Anti-Palestinian Racism in the Media

by Visualizing Palestine / February 15th, 2025

In the midst of growing repression faced by Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian freedom, the VP team has worked on a new visual that  addresses anti-Palestinian racism in mainstream media, exposing the pervasive dehumanization of Palestinians. The visual was created in partnership with the Arab Canadian Lawyers Association.

Visualizing Palestine is the intersection of communication, social sciences, technology, design and urban studies for social justice. Visualizing Palestine uses creative visuals to describe a factual rights-based narrative of Palestine/Israel. Read other articles by Visualizing Palestine, or visit Visualizing Palestine's website.

Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Captives Demonstrates Dehumanization in Action

By Belen Fernandez

February 15, 2025

Source: FAIR

Three Israeli men held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip were freed on Saturday, February 8, in exchange for 183 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It was the latest round of captive releases stipulated by the January ceasefire deal that ostensibly paused Israel’s genocide in Gaza, launched in October 2023, the official Palestinian death toll of which has now reached nearly 62,000—although the true number of fatalities is likely quite a bit higher (FAIR.org, 2/5/25).

In all, 25 Israeli captives and the bodies of eight others were slated to be released over a six-week period, in exchange for more than 1,900 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel—the disproportionate ratio a reflection both of the vastly greater number of captives held by Israel and the superior value consistently assigned to Israeli life.

Hamas halted releases on Monday on account of Israel’s violations of the ceasefire agreement, with Reuters (2/10/25) oh-so-diplomatically noting that the “ceasefire…has largely held since it began on January 19, although there have been some incidents in which Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces.”

But Saturday’s exchange offered a revealing view of the outsized role US corporate media play in the general dehumanization of the Palestinian people—an approach that conveniently coincides with the Middle East policy of the United States, which is predicated on the obsessive funneling of hundreds of billions of dollars in assistance and weaponry to Israel’s genocidal army. And now that President Donald Trump has decided that the US can take over Gaza by simply expelling its inhabitants, well, dehumanizing them may serve an even handier purpose.

Granted, it’s a lot easier for a news report to tell the individual stories of three people than to tell the stories of 183. But the relentless empathetic media attention to the three Israeli men—who, mind you, are not the ones currently facing a genocide—deliberately leaves little to no room for Palestinian victims of an Israeli carceral system that has for decades been characterized by illegal arbitrary detention, torture and in-custody death.

So it is that we learn the names and ages of the three Israelis, the names of their family members, and empathy-inducing details of their captivity and physical appearance, while the 183 Palestinians remain at best a side note, and at worst a largely faceless mass of newly freed terrorists.

‘Like Holocaust survivors’

Deep into this story, the New York Times (2/8/25) admits that many released Palestinian prisoners were also “in visibly poor condition”—but it doesn’t explain that both the Israeli and Palestinian prisoners were emaciated for the same reason: because Israel had deliberately deprived them of food.

Take, for example, the Saturday New York Times intervention (2/8/25) headlined “Hamas Makes Gaunt Israeli Hostages Thank Captors Before Release,” which recounts the plight of the “three frail, painfully thin hostages” who elicited the following comparison from Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar: “The Israeli hostages look like Holocaust survivors.”

When we finally get around to the Palestinian prisoners, we are immediately informed that “at least some were convicted of involvement in deadly attacks against Israelis, who view them as terrorists.” Needless to say, such media outlets can rarely be bothered to profile Palestinian prisoners with less sensational biographies—like all the folks arbitrarily swept up in raids and never charged with a crime.

The article does acknowledge, more than 20 paragraphs later, that “many of the released Palestinian prisoners were in visibly poor condition,” too—albeit not meriting a comparison to Holocaust survivors—and that “Palestinian prisoners have recounted serious allegations of abuse in Israeli jails.” It also mentions that “Israeli forces raided the West Bank family homes of at least four of [the] men before their release, warning their relatives not to celebrate their freedom”—evidence, according to the Times, that Israel has simply been “particularly assertive in suppressing celebrations for detainees.”

And yet all of this “assertiveness” is implicitly justified when we are supplied with the biographical details of a handful of released detainees, who unlike the three Israelis are categorically ineligible for pure and unadulterated victimhood, consisting instead of the likes of 50-year-old Iyad Abu Shkhaydem, who “had been serving 18 life sentences, in part for planning the 2004 bombings of two buses in Beersheba, in central Israel, that killed 16 people.”

Of course, the corporate media are more interested in obscuring rather than supplying context, which is why we never find the New York Times and its ilk dwelling too critically on the possibility that Palestinian violence might be driven by, you know, Israel’s usurpation of Palestinian land, coupled with systematic ethnic cleansing and regular bouts of mass slaughter.

In the media’s view, the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks that killed some 1,200 Israelis and saw more than 250 taken captive was just about the most savage, brutal thing to have ever happened. Never mind Israel’s behavior for the past 77 years, which includes killing nearly 8,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from September 2000 through September 2023, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

But that’s what happens when one side is appointed as human and the other is not—and when the US media takes its cues from a genocidal state whose officials refer to Palestinians as “human animals.”

‘Shocked Israelis’

This New York Times story (2/9/25) is not matched by one in which Palestinian captives “Give Glimpses of Ordeal”—but then, the Times doesn’t have a correspondent who’s married to a Palestinian PR agent, or who has a son who’s a fighter for Hamas.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran another article (2/9/25) on the “torment” the Israeli hostages had endured. Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner managed to find space in it to discuss the “bright magenta track suit” worn by a female Israeli hostage released last month, but not much space to talk about Palestinians, aside from specifying that “some” of the prisoners slated for release were “convicted of killing Israelis.” (Kershner, it bears recalling, was called out by FAIR back in 2012 for utilizing her Times post to provide a platform for her husband’s Zionist propaganda outfit. In 2014, it was revealed that her son was in the Israeli military.)

