Trump Aims to Erase Palestine By Barry Sheppard and Malik Miah
With a smiling Benjamin Netanyahu at his side, Trump announced the Palestinians in Gaza would be displaced (ethnic cleansing), and then the U.S. would take over Gaza and turn the Strip into a beachfront Riviera on the Mediterranean Sea.
Israeli government officials took turns praising Trump. Opponents of Netanyahu have also expressed openness to Trump’s plan — something once only advocated by the far right.
Trump said that the Palestinians would willingly leave Gaza to be dispersed in surrounding Arab countries (mainly Egypt, although he didn’t name it, but did so in other statements), something the Palestinians as well as Egypt reject.
Trump has stuck to his plan in the face of domestic and international criticism, which Trump doesn’t care about. He also dismisses international agreements against the displacement of peoples out of their countries, and international “laws” (which cannot be enforced anyway).
An article in the New York Times of February 7 points out that Trump’s plan “is the latest example of how government officials on the right in both the United States and Israel now speak publicly about a shared goal: the takeover of Palestinian land.”
According to the Times, Itamar Rabinovich, former Israeli ambassador to Washington said, “It’s the most rightwing government we’ve ever had in Israel — and there never was a U.S. administration that shared these views to this extent.”
The fig leaf “two state” proposal that had been supported by the U.S. for decades, but never got off the ground, has been relegated to “the dust bin of history” by Trump.
Trump’s proposal has shaken up the Arab countries. Hours after Trump spoke, Saudi Arabia said that there would be no accord with Israel, since it remains firm that a precondition is Palestinian statehood.
To understand what Trump means when he says the Palestinians would willingly be displaced, we should recall another statement Trump recently made, that “Israel should finish the job in Gaza.”
Taken together with his new statement, what Trump means is that the U.S. will give 100 percent backing to Israel to use any means to intensify its genocide and physical destruction of Gaza when it’s war resumes, to the extent that remaining Palestinians will have no choice but to leave.
We have seen Israel beginning to use starvation as one of its means, but to back off when the U.S thought that was going too far, but now this will be resumed, and humanitarian food and other aid to Gazans will be restricted or eliminated if Israel so deems, in the full knowledge that it will be backed by the U.S.
Already, the administration’s drastic downsizing of the United States Agency for International Development means the cutoff of food, tents, and medical treatments for Palestinians the U.S. has been giving.
When Gazans have been so pulverized they have no choice but to leave, this will put pressure on Egypt to accept them, and the U.S. will use whatever means it deems necessary, from cutting off economic aid, sanctions, etc. to force Egypt to do so.
Palestinians make their way after Israeli forces withdrew from the Netzarim Corridor, allowing people to travel in both directions between southern and northern Gaza, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, near Gaza City, February 9, 2025. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Trump is also working with Israel to accomplish the same thing in the West Bank, with Jordan the country into which Palestinians will be dispersed. Like Egypt, Jordan rejects this.
The Times article has a subhead title, “Israel and the U.S. Talk of Annexing West Bank”. Trump said he would make an announcement about this in the next weeks. There is little doubt that Trump would recognize Israel annexation.
His administration has ordered all government documents and statements to expunge any reference to the “West Bank” and “occupied territories,” and to refer to the area as “Judea and Samaria”, the Biblical terms Israel uses.
He also reversed (toothless) sanctions Biden put on West Bank Israeli settlers who have used violence to terrorize Palestinians, and seized their land.
A few years ago the Israeli Knesset adopted a law that said that in all of “Eretz Israel”, meaning Biblical Israel, only Israeli Jews have the right to self determination. Trump officials echo this definition of the “land of Israel”. It is vague what it includes today, but it at least includes the land the present state of Israel rules, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Genesis, the first book of the Bible, says that God gave the land between the Euphrates River and the Nile to the Jewish people.
Israel itself has never recognized any border, not the “Green Line”, and not the borders Israel today rules over. The Syrian Golan Heights has already been annexed to Israel and a part of Lebanon may be included.
Today, the annexation of what is now called Judea and Samaria is on the agenda. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Elise Stafanik says that Judea and Samaria are a Biblical part of Israel.
Annexation of the area, whether de facto (in practice) or de jour (in law), will allow Israel to intensify its confiscation of Palestinian land, snd greatly increase its military campaign there, with the aim of making life for Palestinians here also, like in Gaza, so miserable that they will “willingly” leave into Jordan.
These are the plans of the Trump and Israeli governments. The only way they can be stopped is by mass resistance.
First of all, by the Palestinians. The temporary cease-fire in Gaza revealed that Hamas, which organizes the resistance there, is very much alive, as the videos of young Hamas fighters controlling streets has shown. This is another example of when a whole people is attacked, “killing of one fighter causes two more to join” as the saying goes.
The sections of the U.S. mainstream media has reluctantly recognized that Hamas remains the only government in Gaza.
The same fact of continued resistance is true of Hezbollah in Lebanon. Fighters in the West Bank from a number of organizations continue to resist.
The Arab people have been aroused, shaking even the comprador bourgeois governments, who fear their own people. They are an ally of the Palestinians and will make their voices heard.
The pro-Palestinian movement in the U.S. and in the West has been proved to be correct, and should once again engage in mass action. There is new ammunition to counter the false charge of anti-Semitism used against us that has been the excuse for repression of the movement.
Opposition the Israel/U.S. axis is more obviously not anti-Semitic.
This is the true axis of evil in the Mideast. It can be defeated.
