By Marcel Rajecky
With the ceasefire in Gaza barely a week old, Trump called for the ethnic cleansing of the territory.
He told reporters: ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: “You know, it’s over.”’
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister and far-right icon, called the proposals ‘an excellent idea’, while Hamas naturally rejected the suggestion. Jordan has also stated that it will not be part of such an operation.
Nevertheless, despite the diplomatic and practical obstacles to conducting the biggest ethnic cleansing campaign since WW2, Israel is pressing inexorably on with its objective, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
As well as killing tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of civilians, Israel’s war in Gaza took the form of a systematic destruction of the means of existence of a people. Virtually educational, medical, and government facility has been levelled along with hundreds of thousands of housing units. The territory’s water and sewage treatment, energy and transport infrastucture have been flattened.
With hundreds of thousands of civilians living without shelter, healthcare or sanitation, the occupation forces have instructed Unrwa to cease operations by 30 January. This is a certain death sentence for thousands, as no organisation has the capacity to deliver aid on the necessary scale.
Trump’s intentions, in line with both Israeli and American policy for decades, is to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land and pave the way for a greater Israel.
In his first term, Trump formulated the ‘deal of the century, which would have seen Palestinians removed from areas like the Jordan Valley, and the environs of the major Zionist West Bank settlements.
There is no question that Palestinians removed from Gaza would never be allowed to return. Palestinians, who were were kicked out of their homes in 1948, 1967 and continuously since then, already constitute the largest refugee population in the world. The global solidarity movement must resist a new Nakba.