While Kershner described the three Israelis released on Saturday as being in “emaciated condition,” many other media outlets opted for “gaunt.” Reuters (2/8/25) announced that the “gaunt appearance” of the three hostages had “shocked Israelis”—and reminded its audience that “some” of the 183 released Palestinians were “convicted of involvement in attacks that killed dozens of people.”

NBC News (2/9/25) also went with “gaunt,” as did CNN (2/9/25). But aside from common vocabulary, a recurring theme throughout media coverage of the prisoner exchanges is the sheer humanity infused into the Israeli characters: their suffering, their weepy reunions with their families, their heart-rending discoveries that certain loved ones have not survived. This same humanity is blatantly denied to Palestinians; after all, emotionally conditioning audiences to empathize with Israel’s enemies would run counter to US machinations abroad and the Orientalist media traditions that help sustain them.

Again, many of the media reports do acknowledge that quite a few released Palestinians were looking worse for the wear, had difficulty walking, or had to be transferred to hospital. But such information is not presented as “shocking” to anyone—perhaps because maltreatment and abuse of Palestinian prisoners is business as usual in Israel.

Conspicuously, the continuous invocation of the factoid that “some” released Palestinians had been convicted of killing Israelis is never accompanied by the corresponding note that “some” of the released Israelis happen to be active-duty soldiers in an army whose fundamental purpose is to kill and displace Palestinians. When individual hostages’ army service is mentioned, it is done so in a positive light—as in Kershner’s recounting of the uplifting aftermath of the January 25 release of 20-year-old soldier Daniella Gilboa: “Days later, she was singing at a party marking the discharge of the army lookouts from Beilinson Hospital near Tel Aviv.”

Weaponization of empathy

CNN‘s article (2/9/25) acknowledged that Israel “intentionally reduc[ed] food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival”—but there’s no headline about “gaunt” Palestinian captives.

To be sure, the media’s effective weaponization of empathy is crucial given that Palestinians are killed by Israelis at an astronomically higher rate than Israelis are killed by Palestinians. Any objective comparison of fatalities or consideration of history unequivocally establishes Palestinians as victims of Israeli aggression—hence the need for the US politico-media establishment’s re-education campaign.

Meanwhile, speaking of “humanity,” a Telegraph article (2/8/25) published on the Yahoo! News website quoted Israeli President Isaac Herzog as detecting a “crime against humanity” in the appearance of the three men released on Saturday, who had returned from captivity “starved, emaciated and pained.” This from a leader of a country that has just bombed an entire territory and a whole lot of its people to bits, while also utilizing starvation as a weapon of war. Starvation is furthermore par for the course in Israeli prisons; as even CNN (2/9/25) observed in one its articles on Saturday’s “pale, gaunt Israeli hostages”:

The Israeli prison system has come under fire for intentionally reducing food servings to Palestinian prisoners in what’s been described as the minimum required for survival, on the orders of then National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir last year.

It brings back memories of that time in 2006 that Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli government, offered the following rationale for restricting food imports into Gaza: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

In November 2023, the Associated Press reported that a 78-year-old female hostage released by Hamas had “said in an interview that she was initially fed well in captivity until conditions worsened and people became hungry.” In this case, the AP semi-connected the dots: “Israel has maintained a tight siege on Gaza since the war erupted, leading to shortages of food, fuel and other basic items.”

In other words, there’s no one but the Israeli government to thank for those shockingly “gaunt” faces—the Israeli ones in headlines and the Palestinians relegated to the bottom of stories. And with Israel gearing up to renew its genocidal onslaught with fanatical US encouragement, there are no doubt plenty of crimes against humanity yet to come.

An Ex-IDF Soldier Threatened a US Medical Student — the Response Highlights a Culture of Institutionalized Anti-Palestinian Racism

An MD/PhD candidate who was threatened with professional retaliation by an ex-IDF soldier working at her hospital for wearing a keffiyeh-print scrub cap offers a stark example of the institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism pervading US medical schools and its harmful effects. This firsthand account relies on ethnographic insight to unpack how systemic repression travels from hospital hallways to the dean’s office, silencing those who refuse to stay quiet about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. With medical students facing blacklisting, suspensions, and retaliation for speaking out, this piece invites readers to confront the complicity of U.S. institutions in enabling both genocide abroad and repression at home.

By Morgen A. Chalmiers

February 14, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





“I’m going to report you. I can get you fired for that,” an ex-IDF soldier threatens in the hospital hallway. The former IDF soldier now working in my hospital does not realize I am a student and cannot be fired, only expelled. The interaction began when the former soldier asked me to step outside to talk about my keffiyeh-print scrub cap.

I spent the first months of the genocide unaware of the massive campaign to silence and discipline any med student who talked about it. I was living in Amman, where I had lived for five consecutive years while completing my PhD work. In August 2024, I returned to the US to finish my rotations as an MD/PhD student.

Thankfully, living in Amman, I missed out on that crucial period of socialization in which I might have learned to be quiet about a genocide for the sake of my residency match. Instead, I spent those months sitting with my friends in Amman as their family members were killed by the dozens with bombs sent by the US.

I first became aware of the repression taking place in the US when someone sent me a link to a livestream of the December 2023 anti-semitism hearings while I was on my way to dinner with a friend. In her car, we watched top US government officials debate about whether or not the use of the word “intifada” counted as violence. I don’t remember how many of her relatives in Gaza had already been killed at that point. But Israel eventually killed them all and they did it with bombs sent by the same politicians we watched debating the meaning of a word from a language that none of them spoke.

Two thousand pound airstrikes that wipe out entire families. A debate on Arabic linguistics in the US Congress. To watch both at the same time is disorienting, like looking through a camera that hums and clacks as it struggles to find an aperture that can bring two disparate realities into focus.

