Trump’s Gaza Plan: A Green Light for Ethnic Cleansing?
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Let’s be clear: the forced displacement of Palestinians is not a new idea. US President Donald Trump’s latest proposal to take “long-term ownership” of Gaza, to “clean out” the “mess”, and to turn it into a “Riviera of the Middle East” is just the latest iteration of efforts aimed at ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their homeland.
What makes Trump’s comments dangerous is not the immediate threat of US military intervention in Gaza followed by the expulsion of its 2.2 million residents. The real danger lies elsewhere.
First, Israel may interpret Trump’s words as a green light to push Palestinians out of Gaza or the West Bank. Second, the US could tacitly endorse another Israeli offensive under the guise of fulfilling the president’s wishes. Third, Trump’s remarks suggest his foreign policy on Palestine will remain largely unchanged from his predecessor’s.
Some Democrats have seized this moment to criticize Arab and Palestinian Americans who voted for Trump or abstained from supporting Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in the last elections. However, the idea of ethnic cleansing was already being floated during the Biden administration.
While then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated that “Palestinian civilians… must not be pressed to leave Gaza,” Biden created the conditions for displacement through unconditional military support for Israel. This allowed one of the most devastating wars in modern Middle Eastern history to unfold.
Just days into the war, on October 13, 2023, Jordan’s King Abdullah II warned Blinken in Amman against any Israeli attempt to “forcibly displace Palestinians from all Palestinian territories or cause their internal displacement.”
The latter displacement became a reality as most of northern Gaza’s population was crammed into overcrowded refugee encampments in central and southern Gaza, where conditions have been and remain inhumane for over 16 months.
At the same time, another displacement campaign is underway in the West Bank, particularly in its northern regions, accelerating in recent weeks. Thousands of Palestinian families have already been displaced in the Jenin governorate and other areas.
Despite this, the Biden administration has done little to pressure Israel to stop.
Arab concerns over Palestinian expulsion were real from the war’s outset. Almost every Arab leader raised the alarm, often repeatedly.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi addressed the issue multiple times, warning of Israeli efforts – and possibly US involvement – in a “population transfer” scheme.
“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to seek refuge and migrate to Egypt,” Sisi stated, insisting that such an outcome “should not be accepted.”
Fifteen months later, under Trump, he repeated his rejection, vowing that Egypt would not participate in this “act of injustice.”
The Saudi statement was issued almost immediately after Trump doubled down on the idea during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on February 4. The Saudi foreign ministry went further than rejecting Trump’s ‘ownership’ of Gaza but articulated a political discourse that summarized Riyad’s, in fact, the Arab League’s position on Palestine.
“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirms that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s position on the establishment of a Palestinian state is firm and unwavering,” the statement said, adding that the Kingdom “also 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”.
The new US administration, however, seems oblivious to Palestinian history. Given the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948, no Arab government – let alone the Palestinian leadership – would support another Israeli-US effort to ethnically cleanse millions into neighboring states.
Beyond the immorality of expelling an indigenous population, history has shown that such actions destabilize the region for generations. The 1948 Nakba, which saw the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, ignited the Arab-Israeli conflict, whose repercussions continue today.
History also teaches us that the Nakba was not an isolated event. Israel has repeatedly attempted ethnic cleansing, starting with its intense attacks on Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza in the early 1950s, and ever since.
The 1967 war, known as the Naksa or “Setback,” led to the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, both internally and externally. In the years that followed, various US-Israeli initiatives throughout the 1970s sought to relocate the Palestinian population to the Sinai desert. However, these efforts failed due to the steadfastness and collective resistance of the people of Gaza.
Trump’s so-called ‘humanitarian’ ethnic cleansing proposal will similarly go down in history as another failed attempt, particularly as Arab and international solidarity with the steadfast Palestinian people is stronger than it has been in years.
The key question now is whether Arabs and other supporters of Palestine worldwide will go beyond merely rejecting such sinister proposals and take the initiative to push for the restoration of the Palestinian homeland. This requires a justice-based international campaign, rooted in international law and driven by the aspirations of the Palestinian people themselves.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out. His other books include My Father was a Freedom Fighter and The Last Earth. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Trump to Gaza: We Will Replace You
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“They are coming to replace us.”
It sounds like the tagline of a horror movie. And indeed, what the far right whispers into ears, chants at hate-filled rallies, and translates into odious legislation in white-majority countries is very much a horror movie in that it is both scary and untrue.
In country after country, the far right has been promoting its horror movie premise that a horde of faceless immigrants is flooding across the border, aided by liberals, and displacing the native-born population. This campaign built around the Great Replacement conspiracy has mobilized White people of different socioeconomic backgrounds to amplify their pride, their power, and their privilege in the face of a vast, inchoate fear.
