If Trump executes his plans, it’s because the media helped pave the way. It’s beyond time for more of my colleagues to speak up.
Trump’s Gaza remarks are no surprise: ethnic cleansing was always the plan.
“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 2.1 million 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. 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”. 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.”
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. 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.
Rawr
Article URL : https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/05/trump-gaza-ethnic-cleansing