In this forceful opinion piece, Fathom editor Jack Omer-Jackaman argues for rejecting and opposing President Trump’s ‘Gaza plan’ as an unvarnished attempt at ethnic cleansing and dispossession and as a further example of the widespread dehumanisation of Palestinians.
Not surprised, but still astonished
Even after a decade in which he has so degraded American democracy, so violated international norms, and so offended elementary moral decency, Donald Trump retains the power to shock. A fictional former President, of exactly opposite intelligence and decency, once asked whether it was possible to be both astonished and not surprised at the same time. Trump proves it, regularly. Just when you think you are suitably inured to his ice-hearted callousness and Twilight Zone unreason – that you understand the nature of the beast even if you are powerless to do much about it – he still manages to stop you dead in your tracks.
We all already knew that he was a treasonous tyrant-fetishist who had effectively had the US switch sides in the battle for a free Europe; and yet the grotesque sight of his and Vance’s double-team act of intimidation and extortion of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on 28 February still left me physically shaking and close to tears.
Shock was also the mot juste with Trump’s announcement in early February that the US intended to assume ownership of Gaza, forcibly transfer the population to some to-be-determined ‘beautiful’ locale, and renovate the scorched Strip for the benefit of all mankind (and, in unspoken parentheses, to the profit of Jared and the boys). The attendant press pack made no effort to conceal their amazement, while the face of Trump’s own clearly unprepared Chief of Staff was an absolute picture. (This supine in-house embarrassment would find an echo with Marco Rubio, sinking ever deeper into the sofa during the Zelenskyy ambush).
Why it must be taken seriously
It is said by many that if we are to remain sane in the era of Trump 2.0, we should not swing at every pitch he chucks out. It is said by others that what emerges from so chaotic and quixotic a mind is best to be taken seriously but not necessarily literally. (It was Salena Zito of The Atlantic who, way back in 2016, offered the observation that ‘the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’) It is said by still others that this particular piece of madness was in fact a cunning attempt to force the reluctant Arab world to take some ownership of the question of post-war Gaza.
I subscribe to none of these exercises in self-reassurance. Part of the resistance to American fascism consists of the daily task of reaffirming truth and decency when they are assailed – and daily assailed they certainly are. Nor do I think we have the luxury of declining to take Trump at face value, nor of crediting him with such diplomatic subtlety. You think he would reverse decades of western alliance consensus, side with an imperialist thug in Moscow, and dismember Ukraine; but he wouldn’t do this? He has made quite clear that a rights-based international order is not only of no interest to him, it is an entirely foreign concept. A purely transactional character, Trump cares only for the deal; the blag; the grift – what’s a bit of ethnic cleansing and the infliction of further misery on millions when there’s golf to be played and tasteless hotels to be built?
Like all sadists and bullies, Trump also can’t resist the opportunity to exploit his victim when he judges them to be at their most fatally vulnerable. ‘You don’t have the cards,’ he scolded Zelenskyy. Well, Gazans, never blessed by luck, have been holding a guaranteed losing hand these last 16 months. (The Saudis may be squirrelling away a Royal Flush in their pocket, but whether they consider now a sufficiently rewarding time to deploy it remains to be seen.)
No, I think we must assume that Trump and his toadies and courtiers mean it. (And unlike in his first term, when he was surrounded by some who retained at least a trace memory of independence of mind, this time around there are only toadies and courtiers.) He means to pilfer the Strip and expel its residents. He made this perfectly clear in the days after the announcement, when offered the opportunity to recant or clarify. American ownership would be permanent, he assured us. Meanwhile, asked by Fox News if Gazans would be allowed to return, he replied ‘no, they wouldn’t… I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.’ [my emphasis]
More recently came his sincere sharing of an apparently satirically-intended fever dream AI video in which he and Bibi sunbathe together on a Gazan beach, while golden effigies of the great man are worshipped by (presumably imported) children. Time now to add the gawdy self-idolatry of Ceaușescu and Enver Hoxha to Trump’s list of strongman fetishes.
The practical obstacles to fulfilling this madness are hardly reassuring either. It is certainly true that no major Arab nation would acquiesce to homing their share of 2.1 million Gazans. The charitable interpretation of such a guaranteed refusal is that they don’t wish to rubber-stamp further irreversible Palestinian dispossession; the semi-charitable that they don’t wish to import external radicalism when they are preoccupied enough with the internal; the uncharitable that they don’t much care for the Palestinians.
But again, I’m not much mollified by this. Recall that among Trump’s previous ‘bold’ proposals was the rehoming of Palestinian refugees well beyond the region, in any willing members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation as could be coerced. Is it beyond the man to extort Chad or Mauritania – even Albania – to pitch in? Uganda qualifies, so perhaps that which was rejected by the Seventh Zionist Congress could be imposed upon the seemingly choiceless Gazans.
To be complacent about Trump’s Gaza announcement, then, is to fall into the trap of assuming that unserious people cannot accomplish hideously serious things – a luxury we cannot afford in this Midnight of the Century. It is the responsibility of anyone with a voice in the discussion, therefore, to oppose it loudly and with vigour.