Fear wins elections, unfortunately. But let’s be clear, the Great Replacement is one of the greatest hoaxes of recent memory, right up there with the notion that COVID vaccines kill people rather than save them. Immigrants, after all, are saving countries throughout the Global North, which otherwise would be not-so-slowly erasing themselves. The EU’s fertility rate, at 1.46 in 2022, is well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The U.S. rate, which dropped to 1.62 in 2023, is not substantially different.
The Great Replacement, once whispered in the corners of bars and Internet chatrooms, is now being shouted in public places, as the far-right campaign has gone mainstream. Donald Trump is probably more responsible for this dismal state of affairs than anyone else.
The once-and-again president hasn’t just translated the Great Replacement theory into domestic policy by closing the border with Mexico and deporting as many people as possible. He has weaponized the theory as part of U.S. foreign policy. It’s no longer a matter of stopping people from leaving “shithole” countries to come to the United States.
To the people of Gaza, Trump has proclaimed, “We are coming to replace you.”
Out of the Blue?
Trump has long flirted with the Great Replacement theory. During the 2024 election, he asserted that Democrats were encouraging an inflow of the undocumented so that they could vote against Trump (they couldn’t, by law, so they didn’t). Before the 2016 election, Trump claimed that it would be the last U.S. election that Republicans had a chance of winning (for the same erroneous reason).
Being wrong has never stopped Trump. He doubles down, which means he’s even wronger the next time around.
Trump’s hostility toward Palestine and Palestinians is also nothing new. During his first term, charging “chronic bias against Israel,” Trump withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council. He closed the PLO’s office in Washington, D.C. and deleted funding for UNRWA, the agency that supports Palestinian refugees. In a boon to the Israeli right, Trump broke a global convention by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
All that time, he was trying to negotiate a megadeal to facilitate the diplomatic recognition of Israel by all major regional actors. As I wrote in 2020,
Where does this leave Palestinians? Up a creek without a state. The Trump administration has used its much-vaunted “deal of the century” to make any future deal well-nigh impossible. In collaboration with Netanyahu, Trump has strangled the two-state solution in favor of a single Israeli state with a permanent Palestinian underclass.
But what Trump is proposing now with respect to Gaza is hubris beyond anything he has ever publicly considered. The president has proposed to expel all 2 million citizens of Gaza to nearby countries, none of which has even the slightest interest in accepting them. The Gazans would have no right of refusal and no right of return. Trump has threatened both Jordan and Egypt with economic penalties if they don’t welcome the expelled. Given domestic considerations, neither country is likely to bow to that kind of pressure.
Imperialism Repackaged
The United States was late to the nineteenth-century game of colonialism. Even though there wasn’t as much land to grab by the 1890s, the United States jumped right in: Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Panama Canal.
Donald Trump must feel as if the United States is late to the game this time around, too. Russia has grabbed a chunk of Ukraine. Israel is reasserting control over Gaza. Turkey sliced off a piece of Syria. China effectively absorbed Hong Kong.
Nothing betokens a healthy empire like a steady diet of territory. Thus, Trump has talked of reasserting control over the Panama Canal. He is eyeing the vastness of Greenland like Secretary of State William Seward once coveted Alaska. Even good neighbor Canada isn’t excluded from Trump’s greedy gaze.
Like most fabulizing colonialists, Trump has promised the Gazans that “We’ll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people. We’ll build beautiful communities, safe communities — could be five, six, could be two, but we’ll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.”
The Gazans know that this is nonsense. Overcrowded refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon have existed for over 70 years, and no one has managed to turn those into “beautiful” or “safe” communities. Like a slumlord eager to get rid of tenants so that he can raze the property and build a new skyscraper, Trump doesn’t care about the current inhabitants. The focus instead is on building an oligarchs’ retreat that’s a short flight from Israeli, Gulf, and Egyptian elites.
The Great Replacement is a clear case of psychological projection, like an inveterate liar who is always calling his opponents liars or a serial rapist who constantly complains about rapists coming from over the border. “They” are not the problem; we the wealthy countries are the problem. Waves of immigrants are escaping wars that rich countries supported or economic conditions that rich nations helped to create through neoliberal reforms or climate conditions that rich industrialized powers have largely produced and subsequently ignored.
All these conditions have converged to push Gazans off the land. Yet, despite this adversity, they want to stay on their land and achieve some measure of political sovereignty. Finally, there’s a people who want to stay, and now Trump wants them to go.
The irony would be laughable—if it weren’t a war crime.
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