The frame through which these impossibly discordant scenes can somehow be reconciled is that of the Genocide Enablement Apparatus described by Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah. He identifies repression not as a byproduct but a central component of a singular apparatus operating across distant continents and disparate scales—from the microscopic to the genocidal—as it seeks to erase symbols of Palestinian life—like a keffiyeh print scrub cap—from the workplace and the earth.

It feels absurd to dissect the mechanisms of students’ repression after witnessing 18 months of violence carried out on a genocidal scale. Yet understanding the logic through which this microscopic form of violence operates allows us to resist it more effectively and, after all, Palestinians will free Palestine. The most effective form of solidarity we can offer from the imperial core is to clean up our own dirty backyard: to trace the winding pathways through which our institutions operate to enable the US-backed genocide, articulate these causal links with precision, and demand accountability in the places where we have maximum leverage.

Institutional violence operates almost invisibly through structures of protocol and policy that displace and distribute responsibility widely across a hierarchy of individuals just doing their jobs. Violence without a clear perpetrator often disappears against the background of the everyday—the way things work.

The ex-IDF soldier demands to see my name-tag which has slipped under my sweatshirt. A nurse I’ve always worked with amicably volunteers, helpfully: “if you want to report her, call upstairs and ask the charge nurse to contact her supervisor.”

The ex-IDF soldier follows this advice. An hour later as I attempt to suture a finger laceration for the first time, hands shaking, I can hear the conversation held publicly. There is some debate about who is the appropriate supervisor to report me to.

Structures of violence that differentially distribute vulnerability to disease and early death among our patients are not upheld by bad people intending to cause harm. Violent systems are sustained by individuals just doing their job, abiding by policies that widen the distance between actions and their outcomes. Our participation in the causal chains that reproduce inequality is rarely felt as such. How many of our actions as physicians—ordering a drug test or filing a CPS report—trigger a chain of events that subjects our most vulnerable patients to additional forms of policing and criminalization? Why do we ask our undocumented patients about substance use without first asking the CBP officers holding them in custody to leave the room?

The norms of white supremacy are upheld by individuals just doing their jobs.

Later, the appropriate supervisor barges into the resident workroom where I have been waiting until I can stop crying to respond to her demand in the group chat that I come to her office (and subsequently that a resident find Morgen and relay the request).

She asks for “my side” of the story in an office shared with one of the physicians who, like the supervisor, is tasked with evaluating and grading my performance. This physician remains silent throughout the interaction.

The supervisor advises me to be more conscious of how symbols are perceived, adding that there are always “two sides” to every story. I express that I am uninterested in perceptions rooted in racism and do not care to hear the side of the story a racist has told while following through on their threat to get me punished for my scrub cap.

She confirms that a formal report is being filed, mentioning professionalism, which seems to imply that the official report will be a professionalism violation given her adamant reassurance that my scrub cap doesn’t violate policy. Her adamance suggests she is not personally opposed to my scrub cap but is just doing her job—fulfilling her duty to help the ex-IDF soldier’s concerns move towards the “higher-ups” who can determine the appropriate consequences.

I reflect on the duty of a supervisor to protect students from mistreatment and harassment and, presumably, to stand up for them when they are threatened by a racist staff member. I notice how quickly this duty disappears when a disciplinary matter demands urgent escalation. How urgently would that escalation take place if a Palestinian staff member threatened a medical student wearing an Israeli (or American) flag-print scrub cap? Would the student be encouraged to reflect on how symbols are perceived? Or, would such a threat be stopped in its tracks and escalate in reverse, materializing into a disciplinary report against the Palestinian staff member?

A kind resident tells me I don’t have to come in for my final day, correctly assuming that it will be painful to continue working with everyone who participated in and watched the slow, highly public transformation of the ex-IDF soldier’s threat into a formal disciplinary report. I use the day to write this article and send it to my lawyer at 5 AM, four hours before my shelf exam. I wonder if it will affect my “wellness grade” to admit that, against the advice of supportive attendings, I didn’t “stop thinking about it and study.” I write for hours, compelled by an urgent need to understand this microscopic encounter with institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism from the vantage point of its central target.

Driving home, a song by Amman-based Palestinian rapper Abo Ali comes on and one phrase stands out: “عطيني ميكروفون ومش رح ألجأ لانتحار (Just give me a microphone and I won’t find myself facing suicide)”. I think immediately of a student organizer who died by suicide at a university infamous for silencing those speaking about Palestine. I think of the case manager assigned to provide mental health support to medical students during the early months of “the escalating violence” while her husband cheered for genocide: “Gazans democratically elected Hamas. They fucked around. They’re about to find out.”

When it rains in Gaza, it rains in Amman. When I listen over and over and over again to the 911 call from Hind Rajab begging for help until the IDF kills her, I hear a five-year-old girl speaking in nearly the same accent as my best friend’s five-year-old daughter.

How could I expect support and understanding from a counselor married to a man eagerly anticipating the slaughter of my friends’ families? The nephew of a former Congresswoman who donates directly to the IDF and serves as a trustee at the hospital where I hope to match someday. I never made an appointment.

I have received two Fulbrights and four Critical Language grants to study in the Middle East. I have learned to speak Arabic with only a trace of an accent. And now, I am expected to silently—apologetically—take off my scrub cap and pretend I can no longer hear, in a language I have spent sixteen years learning to understand.

The pain evoked by my microscopic encounter with anti-Palestinian racism is tied to the bottomless horror, rage, and heartbreak of mourning a genocide that has not ended. I do not know the circumstances leading up to the student organizer’s suicide.

But I know that silence is death. And silence about death enables the genocide to continue. And silence about the deaths of the beautiful people we loved who were killed by Israel is not a price we should have to pay in order to ensure we match to residency.