Thus, we are reduced to needing to articulate, out loud, that which in previous, saner eras would have been taken for granted. To whit: forcible transfer of a population for the benefit of others is ethnic cleansing; and Gaza is for Palestinians, much as Ukraine is for Ukrainians, in perpetuity, and no matter whether a cabal of American fascists and disaster capitalists say otherwise. It is not American, and it is not Israeli. Nor is it Jordanian or Egyptian, contrary to some other suggestions. It is Palestinian.
I am not remotely interested in a discussion of by what historic or biblical right Gaza is Palestinian: it is Palestinian because its population of over 2 million is exclusively Palestinian, and because for decades the international community, recognising that there are two national groups with legitimate claims in historic Palestine, has affirmed, ad nauseum, that the 22 per cent comprising Gaza and the West Bank is Palestinian by right.
Scholarly Ethnic Cleansing
The other flaw in opting not to take the plan seriously is that a great many other people very much are taking it seriously. Bibi Netanyahu certainly is: Trump’s is a ‘revolutionary and creative’ plan to which the Israeli prime minister is ‘committed’. And the openly-ethnic-cleansing Israeli far-right, which has been pushing the chilling euphemism of ‘voluntary emigration’ almost from day one of the war, is practically giddy.
The response from the Israeli centre and left was mixed. Leader of the Opposition Yair Lapid praised Trump’s comments before offering his own version which at least dwelt in the region of sanity. Labor leader Yair Golan stumbled a little at first before offering a commendably firm refutation. Not for the first time, the most sensible comments from among the ranks of Knesset members came from Mansour Abbas. The scheme was ‘old Kahanist thinking that normalises what is unacceptable,’ said the Ra’am leader. ‘It is impossible to carry out a transfer without committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.’ Quite.
The right-wing commentariat, too, is horribly emboldened. Even if nothing ultimately comes of the plan, what it has unquestionably done is to further normalise that which was already disgracefully normalised in far, far too many Israeli and pro-Israeli circles: the logic of expulsion; the cold shrugs at (at best) or outright celebration of (at worst) mass death and suffering; and the utter dehumanisation of Palestinians. Evidence of this emboldening has been provided, to anyone on social media, by the sight of invective flowing at an even higher than usual rate from those who have lost both mind and conscience.
More worryingly and more disgracefully still, by writers seeking to give ethnic cleansing a scholarly gloss. In an essay charmingly entitled ‘Their Time is Up’ (the ‘their’ being Gazans), Tablet’s editor-at-large Liel Leibovitz positively salivated over the opportunity provided by the Trump plan to be done, once and for all, with ‘the specimens who live in Gaza’. The ascents of American fascism and its Ben Gvirist Israeli cousin have made just this kind of appallingly dehumanising language permissible. This is, after all, what fascism excels at: the shifting of the Overton window – slowly, a day at a time – to the point that language that a short time ago would have prompted shock is now met by many with a shrug.
Leibovitz is but one of the more prominent ‘no innocents in Gaza’ brigade who have so debased the field these last 16 hellish months and is joined, online, by countless more, including many erstwhile ‘liberals’. He is charitable enough to allow that ‘there are certainly some somewhere in the strip, the very young and the very frail included, who neither partook in nor condone the atrocities of the past 18 months’. But lest his friends worry he has gone all soppy, he then avers that ‘they should no more redeem Gaza’s genocidal enterprise than the hypothetical 10 good men of Sodom and Gomorrah could the cities of the plain.’ We all know what happened to them, of course, and what sulphur and fire has not totally accomplished in Gaza, Leibovitz would have Trump finish.
A shame, of course, to be deprived further death, given that Trumpian ethnic cleansing is ‘more merciful than any Gazan deserves’. Seize the moment, demands Leibovitz:
Now, an American president possessing uncommon moral clarity and candor is advocating for the opening of the gates of hell… Israel, then, must annex Judea and Samaria right now, if only to appear as certain of its right to its ancestral homeland as, say, Sen. Tom Cotton. It must enthusiastically advocate for Trump’s plan, or some other arrangement that leaves Gaza empty of Gazans.
Also in Tablet, Tulane Professor Brian Horowitz preferred the rather more slippery approach of stopping short of advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza explicitly but allowing the population transfer expert and Jabotinskian Revisionist Joseph Schechtman to do so from beyond the grave.
Horowitz is perfectly right that in Schechtman’s day population transfer was not only permissible but rather de rigeur – especially in a Europe in which multi-ethnic or multi-confessional states often formed after the collapse of empires seemed, not always unreasonably, to be a recipe for wholesale slaughter. I have some sympathy for the notion that the Nakba can be considered – though its effects not excused – in the context of then-prevailing norms. But such norms certainly no longer prevail, any more than other antediluvian concepts once considered solid common sense. Perhaps Horowitz concludes that since western fascism is chic once more, other relics of the early-to-middle 20th century are also due a comeback.
