissed as ‘crazy’ and ‘unworkable’, although it’s interesting to note that he has restated it, in spite of attempts by his staffers to suggest he had been misunderstood. He made his declaration during the Washington DC visit of Benjamin Netanyahu, the first foreign leader to visit the Trump 2.0 White House. Just as Trump allowed himself to be manipulated by Vladimir Putin, it seems very likely that Bibi has done the same thing. A ceasefire, and release of the hostages, spells bad news for Bibi’s government holding together and would force him to face an electorate that wants to hold him responsible for the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023. Trump’s Gaza plan makes further hostage releases unlikely and makes the negotiations for a lasting settlement far harder; why would Hamas negotiate when they are about to be cleared out of the Gaza Strip entirely? It seems entirely possible that Trump was nudged in this direction by his visitor, who might have encouraged him to improvise on some of his favourite themes: hotel developments and flashy casinos.
But it’s because Trump lacks any intellectual curiosity that he doesn’t even understand the implications of his own ideas. As we drove into Tel Aviv one evening we sat in rush-hour traffic by two immense billboards on the sides of tower blocks. Both of them depicted Trump: in one he is shaking hands with Muhammad bin Salman (MbS), the slogan urging Israel to make peace with Saudi Arabia; in the other, Trump is encouraged to bring home the hostages.
In both cases, Trump’s Gaza plans make these things less likely. Saudi Arabia issued a statement in response to Trump’s press conference, stating:
Saudi Arabia will continue its relentless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that… The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia … reaffirms its unequivocal rejection of any infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, land annexation, or attempts to displace the Palestinian people from their land… this unwavering position is non-negotiable and not subject to compromises.
There is an irony here: one of the key proponents of an Israel-Saudi deal is one Donald Trump, who sees it as both an economic opportunity and a way of containing Iran. Clearly, it has not occurred to him that ethnic cleaning of Gaza would jeopardise his aims. Similarly, Trump took (not entirely without reason) much of the credit for the earlier release of hostages and would want to be praised for further such releases. His Gaza ‘blue-sky thinking’ makes that far less likely.
Perhaps none of this matters: Trump is a bloviator who has little understanding of the complexities of the Middle East; there is no chance that Gaza will be depopulated in order to build him some casinos. But speculation of this nature emboldens other wild ideas. One of the most popular of these among the Israeli far right is the reoccupation of Gaza by Israeli settlers. Trump’s speculations makes such an idea seem a lot less extreme. This will be welcome news to Netanyahu’s far-right colleagues and the prospect of a resettlement of Gaza may be sufficient to keep the governing coalition alive.
In this sense, Donald J Trump is proving a very useful idiot to extremists in both Israel and Palestine. The two-state solution, always a distant prospect, now looks very dead.
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