Trump proposes the US taking over Gaza genocide. Our media normalises it

An obscene, shameless crime is proposed - and the Western media simply normalises it

Right now there is a basic test for every journalist, every media outlet, and every politician. It is a defining litmus test. Donald Trump, the President of the United States, has committed his country - the world’s only superpower - to commit an abominable crime.

He has committed the US to illegally occupy and annex Gaza and ethnically cleanse its entire population. This is a grave and indisputable crime.

The bare minimum right now is to just state the facts. That what Donald Trump has proposed is ethnic cleansing, a fact, that’s number one; and that this is an objective violation of international law, that’s number two.

Well we have seen how our journalists, media outlets and politicians have failed, disastrously failed, and how they are helped to normalise and indeed facilitate genocide.

Let’s start with Trump’s comments. His first notable intervention came before his press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel and wanted man by virtue of the arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. (This itself being a fact which should be relayed by Western media outlets to their viewers, listeners and readers as a matter of course).

He casually declares about the homeland of people: “The Gaza thing has not worked. It’s never worked.”

What hasn’t worked, to be very clear, is the Israeli state repeatedly murderously driving the Palestinian people from their homes, including three quarters of a million people in 1948, which was achieved by slaughtering around 15,000 people.

The deprivation of a people’s right to national self-determination, occupying their land, stealing their land, colonising their land, besieging their land, subjugating them through apartheid - this has not worked. It has only led to violence, instability and chaos. That has not produced peace or security or whatever of those words you wish to choose.

That is not a Gaza specific problem. That is a problem of oppression. There can never be peace when there is oppression, which is one of the most basic history lessons there is.

Trump talks about giving the people of Gaza “a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land”. - Well firstly, the people of Gaza do not want to leave their homeland (one they would already describe as a “beautiful piece of land”. It is their homeland. And they know from their history that leaving their homeland means they are never allowed back.

If Trump wants to talk about the people of Gaza getting a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land, then Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s Ambassador to the UN has an idea: "For those who want to send the Palestinian people to a ‘nice place’, allow them to go back to their original homes in what is now Israel".

That’s because the vast majority of people in Gaza are the families of refugees forced to flee from what is now Israel back in 1948 in particular.

Trump just casually describes Gaza as a demolition site. In doing so, he casually accepts that Israel must have committed an abominable crime, because that’s what flattening an entire land constitutes. This actually puts Joe Biden, perversely, to shame, because he never admitted what Israel had actually done with the weapons he’d supplied.

These comments were then followed by the press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump makes absolutely clear, with no ambiguity, that he wants the permanent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people of Gaza.

If you speak to almost anyone in Gaza, they will tell you of their love for, their devotion towards Gaza - their home. When Trump says it’s been one of “the meanest, toughest places on earth” and says they’ve experienced “nothing but death and destruction” : why does he think that’s the case? Perhaps sitting next to Netanyahu may offer some clues?

An accurate explanation would be that Gaza was subjected to direct military occupation and then a brutal siege and repeated Israeli onslaughts prior to 7th October in which a litany of war crimes were committed. Amnesty International, for example, detailed Israel’s war crimes in murderous onslaughts against Gaza in 2009 and 2014. Just months before 7th October, Israel bombed Gaza and killed several children. All of this happened under an array of Israeli leaders and officials - let’s not just make Netanyahu a convenient bogeyman. And all of this was facilitated by Israel’s patron, the United States.

It should be noted that Trump’s call for a “beautiful area” for Palestinians to “settle permanently” is a nonsense. He’s called for Jordan and Egypt to take in the people of Gaza. They have both declared they will refuse to do that. It should be noted that the majority of Jordan’s population is Palestinian or of Palestinian heritage - that is those who were expelled or forced to flee Palestine.

If either of these regimes complied with this grotesque crime, there would be a mass uprising on the streets of those countries which would quite conceivably overthrow them both.

Which is why Middle East Eye has been briefed that Jordan would go to war with Israel if it sought to expel Palestinians to its territory. The article notes that it would be an “existential issue” for Jordan and its Hashemite royal family, because Jordan has the third poorest water supply on earth, and it’s 12 million citizens largely live in a strip of land which runs across Israel’s border, so it would not be possible to host any significant number of refugees - the morality of facilitating ethnic cleansing aside

It is notable too, in Trump’s comments that he talks about other rich countries providing “a lot of money” to build these new settlements for the ethnically cleansed Palestinians. Who is going to spend a vast sum of money facilitating the crime of ethnic cleansing committed by the US and Israel, and why?

It is worth observing the grin painted on Netanyahu’s face as Trump describes Gaza being “absolute hell”, and whilst he discusses the death and destruction there. He no doubt thought of the orders he gave, the instructions he issued, and the resulting carnage.

But also, as Israeli anti-genocide writer and activist Asaf Ronel, tells me:

Netanyahu knows he can't do anything other than smile. If he says a single word of support it will be added to the @IntlCrimCourt case against him.

There is another chilling detail from Trump’s performance alongside Netanyahu.

He says he wants remove Gaza’s entire population, which he says is “1.7 million people maybe 1.8 [million].

There were up to 2.3 million people in Gaza before the genocide began. This would still suggest Trump believes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. We should conclude that he has access to high level data from the US and Israeli intelligence services that we don’t.