Abo Ali continues, “ما تحملت اشوف عيونك (I couldn’t bear to meet your eyes)”. I remember my beloved colleague Dr. Yipeng Ge’s reflection that one does not need to be fearless to speak out. I imagine meeting the eyes of the people who made my life in Amman beautiful for five years, nearly every one of whom is Palestinian. Of course I am afraid. I am afraid all the time. I am afraid speaking publicly against the genocide will mean I do not match to my top—or any—residency program. But there are things that I fear more.

Every few months I encounter some new incarnation of the baseless accusations directed at students talking too loudly about Palestine. None of these has ever come to fruition as an official disciplinary charge, partly because I am not doing anything wrong, but mostly because I am white and the structures of white supremacy continue to protect those who benefit from white privilege even as we work to dismantle them at their very core. Who has the privilege to publicly narrate an encounter with institutionalized anti-Palestinian racism and expect to face an exponentially lower risk of disciplinary action and direct physical violence against her in retaliation? Women of color who publicly name forms of racialized violence often receive death threats. White women are socialized from birth to speak loudly, often obnoxiously, when we think we are right.

An encounter with the thoroughly unsurprising—the racism of an IDF soldier upheld by the faceless norms of an institution—still stings like an open wound. When the violence of repression disappears against the background of institutional norms—the way things work—what stands out is the individual. Students who have been doxxed and threatened appear not as targets of a repressive, racist campaign but as the source of the problem themselves. Shame that belongs to the institutions inventing new policies to silence, discipline, and intimidate is displaced onto the students they target. Institutional racism remains invisible while individual students appear as (and feel the shame that comes from being) the source of the problem.

To be someone who is seen as creating problems by talking too loudly about Palestine, is incredibly lonely. It’s devastating to witness the genocide taking place in Gaza and doubly devastating to witness it alone.

My dear friend Umaymah and I have talked about our sense of having something contagious, the palpable fear that having your name associated too closely with one of ours might affect your residency match. Umaymah has been suspended from Emory for a year for a brilliant interview with DemocracyNow in which she asked why an Emory physician who volunteered with an IDF combat unit in Gaza and participated in a military campaign that the ICC has deemed an attempt to exterminate an entire people—her people—was allowed to return to Emory School of Medicine and remain in a position of power and authority over Palestinian students like herself as her teacher.

Umaymah is, not coincidentally, also an MD/PhD student in the social sciences. Together we have fifteen years of training in a field that traces the pathways through which institutional violence becomes embodied as health disparities. We have harnessed its tools to do exactly what they are designed for: to identify forms of violence that continue largely because they remain invisible and, by articulating how they operate, expose them in a way that disrupts their ability to persist unchallenged because they are unseen.

There’s a kind of relief that feels like freedom in knowing that—whatever blacklists are circulating to prevent students who talk too loudly about Palestine from matching to residency—our names are already on them.

When Umaymah began to speak publicly about the genocide, there was a sense that people did not want their names appearing too close to hers because of the fear that if she goes down, they will be pulled down with her. And my response to this instinct is to publicly say as often as I can that you can glue my name to hers and try to pull us down together.


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Morgen A. Chalmiers is an MD/PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology and was recognized as an Emerging Scholar in Family Planning for her research on barriers to reproductive healthcare for resettled refugee women. Her PhD research has been funded by Fulbright and the NSF and focuses on reproductive healthcare in humanitarian settings.

 Palestinians to be Expelled from Gaza and Emigrated to Mars

by Vern Loomis / February 14th, 2025

Mr. President, are you and Elon Musk on the same page? More precisely, do you support his current decision concerning the Palestinians?

My friend Elon has ideas, not decisions. I’m the one who makes decisions. Elon is a smart guy. Some would say he’s a very smart guy. He thinks outside of the box, which is a good thing, and then he brings his idea to me. I’m the commander in chief and I decide if his idea is a good one. Elon, who is merely my assistant by the way, has lots of ideas; he’s like an idea machine. Ideas pop out of his head like toast popping out of a toaster. Some would say he makes too much toast. So, I’m the decider. I’m the one who decides if the toast gets buttered or not. Now what slice of toast are you referring to?

It’s the one about Gaza and the Palestinians, sir. Musk said the Palestinians will be emigrated to Mars.

Oh yes! That’s one of the good ones. It’s one of the best outside-of-the-box ideas that Elon has ever come up with.

But Mr. President, isn’t it a rather unorthodox, or even a dangerous idea?

No, it’s an outside-of-the-box idea. “Dangerous” is what libs say about any good idea that they haven’t thought of themselves, and by the way, they haven’t had a good idea for years. Elon’s idea, which I will supervise, solves a big problem. Look, their place is a mess; anyone can see it’s true. Gaza is an unlivable pile of rubble. When Hamas viciously attacked Israel, which, by the way, never would have happened had I been president, Israel did what any other country would have done; it dropped 2,000-pound bombs on anything that could hide a Hamas terrorist, which unfortunately was everything. So, there’s nothing left for the Palestinians; Gaza is a just dangerous pile of broken bricks and half-destroyed buildings, many of which might still hide bombs that have yet to explode. By the way, do you know we still find unexploded bombs from WWII all over the place in Europe? We find them all the time. Anyway, it’s too dangerous for them. The Palestinians aren’t equipped to safely meddle in the debris. For their own sake, they need to be moved out of Gaza while more capable hands clean up the mess and turn it into something beautiful. It will take us years, by the way, maybe even decades. That’s why we have to get the Palestinians out of the way. It’s for their own safety of course, but it’s for ours, too. One can never know when a peaceful Palestinian is going to turn into a violent terrorist. Some say it’s in their blood. Anyway, we can’t have them lurking about while our brave and patriotic workers are cleaning up the debris and erecting grand hotels and casinos. So, it will be a big job, a really big job, but when we’re finally done, it will unbelievable, it will be something so beautiful; so beautiful, the likes of which the world has never seen before. 

But to Mars, Mr. President? Is that safer than Gaza?

