Trump’s Exemplary Gaza
Plan
Jim Kavanagh
Donald Trump has presented the world with a spectacular plan
to help the people of Gaza. He will take control of the strip and move all the
residents of the demolished, unlivable territory to nice safe homes in other
countries.
Now, many people, including myself, correctly denounce this plan as outright, egregious, ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity. Not to mention unhinged. And so it is.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2025And what is their plan instead?
Unfortunately, most of the people now denouncing this plan
have been part of that very plan, helping to carry it out all along. What were Israel
and US government under the Biden administration doing by providing all the
bombs and weapons that destroyed Gaza and killed many tens of thousands of
Gazans over the past 15 months? What were the US and western media doing when
they repeated the fake Israeli narrative and supported that killing and
demolition in a myriad of explicit and implicit ways? What were all the U.S.
and European politicians doing who welcomed Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders
and praised the Zionist project that was carrying out that killing and
demolition for the past 15 months? What plan did they think Israel and the U.S.
were executing?
Now here comes Donald Trump, being crudely blatant, forgoing
all the complex "peace process," "two-state" mumbo-jumbo,
under which sanctimonious Western liberals pretend that they don’t know, and
are not supporting, the criminal ethnic-cleansing project that Zionism is in
Gaza. Trump is telling us that the U.S., now speaking in the same voice as
Israel has been using 77 years, is a full-on, leading partner in the Zionist
project of erasing the Palestinian people. It’s an exemplary case of stripping
the supercilious, hypocritical lipstick from the U.S/Zionist pig. His
discourse, in other words, undermines the soft-power face of U.S. imperialism
in favor of identification with the utterly-indifferent-to-“soft power” Zionist
project.
Gaza, Trump says,
is “right now a demolition site,…a hellhole…the people…have been absolutely
destroyed…they are living in hell.” True, as he should know, since every
U.S. government, including his, has participated in making it so—as he
himself admits: “It's just terrible. And that includes on the American
side, by the way. We should have never gone in there a long time ago, spent
trillions of dollars and created so much death. So it includes Americans.”
So, then, why not “give people a chance at life...a beautiful
area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and
harmony”? Let’s have Jordan and Egypt “open their hearts and…give us the kind
of land that we need to get this done.” Because there is no other way: “they've
tried the other…for decades and decades and decades. It's not going to work. It
didn't work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history…you just
can't let it keep repeating itself.”
Trump is here acknowledging the purpose and unity of
the US-Israel Zionist project. He is saying, in effect: Gaza has been
destroyed and made unlivable, by us along with the Israelis, and the necessary,
as well as most humanitarian, result is to expel the Gazan people, whose
homeland aspirations, we all assume, are irrelevant to all the important people.
We’ll take that project over and finish it for the Israelis.
As I’ve said
for over a year, the Israel plan in Gaza has always been to kill or expel the
Palestinians—preferably “all of them,” as Trump said, but a great majority will
do, for a start. For more than a year. Israel has been saying to the world
quite clearly: “See us. We’re killing them all. We don’t care whether you call
it ‘genocide’ or not. We have impunity from the U.S. If you’re so concerned for
them and want us to stop killing them, and if you’re not going to make us stop, take them
away. Otherwise, bleat your outrage and watch us keep killing them.” The Biden administration quietly helped the
plan, trying
to get Egypt to accept Gazan
“refugees” in exchange for debt relief.
Everybody saw that and knew depopulation was Israel’s
essential plan for Gaza. Western politicians and media pretended they didn’t,
thereby enabling it. Donald Trump has made that pretense impossible anymore. He
has now explicitly embraced that plan as President of the United States, adding
the twist that the U.S. will “take over” the Gaza Strip and take charge of
implementing the plan.
So now various Western politicians and media must express
outrage. A “violation of international law,”
“a straightforward crime against humanity,” cry
Western ethicists. Yup, as was the establishment
of Israel via the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli war of territorial conquest of
1967, the killings and maimings of Great March of Return protestors in 2018,
the repeated previous Israeli demolishment bombing campaigns of Gaza, et. al.
It's easy to denounce Trump’s plan. But what are those outraged Western politicians and media going to do about it that’s different from what they did about the same plan they’ve been accepting for 15 months? What plan do they have that will put an end to the present and future “straightforward crimes against humanity” visited upon the Palestinians of Gaza, and make the Strip decently livable for them?
