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Trump’s Gaza remarks are no surprise: ethnically cleansing was always the plan | Arwa Mahdawi

“They make a desert and call it peace,” said Tacitus, paraphrasing Calgacus.

Israel, meanwhile, has made a graveyard of Gaza, and Donald Trump is calling it a real estate opportunity. The president, as you will know, has decided the US should just take over the Gaza Strip. As for the Palestinians who are inconveniently there at the moment? According to Trump, they can just be moved somewhere else. They can be dumped in Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. They won’t mind. Those Arabs are all the same anyway.

It’s not clear, by the way, exactly how many Palestinians are actually left to be moved. Fifteen months ago there were an estimated 2.1m people in Gaza. The official death toll is now almost 62,000 people but this is very likely a gross underestimate that doesn’t account for all the “indirect deaths” from disease and starvation. Writing in the Guardian in September, Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, noted that according to an extrapolation of one estimate published in the Lancet medical journal, the death toll would be estimated at about 335,500 in total.

It seems Trump might agree with that estimate. While waxing lyrical about his planned crimes against humanity, Trump said “we’re talking about probably 1.7 million, maybe 1.8 million” people in Gaza who would need to be moved. If only reporters at Trump’s press conferences would ask him if he knows exactly how many people are dead, eh? However, it would seem that much of the US press simply aren’t that interested.

There is a lot of interest in Trump’s plans to redevelop Gaza, however. The word ‘shocking’ has been bandied around a lot to describe these very Trumpian real estate fantasies. And, yes, the fact that the president is being so blunt, so open, about what he wants to do is shocking. But the idea that the US and Israel might want to get rid of all the Palestinians in the strip should hardly come as a shock to anyone. This, after all, is effectively what Israel’s politicians and pundits, along with Israel’s supporters, have been saying all along: they want to make Gaza unliveable and get all the Palestinians out.

In October 2023, for example, Major General Giora Eiland, who is highly influential, wrote in an Israeli paper that: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in.” In another article, Eiland wrote: “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”

Other people have been very open that they want certain types of human beings to exist in Gaza—just not Palestinians. Last March, for example, Jared Kushner salivated about the prospect of building waterfront property in Gaza and said Israel should move Palestinians into the Negev desert while it “cleans up” the strip. Settler activists have also been scouting locations for Jewish settlements in North Gaza.

So, again, if you’re shocked by Trump’s comments about Gaza then you simply haven’t been paying attention. There are hundreds of documented statements from high-profile Israeli figures calling for the complete destruction of Gaza. And a growing list of genocide experts and human rights groups have termed what Israel has been doing in Gaza a “genocide.”

Speaking to me last November, for example, genocide expert Omer Bartov said that, from the very beginning, you could see “there was a concerted effort, not only to move the population over and over again, but also to destroy everything that makes the life of a group possible.”

Not many foreigners have been allowed into Gaza to see that destruction for themselves, but those that have gone in come out saying much the same thing. Last November, for example, Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, returned from a trip to Gaza and told BBC Radio the situation in the north was a “besiegement within a besiegement”. Egleland stressed: “This is not self-defence. This is the systematic destruction of Gaza.”

Now that the destruction of Gaza is complete, it seems like forced displacement is about to begin. On Wednesday, after some backlash from the international community, Trump’s team did a little bit of backtracking and suggested the displacement might not be permanent. “The president has made it clear that they need to be temporarily relocated out of Gaza,” Leavitt said during a White House briefing.

But history would suggest there would be nothing temporary about the displacement. My grandparents, who had to flee in 1948 from Haifa, were buried in the West Bank; my father was born there. He left in 1967, however, and does not have the right to return. It seems inevitable that any Palestinians leaving Gaza won’t have the right to return either.

Perhaps what is most disgusting about all this is the gaslighting; Trump’s attempts to dress up his plans for forced relocation as some sort of act of humanitarianism. On the contrary, it is violation of international law. While it looks a hell of a lot like ethnic cleansing, I should note that that particular term is quite complex.

There are “certain complications with ethnic cleansing itself as a phrase”, Dr John Reynolds, associate professor at the School of Law & Criminology at Maynooth University in Ireland, told me. In legal terms, “the type of mass expulsion or displacement that ethnic cleansing commonly signifies is a violation of international law, but it is criminalised as the war crime and crime against humanity of forcible population transfer”.

In simple terms, however, Reynolds thinks that Trump is clearly calling for a crime against humanity. Whether it is best to call that ethnic cleansing or forced displacement is somewhat more complicated. But, again, what Trump wants to do clearly violates international law and would be a crime against humanity.

Will Trump actually get what he wants? Who knows. But the fact that Trump is even voicing these plans, and many lawmakers are nodding along, speaks volumes about just how much Palestinians have been dehumanized.

Responding to Trump’s comments, Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American member of Congress, said: “Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. This president can only spew this fanatical bullshit because of bipartisan support in Congress for funding genocide and ethnic cleansing. It’s time for my two-state solution colleagues to speak up.”

Tlaib is quite right, but she should also have mentioned the media. Another reason Trump can spew this “fanatical bullshit” is because much of the western media have been complicit in dehumanizing Palestinians and normalizing what many experts have termed a genocide.

They’ve been complicit in ignoring the fact that Gaza has become a graveyard for journalists. They’ve been complicit in ignoring the fact that Israel has refused foreign journalists to freely report from the strip. And they’ve been complicit in dressing up horror after horror in sanitizing, passive, and obfuscatory language.

Even now much of the media coverage of Trump’s comments omits the fact that just by meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu – who sat by Trump grinning like a Cheshire cat as he made his comments about Gaza – Trump is undermining international law. The international criminal court has an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity. If Trump is allowed to execute his plans, it’s because the media helped pave the way for them. It’s beyond time for more of my colleagues in the US media to speak up.