So, where exactly would you send them? Jordan said they can’t house many more refugees, and Egypt is reluctant to take them in. Nobody really wants them. I mean they can be a fine people if given the chance to dust themselves off, but where on Earth can they go? No one in the Middle East wants them. No one in Europe or Asia wants them. The United States certainly won’t import two million Palestinians into its borders. I mean look, I was elected to kick people out, not to let them in. Let me just say it again; for their own safety, we couldn’t let them stay in Gaza, and no country on Earth wanted to take them in. We were confronted with a dilemma, but then, just when it seemed there was no practical solution, Elon Musk’s brilliant out-of-the-box piece of toast popped up: He said, why don’t we send them to Mars?

Okay, to Mars, but how?

Well, it’s not really a new idea at all, except for using the Palestinians. Elon has been thinking about it for a long time. He’s had plans to create a big city on Mars for years. With my help, he’ll just move his timeline up a bit. Instead of 2050, we’ll aim for 2030 or maybe even sooner. We’re Americans; with God on our side, we can do whatever needs to be done. Sure, it’s complicated, but just imagine the magnificence of it: all those rockets taking off! And it won’t be from just one place either; it will take thousands upon thousands of rockets launched from different launch pads all around the world! It will be like a giant 10 or 20-day Fourth of July festival that the whole world will celebrate together. It will be an extraordinary extravaganza, the likes of which the world has never known!

It sounds like quite a send-off Mr. President, but will the Palestinians want to even go there?

Well, I don’t see why they wouldn’t. They don’t have anything here except a big pile of rubble and a neighbor who hates them. Look, here they lived on a tiny sliver of land that many say was never really theirs to begin with, and now it’s destroyed. On Mars they’ll have a whole planet to themselves, and with no rubble! There will be no Israel next door to threaten or control them, and no 2000- pound bombs falling from the sky. They’ll be free to live in peace and prosperity! So, what Palestinian in their right mind wouldn’t want to go there? I mean it’s a whole planet, for God’s sake, and it will all be theirs. They’ll have it all to themselves, at least for a very long time.

Mr. President, it’s never been done before, and with such magnitude! Mars is hardly habitable, and just getting there will be dangerous in itself.

Look, when Moses guided the children of Israel to the shores of the Red Sea, do you think it had ever been done before? Moses was chosen by God to lead them there. With Egyptians in hot pursuit, God told Moses to stretch out his hand, and then He parted the sea and even dried the mud to make the crossing easier. When the children of Israel were safely on the other side, God closed the sea back up, and His chosen people found themselves safely standing on their sacred promised land, which many say included Gaza, by the way.

But Mr. President, wasn’t that a little different? That was all on Earth, and are you saying that God’s hand is involved in this mission? Will God protect the Palestinians as they cross the vast ocean of space? And what about their safety when they finally get there?

Look, I might not be Moses, but there are many who say, many who have real conversations with God every day by the way, that I have been chosen to do God’s work and make America great again. Who’s to say they’re wrong? And you know, when that bullet whizzed past my ear in Pennsylvania, it was like a whisper from God that only I could hear. It was like He was saying, “Listen Donald, I have a little more work for you to do before I bring you up to sit beside me in Heaven.” So, while I might not be Moses, I’m here to carry out the will of God. I will lead the children of Palestine to the shores of space, and then my faithful disciple Elon will ferry them across the vastness of space to their promised land on Mars.

Wait, did I hear that right? Did you just say that Musk will actually go to Mars with the Palestinians?

Well sure, it was his idea after all. There’s no denying that I will miss him, but the Palestinians will need him more than I do. They’ll need his ideas. Elon’s the only one who will know exactly what needs to be done. He’s been studying it for years. He will be there with them, showing how to set up the space tents and all kinds of other little tricks needed for survival. It won’t all be easy, but remember this: when the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, they didn’t even have tents, yet they did survive, and just look at them now!

Elon has been so important in your second term. Can you get along without him?

Well, it won’t be the same as having him right here by my side every day at Mara Logo, but he will be leaving me with so many ideas, a lot of which I haven’t even had time to look at yet. It will take a long time to sift through all of them, so in a way, it will almost be like he’s still here. It is true though, Elon Musk has been more than just my never-leaving and ever-present assistant; he has been a dear friend. He will truly be missed. So yes, it will be tough trying to get along without him, but I will take some comfort in knowing that Elon and two million Palestinians will soon be in a better place.Reddit

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Vern Loomis lives in the Detroit area and occasionally likes to comment on news and events that interest him in whatever capacity available. Besides Dissident Voice, his other musings can be found at Transcend Media Service, ZNetwork, CounterPunch, The Humanist, and The Apathetic Agnostic. Read other articles by Vern.

Trumps nightmare for Gaza based on

longstanding Zionist hope

Wednesday 12 February 2025


Roland Rance explores the continuity between Trumps outrageous proposals for Gaza and the longterm approach of all currents of Zionism


Donald Trump’s proposal to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and turn the region into a beach resort has received near global condemnation. The objections have pointed out, correctly, that this idea is both outrageous and impractical; but they generally ignore the fact that it does not originate from Trump, but has long been a part of Zionist plans for the Middle East.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, was initially unclear whether his future Jewish state should be in Palestine or in Argentina. He confided to his diary in June 1895, regarding the indigenous inhabitants of such a state “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country”. Prior to expulsion, he proposed that “If we move into a region where there are wild animals to which the Jews are not accustomed—big snakes, etc.—I shall use the natives, prior to giving them employment in the transit countries, for the extermination of these animals.”

Under Ottoman, and from 1917 British, rule the Zionist movement evicted thousands of peasants from their lands. Yosef Weitz, director of the colonising body the Jewish National Fund and one of the architects of this policy, wrote in 1940 (again in his diary, and not intended for publication) “It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples… The only solution is Palestine, at least Western Palestine, without Arabs… The way is to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, all of them, except perhaps those from Bethlehem, Nazareth and the Old City of Jerusalem. Not one village, not one tribe should be left”.

