Trump backs the ethnic cleansing of Gaza

Israel has been plotting the violent removal of Gaza's surviving population from the start. Our media conspired to cover that up

Ethnic cleansing. That is what Donald Trump has proposed for the surviving population of Gaza. Whilst on Air Force One, during a huddle with US journalists, he described Gaza as a “demolition site” and discussed his plans for Egypt and Jordan “to take people” in order to “clean out that whole thing”.

This is not some off the cuff remark from Donald Trump. As Amit Segal, chief political analyst on Israel’s Channel 12 news tweeted:

Senior Israeli officials: Trump’s statement about the migration of Gazans to Muslim countries is not a slip of the tongue but part of a much broader move than it seems, coordinated with Israel.

It has been transparently clear from the start that Israel’s game plan has been to annihilate Gaza, make it unfit for human habitation, and then destroy the Palestinian people in three ways, one, by slaughtering them, that is through direct violence; two, killing through indirect means, so for example destroying their healthcare system and depriving them of the essentials of life; and three by driving them out of Gaza altogether.

And this again underlines the absolute travesty that is Western media coverage. From the start, as the Israeli state forcibly drove the Palestinian people of Gaza from their homes and then destroyed those homes, the Western media, if they had their job, would have reported on the threat that Gaza would be violently emptied of its people. They did not do so.

But they have no excuses. Because some of us warned about this over and over again, but our warnings were ignored and more generally we were treated as fringe extremists.

As an example: on 31st October 2023, I published a video headlined ‘EXPOSED: Israel Ethnic Cleansing Plot’. In February 2024, I published another video entitled ‘Shocking Evidence Israel Plots Mass Expulsion of Palestinians’. As ever, this required no special insight: it simply required looking at the overwhelming evidence and take it seriously.

Consider some of that evidence. Less than 24 hours after the 7th October attack happened, Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted:

“I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

There was no subtlety here. What Israel actually did of course is drive the vast majority of the Palestinian people of Gaza from their homes, but they remained within Gaza as it was destroyed.

Weeks after the attack, Israeli general Giora Eiland, former head of the Israeli National Security Council, published an article in which he wrote the following:

“The people of Gaza will have to leave – either temporarily or permanently – via the border with Egypt”

He added:

“Israel should not allow any economic assistance. The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave. If Egypt and other countries prefer that these people will perish in Gaza, this is their choice. I prefer something that is more reasonable.”

This piece was written in Fathom journal, which is the media arm of BICOM - that is, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, and the main pro-Israel lobby organisation in the UK.

Giora Eiland was advisor to Yoav Gallant, the former defence minister who, like Benjamin Netanyahu, is subject to an international arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court. In South Africa’s submission to the International Court of Justice, as part of their case against Israel for the crime of genocide, multiple other statements by Eiland are noted.

Eiland declared that “Israel has no interest in the Gaza Strip being rehabilitated and this is an important point that needs to be made clear to the Americans”.

He declared to retrieve the hostages “a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza” must be created, with water supplies specifically targeted.

He said that Israel’s army must “create such a huge pressure on Gaza, that Gaza will become an area where people cannot live.”

He declared “the State of Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place that is temporarily, or permanently, impossible to live in”. This is a point he was keen to reiterate, adding “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist”

He additionally wrote: “Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.”

He declared that:

“severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer. It is precisely its civil collapse that will bring the end of the war closer. When senior Israeli figures say in the media ‘It’s either us or them’ we should clarify the question of who is ‘them’. ‘They’ are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population who enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th.”

It should be noted that Giora Eiland is seen as a moderate with Israel’s political system.

He is the chief architect of the so-called ‘Generals plan’, which proposed a total siege on northern Gaza, forcing survivors to flee, which Irrael then executed.

At the end of October 2023, a 10 page document was leaked to the Israeli-Palestinian news outlet +972 magazine, originating from Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence. It recommended the forcible and permanent transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai desert.

The document proposed messages directed at Palestinians which

“should revolve around the loss of land, making it clear that there is no hope of returning to the territories Israel will soon occupy, whether or not that is true. The image needs to be, ‘Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership — there is no choice but to move to another place with the assistance of your Muslim brothers”.

The intelligence minister at the time was seen as a relative moderate.

In December 2023, according to the Israel Hayom daily newspaper, Benjamin Netanyahu told a closed door parliamentary session of his Likud party colleagues that he supported what he described as “voluntary migration” of the Palestinians to Gaza.

He added: "Our problem is the countries that are willing to absorb (them), and we are working on it.”

Israeli cabinet ministers have repeatedly pushed for so-called ‘voluntary migration’, with a conference on this being attended by 11 cabinet ministers in January 2024

“Voluntary migration” of course is a nonsense. The people of Gaza do not want to leave their homeland. It is simply a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

Now Egypt’s military dictatorship has repeatedly publicly opposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, including in response to Trump’s latest comments. But last February, nearly a year ago, photos were released showing that Egypt was building an enclosed area ringed with high concrete walls along its border with Gaza. That was discussed as possibly housing Palestinians fleeing the then planned Israeli assault on the southern city of Rafah.

The prospect of driving the people of Gaza from their homeland always loomed large and yet the Western media overwhelmingly did not take it seriously. Even now they won’t.

The BBC tweeted out: ‘Palestinians condemn US President Donald Trump's proposal to resettle Gazans abroad and "clean out that whole thing"’

The headline above the piece? ‘Trump wants neighbours to take in Palestinians to 'clean out' Gaza’

Nothing, zero, about ethnic cleansing there.

But today with a ceasefire in place however temporarily the Palestinian people are returning en masse to their homes in northern Gaza. As one of those Palestinian women says: ‘Trump is dreaming is he thinks any of us will go to Egypt or Jordan’.

Indeed the sight of Palestinians returning to their homes repulsed many of Israel’s powerful extremists, with Itamar Ben-Gvir, until recently minister of national security, tweeting:

“The opening of the Netzarim highway this morning and the entry of tens of thousands of Gazans into the northern Gaza Strip are images of Hamas' victory and another humiliating part of the reckless deal. This is not what "complete victory" looks like - this is what complete surrender looks like.

The heroic IDF soldiers did not fight and give their lives in the Strip to make these images possible.

We must return to war - and destroy!”

We should also note that the British prime minister Keir Starmer spoke to Trump by phone and praised him for “securing the landmark ceasefire and hostages deal in Gaza”, with no condemnation or even concerns about the proposed ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Now as Omer Bartov, the Israeli American professor of genocide and Holocaust studies, told me in an interview towards the beginning of all this horror, the line between ethnic cleansing and genocide is blurred in that people do not wish to be ethnic cleansing and in response to that resistance comes genocide.

Gaza has been made deliberately inhospitable to human life. One statistic sums that up: 83% of plant life has been destroyed.

Trump’s endorsement of ethnic cleansing did not come from nowhere. It has been the favoured plan of the Israeli regime from the start. Our media chose to cover that up. Here is another example of complicity in one of the great crimes of our age.

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