He certainly sees no reason why, Article 49 of the Geneva Convention notwithstanding, transfer should not be rehabilitated. Perhaps he agrees with Leibovitz that we ought to say ‘enough with the sophistry about international laws and human rights’. (Enough, in other words, with the paradigms, such as the sacrosanctity of civilians, which best establish Hamas as an unspeakable evil.) Citing Schechtman, Horovitz says – and please note his use of the present tense – ‘in other words, in places where peace cannot be achieved otherwise, reducing sizable national minorities can be defended as “a higher aim.”’ Orwell would have had a word or two for the obscuring of inevitable human suffering by such seemingly benign euphemisms.
There are any number of problems with this logic, but it can be dispensed with by reference only to one: namely that Gazans are not a ‘minority’ in Gaza, but a totality. Only if one considers Israel entitled to the territory river-to-sea could Horowitz’s logic apply; even then it collapses, since Palestinians are not a minority in the territory river-to-sea either! Which is it – a logical error or an affirmation of Israeli maximalism?
Horowitz cannot help but do at least some shilling in his own voice for the Trump plan itself. ‘Due to ineffective governments, the chance to exact vengeance, and opportunity to take someone else’s belongings,’ he tells us, ‘transfer is usually accompanied by tremendous suffering.’ Usually? When has transfer (another euphemism, putting one in mind of connecting smoothly with a plane flight rather than brutal expulsion) not been attended by mass casualties and suffering? One might also have thought that Horowitz’s unholy trinity of motivations rather aptly characterised the pro-expulsionists in Israel. Not to worry though, for Horowitz assures us that ‘to be sure, none of this bears any resemblance to what is currently under discussion for Gazans, who, despite repeatedly launching and losing wars against their more powerful neighbor, are being presented with an American offer to rebuild their lives elsewhere.’
‘Voluntary’ Emigration
In conversation with some Israeli friends, I have been challenged to affirm that I would respect the wishes of those Gazans whose stated desire is leave the Strip. The short answer is ‘of course’: those who wish to leave should be able to, and countries should be forced to respect their own treaty obligations in accepting them.
Nonetheless, it needs stressing that the ‘voluntary’ in this case ought to be placed in about a million imagined scare quotes. If someone’s home and environment has been levelled and any prospect of subsistence or livelihood shattered, then leaving it can’t really be considered ‘voluntary’ in the sense anyone like myself would ever have to contemplate. Someone taking a look at the apocalyptic devastation around them and concluding, almost certainly with profound heartbreak, that for the benefit of them and what remains of their family they should leave, has been rather forced into that position, no?
And so, even in these cases, justice commands that it ought not to be an uncomplicated ‘stay or go’ binary, but rather ‘would you wish Gaza to remain your home in the event it is rehabilitated?’ If yes, then those people ought to be perfectly entitled to refuge elsewhere while that rehabilitation occurs, and to receive guarantees of their return and associated property rights post-rehabilitation. It is, frankly, the very least that ought to be done. Needless to say, Trump’s promises that the US will ‘own’ Gaza and that relocation is ‘permanent’ rule out such a scenario.
So, too, does the reasoning of Bezalel Smotrich, the liege of the occupied West Bank and the Israeli coalition’s racist-in-chief (his even worse confrère Ben Gvir now having decamped). For Smotrich, justifying permanent dispossession is easy, since Gazans have no moral right to their homes there anyway. How can they when they think their real homes are in Haifa, Tiberias, Acre, Jaffa? So a first wrenching exile justifies a second. And then why not more? Why not chase them to the ends of the earth? It’s tortuous logic and worse morality, but we expect nothing less.
A final point
Amid all the awfulness of the speech in which Trump announced his scheme, it should be noted he also spoke the most lucid words I’ve ever heard from him. ‘I think that Gaza is a demolition site right now,’ he said. ‘… There’s hardly a building standing and the ones that are going to collapse. You can’t live in Gaza right now… It’s all death in Gaza.’ It takes a special kind of sick mind to look at that level of abject human misery and see dollar signs and good golfing for you and your scumbag pals, but credit for verisimilitude where it’s due.
Trump had this moment of truthfulness while one of the architects of all that death and destruction sat next to him, grinning awkwardly. (There are co-architects, for sure, but neither the Ayatollah nor the late and unlamented Yahya Sinwar were sat at the orange one’s right hand.) It was a hideous sight, but at least now any lingering pretence at the ‘surgical’ or ‘precise’ nature of the war – still being trotted out, in defiance of the evidence of our own eyes – can be dispensed with. The Strip has been destroyed, by the inarticulate brutality of these small and terrible men. It is the responsibility of regional powers and the international community to rehabilitate it. For Gazans.
There is much that remains up in the air, to which this article pretends no answer: will Hamas be fully defeated? How will the people of Gaza, injured beyond belief, be provided for during its rehabilitation? Who is to take responsibility for that rehabilitation? How is Israeli security to be provided for? But in this post-truth, seemingly post-reality, age, let’s begin with some elementary truths, shall we. Up is up, down is down, ethnic cleansing is ethnic cleansing, and not a humanitarian gesture. And Gaza is Palestinian.