The wars that established the state of Israel in 1947-9 created the opportunity to forcibly remove Palestinians not just from their homes, but from Palestine itself. In the course of these wars, some 750,000 Palestinians — about 80% of the total population – was “spirited across the border”, accompanied by countless massacres and atrocities. One of the most notorious of these was the July 1948 massacre in Lydd, where scores of Palestinians died after they were imprisoned in a mosque which was then shelled by an Israeli tank. About 70,000 survivors were then forced to walk through the desert towards Ramallah; hundreds died in what became known as the Lydda Death March. The officer who gave the order for these crimes was Yitzhak Rabin, later hailed by many as a hero of “liberal Zionism”.

Another Israeli unaccountably regarded as a “liberal Zionist” is historian Benny Morris, who in an interview with Haaretz in 2004 criticised Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion for not going far enough: “If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself… The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake.”

A later opportunity came in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, and expelled a further 300,000 Palestinians. Israel’s Chief of Staff responsible for this was, once again, Yitzhak Rabin.

Since 1967, Israel has expelled many hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians, while the establishment of illegal settlements has deprived very many more of their homes and land. Although associated with the so-called Zionist right, much of this activity originated with and has been carried out by people professing to be liberal or even socialist Zionists. While the open fascists, such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, publicly proclaim their desire to remove all Palestinians from Palestine, others have been quietly pursuing the same agenda while publicly dissociating themselves from the idea of forcible expulsion.

Trump’s proposal, therefore, is not as outlandish as it may at first seem. Much of the ground for this has been established over the past 77 years of dispossession and expulsion. Any attempt to implement it will meet with mass Palestinian resistance, which will be supported by consistent anti imperialists in Israel – but it seems unlikely that a significant number of Israeli Jews would take any steps to prevent this further crime against humanity.

We insist that if Palestinians in Gaza are to be resettled, it should be to their former homes, towns and villages in Palestine, from which they have been excluded for many decades.

AntiCapitalist Resistance. 9 February 2025

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Trump Didn’t Invent the Gaza Ethnic Cleansing Plan

It's been US policy since 2007

by Jonathan Cook / February 15th, 2025

Trump’s innovation is not the threat to ‘clean out’ Gaza. It is dropping a long-standing aim to dress up Palestinian expulsion as a peace plan

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention from day one of his “revenge” attack on Gaza, launched 16 months ago, was either ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza.

His ally in genocide for the next 15 months was former US President Joe Biden. His ally in ethnic cleansing is current US President Donald Trump.

Biden provided the 2,000lb bombs for the genocide. Trump is reportedly providing an even larger munition – the 11-ton MOAB, or massive ordnance air blast bomb, with a mile-wide radius – to further incentivise the population’s exodus.

Biden claimed that Israel was helping the people of Gaza by “carpet bombing” the enclave – in his words – to “eradicate” Hamas. Trump claims he is helping the people of Gaza by “cleaning them out” – in his words – from the resulting “demolition site”.

Biden called the destruction of 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings “self defence”. Trump calls the imminent destruction of the remaining 30 percent “all hell breaking loose”.

Biden claimed to be “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” while encouraging Israel to continue the murder of children month after month.

Trump claims to have negotiated a ceasefire, even as he has turned a blind eye to Israel violating the terms of that ceasefire: by continuing to fire on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by refusing entry into Gaza of vital aid trucks; by allowing in almost none of the promised tents or mobile homes; by denying many hundreds of maimed Palestinians treatment abroad; by blocking the return of Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza; and by failing to engage with the second phase of the ceasefire negotiations.

Those Israeli violations, although widely reported by the media as Hamas “claims”, were confirmed to the New York Times by three Israeli officials and two mediators.

In other words, Israel has broken the agreement on every count – and Trump has stood foursquare behind this most favoured client state every bit as much as Biden did before him.

‘Hell breaking loose’

As Israel knew only too well in breaching the ceasefire, Hamas only ever had one point of leverage to try to enforce the agreement: to refuse to release more hostages. Which is precisely what the Palestinian group announced last Monday it would do until Israel began honouring the agreement.

In a familiar double act, Israel and Washington then put on a show of mock outrage.

Trump lost no time escalating the stakes dramatically. He gave Israel – or maybe the US, he was unclear – the green light to “let hell break out”, presumably meaning the resumption of the genocide.

This will happen not only if Hamas refuses to free the three scheduled hostages by the deadline of noon this Saturday. Trump has insisted that Hamas is now expected to release all of the hostages.

The US president said he would no longer accept “dribs and drabs” being released over the course of the six-week, first phase of the ceasefire. In other words, Trump is violating the very terms of the initial ceasefire his own team negotiated.

Clearly, neither Netanyahu nor Trump have been trying to save the agreement. They are working tirelessly to blow it up.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported as much last weekend. Israeli sources revealed that Netanyahu’s goal was to “derail” the ceasefire before it could reach the second stage when Israeli troops are supposed to fully withdraw from the enclave and reconstruction begin.

“Once Hamas realizes there won’t be a second stage, they may not complete the first,” a source told the paper.

Hamas insisted on a gradual release of hostages precisely to buy time, knowing that Israel would be keen to restart the slaughter as soon as it got the hostages home.

The Palestinians of Gaza are back to square one.

Either accept that they will be ethnically cleansed so that Trump and his billionaire friends can cash in on reinventing the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East”, paid for by stealing the revenues from Gaza’s gas fields, or face a return to the genocide.

Quiet part out loud

As should have been clear, Netanyahu only agreed to Washington’s “ceasefire” because it was never real. It was a pause so the US could recalibrate from a Biden genocide narrative rooted in the language of “humanitarianism” and “security” to Trump’s far more straightforward tough-guy act.

Now it’s all about the “art of the deal” and real-estate development opportunities.

