To stop Trump’s Gaza plans, Palestinians need solidarity and support | Omar Barghouti

Egyptian and Greek mythologies mention a phoenix rising from ashes. Palestinians in Gaza have shown this is not entirely a myth. With the shaky ceasefire barely holding, hundreds of thousands of genocide survivors have emerged from the carnage in this land, whose civilization goes back 4,000 years, marching to north Gaza with hope, despite knowing that almost all their homes, roads, services, schools and hospitals have been wiped out. The real aspiration of most of them is to keep marching home, to where their families had been ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. Palestinians, it seems, have presciently responded to “Donald Trump’s plan” even before he spat it out.

Despite his sinister side, the US president has mastered the skill of dominating the airwaves and cyberspace through manufacturing dissent. With one outrageous statement after another, he has managed to preoccupy the minds of most nations, leaving almost everyone guessing what his next “unhinged” move may be. But he is not the first to indulge in pretending he is “crazy.” Richard Nixon did too. They subscribe to a “madman theory”, creating the perception of insanity, to achieve two simultaneous goals: throwing friends and foes alike off balance, to the edge, as a means of extracting from them prized concessions and normalizing the patently abnormal: an unmasked might makes right order.

Trump’s recent proposal to “take over” and “own” Gaza after forcibly displacing millions of Palestinians must be seen in this light. It has been widely condemned, even by despotic Arab regimes and Germany, with many describing it as “criminal”, “illegal”, “immoral”, “impractical”, or “destabilizing”. This global dissent inadvertently normalizes the idea, making it merely controversial, debatable, not categorically dismissible.

Inciting for the forced displacement of Palestinian genocide survivors constitutes a “continuation” of the genocide, as a Palestinian human rights organization puts it. Beyond depraved; it is sheer evil. It is a desperate attempt to normalize the commission of atrocity crimes and to achieve through US imperialist bullying what Israel’s military prowess has utterly failed to accomplish after 15 months of genocide. Indeed, only 4% of Jewish-Israelis believe that Israel’s goals were fully achieved in Gaza, according to a recent poll. Former US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin as early as December 2023 warned Israel of such a “strategic defeat”.

Indeed, despite the typical militaristic bravado, it is far from evident that the Israeli establishment wishes to resume the ruthless bombardment and massacres in Gaza. Israel’s economy is experiencing what 130 of its top economists describe as a “spiral of collapse”, with an almost unprecedented “brain drain”, a nosediving tech industry and a credit rating that is near “junk” levels, according to Moody’s. Increasingly seen by investors as a shut-down nation, Israel has ranked dead last among 50 countries in the just released Nations Brand Index. The chairman of the Israel Export Institute admits, “BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape.”

As evidenced by repeated UN votes, the overwhelming majority of nations today see Israel as a rogue state that has not only exterminated tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and in a few weeks killed thousands in Lebanon and occupied large swathes of Syria, but is simultaneously bulldozing the very tenets of international law. Its prime minister is wanted by thenternational criminal court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The international court of justice in January 2024 decided that it is plausibly committing genocide and in July 2024 ruled that its occupation is illegal and it is an apartheid state.

This all explains why Trump is now amplifying an old Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza to do Israel’s bidding. Days into the start of Israel’s genocide in October 2023, a leaked Israeli ministry of intelligence document revealed a plan for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai at the end of the “war”. Not to be outdone, and to make forced displacement sound normal in comparison, on 5 November 2023, Israel’s minister of heritage (Jewish Power party) Amichai Eliyahu suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza “ghetto”.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory, has warned: “If it is not forced to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza. Mark my words.” The Israeli war minister Israel Katz has referred to the military attack on Jenin in the occupied West Bank as “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza”. The Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist homophobe”, has incited fanatic colonial violence against Palestinians in the West Bank saying: “Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabalia.”

But wiping out Palestinian towns to forcibly displace their residents is nothing new in this ongoing Nakba. A recent error by Israel’s censors has accidentally revealed secret documents exposing David Ben-Gurion’s conscious decision to “wipe out” Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, as a necessary condition to create what Israeli human rights group B’Tselem today calls “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.

While global outrage against Trump’s plan abounds, the Biden administration, the “lesser evil”, the main partner in arming, funding and shielding from accountability Israel’s genocide, has entertained Israel’s proposed ethnic cleansing plans without provoking similar media outrage. It has abortively applied immense pressure on the Egyptian regime to go along with the plan in return for large investments.

Obviously, all settler colonies, not just Israel, have perpetrated forced displacement of Indigenous populations. US President Theodore Roosevelt towards the turn of the 20th century wrote, “[V]iewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind.” He added, “[A] conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples”.

Similarly, when asked about the rights of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine, British leader Winston Churchill in 1937 said: “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time … I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

But just as the legendary sumud, resilience and resistance of the Palestinian people have defeated Israeli-US plans of ethnic cleansing, we know that our agency, our principled and strategic struggle, supported by tens of millions of people of conscience globally, can ultimately prevail over this latest plan. But without meaningful accountability measures, the Gaza ceasefire may lead to a continuation of the genocide in a less visible form. Unspeakable criminality and shameless complicity must be met with inexorable accountability. As we have learned from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, ending state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s system of oppression, especially through the nonviolent tactics of BDS, is the most effective form of solidarity with our liberation struggle.

To defeat Trumpism and the rising wave of fascism worldwide, broad-tent, inclusive, anti-racist alliances are more important than ever. This is not just an ethically desired strategy to unite racial, climate, social and economic justice movements to build a critical mass of people power. The current threat to humanity shows that the intersectional unity of those struggles has truly become an existential need.

The Palestinian phoenix of Gaza is emerging from under the rubble to reassert to the world that we shall never bow to oppressors; we shall continue to resist oppression and insist on defending our inalienable rights. But in mythology, a phoenix needs sunlight to resurrect itself, and in our case, that sunlight is blocked by dark, heavy clouds of complicity. Principled and strategic solidarity is crucial to dissipate these clouds so we can rise to our inevitable emancipation.

• Omar Barghouti is co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights and co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award