But of course Trump’s plan to “own” Gaza and then “clean it out” has left his allies in Europe – in truth, his satraps – squirming in their seats.

As ever, Trump has a disturbing habit of saying the quiet part out loud. Of tearing away the already-battered veneer of western respectability. Of making everyone look bad.

The truth is that over 15 months Israel failed to achieve either of its stated objectives in Gaza – eradicating Hamas and securing the return of the hostages – because neither was ever really the goal.

Even Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had to concede that Israel’s mass slaughter had served only to recruit as many fighters to Hamas as it had killed.

And Israeli military whistleblowers revealed to the website +972 last week that Israel had killed many of its hostages by using indiscriminate US-supplied bunker-buster bombs.

These bombs had not only generated huge blast areas but also served effectively as chemical weapons, flooding Hamas’ tunnels with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating the hostages.

The indifference of the Israeli leadership to the hostages’ fate was confirmed by Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in an interview with Israeli TV Channel 12.

He admitted that the army had invoked the so-called Hannibal directive during Hamas’ breakout of Gaza on 7 October 2023, allowing soldiers to kill Israelis rather than risk letting them be taken hostage by the Palestinian group.

These matters, which throw a different light on Israel’s actions in Gaza, have, of course, been almost completely blanked out by the western establishment media.

Damage limitation

Israel’s plan from the outset was the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And now Trump is making that explicit.

So explicit, in fact, that the media have been forced to go into frenzied damage-limitation mode, employing one of the most intense psy-ops against their own publics on record.

Every euphemism under the sun has been resorted to to avoid making clear that Trump and Israel are preparing to ethnically cleanse whoever’s left of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

The BBC speaks of “resettling“, “relocating” and “moving away” the population of Gaza.

In other reports, Palestinians are inexplicably on the brink of “leaving”.

The New York Times refers to ethnic cleansing positively as Trump’s “development plan”, while Reuters indifferently calls it “moving out” Gaza’s population.

Western capitals and their compliant media have been put in this uncomfortable position because Washington’s client states in the Middle East have refused to play ball with Israel and Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan.

Despite the ever-mounting slaughter, Egypt has refused to open its short border with Gaza to let the bombed, starved population pour into neighbouring Sinai.

There was, of course, never any question of Israel being expected to allow Gaza’s families to return to the lands from which they were originally expelled, at gunpoint, in 1948 in order to create a self-declared Jewish state.

Then, as now, the western powers colluded in Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations. This is the historical context western media prefer to gloss over – even on the rare occasions when they concede that there is any relevant background other than a presumed Palestinian barbarism. Instead the media resort to evasive terminology about “cycles of violence” and “historic enmities”.

Backed into a corner by Trump’s outbursts of the past few days, western politicians and the media have preferred to suggest that his administration’s “development plan” for Gaza is actually an innovation.

In truth, however, the president isn’t advancing anything new in demanding that Gaza’s Palestinians be ethnically cleansed. What’s different is that he is being unusually – and inadvisably – open about a long-standing policy.

Israel has always harboured plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and from the West Bank to Jordan.

But more to the point, as was noted by Middle East Eye a decade ago, Washington has been fully on board with the Gaza half of the expulsion project since the latter stages of George W Bush’s second presidency, in 2007. For anyone struggling with maths, that was 18 years ago.

Every US president, including Barack Obama, has leant on Egypt’s leader of the time to allow Israel to drive Gaza’s population into Sinai – and each one has been rebuffed.

Open secret

This open secret is not widely known for exactly the same reason that every western pundit and politician is now pretending to be appalled that Trump is actually advancing it.

Why? Because it looks bad – all the more so couched in Trump’s vulgar real-estate sales pitch in the middle of a supposed ceasefire.

Western leaders had hoped to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with more decorum – in a “humanitarian” way that would have been more effective in duping western publics and maintaining the West’s claim to be upholding civilised values against a supposed Palestinian barbarity.

Since 2007 Washington and Israel’s joint ethnic cleansing project has been known as the “Greater Gaza Plan.”

Israel’s siege of the tiny enclave, which began in late 2006, was designed to create so much misery and poverty that the people there would clamour to be allowed out.

This was when Israel began formulating a so-called “starvation diet” for the people of Gaza, counting the calories to keep them alive but only barely.

Israel’s conception of Gaza was that it was like a tube of toothpaste that could be squeezed. As soon as Egypt relented and opened the border, the population would flood into Sinai out of desperation.

Every Egyptian president was bullied and bribed to give in: Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. They all refused.

Egypt was under no illusions about what was at stake after 7 October 2023. It fully understood that Israel’s levelling of Gaza was designed to squeeze the tube so hard the top would be forced off.

Pressure on Egypt

From the outset, officials like mage limitation Israel’s former national security adviser, stated publicly that the goal was to make Gaza “a place where no human being can exist”.

Just a week into Israel’s slaughter, in October 2023, military spokesperson Amir Avivi told the BBC that Israel could not ensure the safety of civilians in Gaza. He added: “They need to move south, out to the Sinai Peninsula.”

The next day, Danny Ayalon, a Netanyahu confidant and former Israeli ambassador to the US, amplified the point: “There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert… We and the international community will prepare the infrastructure for tent cities.”

He concluded: “Egypt will have to play ball.”

Israel’s thinking was divulged in a leaked policy draft from its intelligence ministry. It proposed that, after their expulsion, Gaza’s population would initially be housed in tent cities, before permanent communities could be built in the north of Sinai.

At the same time, the Financial Times reported that Netanyahu was lobbying the European Union on the idea of driving the enclave’s Palestinians into Sinai under cover of war.

Some EU members, including the Czech Republic and Austria, were said to have been receptive and floated the idea at a meeting of member states. An unnamed European diplomat told the FT: “Now is the time to put increased pressure on the Egyptians to agree.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration supplied the bombs to maintain the pressure.

Sisi was only too aware of what Egypt was up against: a concerted western plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. None of it had anything to do with Trump, who was more than a year away from being elected president.

In mid-October 2023, days into the slaughter, Sisi responded in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted.”

That was precisely why he dedicated so much effort to shoring up the short border shared between Gaza and Sinai both before and after Israel’s genocide began.

Peace sales pitch

Part of what makes Trump’s sales pitch so surreal is that he is half-heartedly sticking to the original script: trying to make the plan sound vaguely humanitarian.

At the same time as re-arming Israel and warning of “all hell breaking loose”, he has spoken of finding “parcels of land” in Egypt and Jordan where the people of Gaza “can live very happily and very safely”.

He has contrasted that with their current plight: “They are being killed there at levels that nobody’s ever seen. No place in the world is as dangerous as the Gaza Strip… They are living in hell.”

That seems to be Trump’s all-too-revealing way of describing the genocide Israel denies it is carrying out and the one the US denies it is arming.

But the talk of helping Gaza’s population is just the rhetorical leftovers from the old sales pitch when previous US administrations were preparing to sell ethnic cleansing as integral to a new stage of the fabled “peace process”.

As Middle East Eye noted back in 2015, Washington had been recruited to the Greater Gaza Plan in 2007. Then the proposal was that Egypt would give 1,600 sq km area in Sinai – five times the size of Gaza – to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinians from Gaza would be “encouraged” – that is, pressured through the siege and aid blockade, as well as intermittent episodes of carpet bombing known as “mowing the lawn”– to flee there.

In return, Abbas would have to forgo a Palestinian state in historic Palestine, undermine the right of return of Palestinian refugees enshrined in international law, and pass the burden of responsibility for repressing the Palestinians on to Egypt and the wider Arab world.

Israel advanced the Sinai plan between 2007 and 2018 in the hope of sabotaging Abbas’ campaign at the United Nations seeking recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Notably, Israel’s large-scale military assaults on Gaza – in the winter of 2008, 2012 and again in 2014 – coincided with reported Israeli and US efforts to turn the screws on successive Egyptian leaders to concede parts of Sinai.

‘Waterfront property’

Trump is already deeply familiar with the Greater Gaza Plan from his first presidency. Reports from 2018 suggest he hoped to include it in his “deal of the century” plan to bring about normalisation between Israel and the Arab world.

In March that year the White House hosted 19 countries in a conference to consider new ideas for dealing with Gaza’s mounting, entirely Israeli-made crisis.

As well as Israel, the participants included representatives from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The Palestinians boycotted the meeting.

A few months later, in the summer of 2018, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of his Middle East plan, visited Egypt. A short time later Hamas sent a delegation to Cairo to learn about what was being proposed.

Then, as seemingly now, Trump was offering a purpose-built zone in Sinai with solar-power grid, desalination plant, seaport and airport, as well as a free trade zone with five industrial areas, financed by the oil-rich Gulf states.

Revealingly, a veteran Israeli journalist, Ron Ben-Yishai, reported at the time that Israel was threatening to invade and bisect Gaza into separate northern and southern sectors to force Hamas’ compliance. That is exactly the strategy Israel prioritised last year during its invasion and then set about emptying north Gaza of its residents.

Trump also sought to deepen the crisis in Gaza by withholding payments to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). That same policy was actively pursued by Israel and the Biden administration during the current genocide.

Since Trump took office, Israel has banned UNRWA activities anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Trump’s team revived their own interest in the ethnic cleansing plan the moment Israel launched its genocide – long before Trump knew whether he would win the November 2024 election.

In March last year, nearly a year ago, Kushner used exactly the same language Trump does now. He observed that “there’s not much of Gaza left at this point”, that the priority was to “clean it up”, and that it was a “valuable waterfront property”. He insisted the people of Gaza would have to be “moved out”.

Rabbit in the headlights

If Trump refuses to relent, the direction things head next for the people of Gaza hangs chiefly on neighbouring Egypt and Jordan: they must either accept the ethnic cleansing plan, or Israel will resume the extermination of Gaza’s population.

Should they demur, Trump has threatened to cut US aid – effectively decades-old bribes to each not to come to the Palestinians’ aid while Israel brutalises them.

King Abdullah of Jordan, during a visit to the White House this week, looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

He dared not anger Trump by rejecting the plan to his face. Instead he suggested waiting to see how Egypt – a larger, more powerful Arab state – responded.

But privately, as MEE has reported, Abdullah is so fearful of the destabilising effects of Jordan colluding in Gaza’s ethnic cleansing – which he regards as an “existential issue” for his regime – that he is threatening war on Israel to stop it.

Similarly, Egypt has shown its displeasure. In the wake of Abdullah’s humiliating visit, Sisi has reportedly postponed his own meeting next week with Trump – in a clear rebuff – until the ethnic cleansing plan is off the table.

Cairo is said to be preparing its own proposal for how Gaza can be reconstructed. Even Washington’s oil-rich ally Saudi Arabia is in revolt.

It is rare to see Arab states show so much backbone to any US president, let alone one as vain and strategically unhinged as Trump.

Which may explain why the US president’s resolve appears to be weakening. On Wednesday his press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that Trump was now seeking from “our Arab partners in the region” a counter-proposal, a “peace plan to present to the president”.

And in another sign that Trump may be hesitating, Netanyahu walked back his threat to resume the genocide unless all the hostages were freed on Saturday. He is now demanding only the three that were originally scheduled.

Reports from Gaza are that Israel has also significantly stepped up its aid deliveries.

All of which is welcome news. It may buy the people of Gaza a little more time.

But we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. Israel and the US are still committed to “cleaning out” Gaza, one way or another, as they have been for the past 18 years. They are simply looking for a more propitious moment to resume.

That could be this weekend, or it could be in a month or two. But at least Biden and Trump have achieved one thing. They have made sure no one can ever again mistake the crushing of Gaza for a peace plan.Email

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.