And then came the extraordinary moment when Trump declared that the US would “take control” of Gaza. Casually declaring that the US will annex Gaza. This is clearly completely and utterly insane even by the standards of this man. The US President is publicly declaring that he will annex and violently expel the population of Gaza.

Before we look at some of the media responses, we should listen to Heidi Matthews, associate professor of law and expert on international law and particularly questions of genocide. She says:

“Many are calling this idea ‘ethnic cleansing’—that’s not it. In this context of mass atrocity & destruction, forced transfer would be genocide.”

Indeed it’s worth noting what Omer Bartov - the Israeli-American Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University - told me towards the beginning of this horror, about the fine line between ethnic cleansing and genocide. He declared ethnic cleansing frequently became genocide because - brutally speaking - people do not want to be ethnic cleansed and therefore they are murdered. Indeed genocide means the intent to destroy a national ethnic, racial or religiuos group, “in whole or in part”. This is genocide.

But the bar is on the floor here and the least we can expect is for unambiguous ethnic cleansing to be called ethnic cleansing.

Yet most of our leading journalists are cowardly, spineless, and complicit they are. At the press conference, Trump and Netanyahu declared that “babies were burned alive” on 7th October.

It is a lie to say that babies were burned alive on 7th October. A total unambiguous lie. One Israeli baby was killed by Hamas militants on 7th October. Her name was Mila Cohen. She was 8 months old. And she was shot dead through the door of a safe room. There was another horrible case of a pregnant woman who was shot, killing her unborn baby on 7th October.

These are grave crimes - no question. The point is if they are grave crimes, which they are, where does that leave the at least 1,091 Palestinian babies killed through Israeli bombs, explosives, shelling and bullets?

Why this lie about burning babies? Because it is an attempt to make a distinction between the form of violence deployed by Israel compared to its enemies in order to justify genocide: “We may kill far more, but they’re savages.” And it’s particularly perverse because many of the Palestinian babies slaughtered were burned alive- because of missiles, explosives and so on, fired by the Israeli army.

No journalist - not one - challenged these lies, with Trump there talking about slaughtering innocent men, women and children when tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men women and children have been slaughtered. But they don’t qualify as human beings to him.

Mark Stone, the US Correspondent of Sky News, talked about"The idea that Gazans should leave and move somewhere else and that a new home should be built for them elsewhere…” Why this convoluted nonsense when he should say this is ethnic cleansing and note that it is a crime as per international law. Who is this man scared of? His editors? The White House? A suggestion: if you can’t do your job, resign and let someone who knows what they’re talking about and/or isn’t a coward take your place.

Let’s look at how the BBC splashed on this announcement on their website front page, which is the most read news website on earth.

‘Suggests’. ‘Redevelop.’ ‘Removing unexploded bombs’. ‘Rebuilding Gaza.’ ‘Resettling’. A farcically disturbing spin on the grave crime of ethnic cleansing.

What about the Telegraph?

‘Trump offers to turn Gaza into ‘Riviera of Middle East’’. Pure, unadulterated Trumpian spinning of a grave war crime.

The Times newspaper:

‘Trump says US will take over Gaza and make it ‘Riviera of Middle East’’. Almost identical: are these newspapers allowing Trump’s press officers to dictate their headlines?

The Independent newspaper, where I once worked.

‘Trump says US wants to 'take over' Gaza and create a 'Riviera of the Middle East'', with the subheading: ‘‘We'll own it and be responsible for dismantling all unexploded bombs,’ US president says at White House press conference with Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu’.

You would think this was a humanitarian gesture: what a sick joke from a newspaper which long lost any meaningful reason to exist.

The headline of Reuters:

‘Trump suggests permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza’: Nothing about ethnic cleansing.

The New York Times splash:

‘With Gaza Takeover Plan, an Unbound Trump Pushes an Improbable Idea’, is the headline. That’s their main takeaway - not about criminality, but about practicality? It gets worse. A New York Times article literally described it as “one of the most audacious ideas that any American leader has advanced in years.”

It sounds like Trump being praised for thinking outside the box.

Many journalists like to think they are courageous truth tellers. Speaking out without fear or favour. Holding the powerful to account whoever they are.

Well, Israel’s genocide in Gaza really was the litmus test of our age. A crime from start to finish - an abominable crime, consisting of countless atrocities which were broadcast to the world, shamelessly and unapologetically bragged about by Israeli leaders and officials and their cheerleaders and allies.

The vast majority of media outlets and journalists did not describe this for what it is, and they thus helped normalise and facilitate genocide. They will never scrub the shame away - and nor should we let them.

As I’ve said from the start, those who directly facilitated this crime, for example by providing weapons, must go to jail.

And I’ve also said, careers must end. We have to make these media outlets pay for what they have done. And the reason we have to do all of this is because if there is no accountability, then we allow the normalisation of the most extreme depravity imaginable - and then our whole world will burn.

The sort of crime now being proposed on top of the crime already committed will break whatever we call “the international order”. It will also lead to the end of what we call “Western democracy”.

At the end of the 19th century, something called ‘The Anti-Imperialist League’ was founded. It was not founded by people on the left, far from it. It was in the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, when there were fears that the US would become an empire because of the proposed annexation and colonisation of the Philippines. They feared that the US would go from being a Republic and turn into an Empire.

Trump - discussing annexing Gaza and frankly annexing Canada - is not joking around. He clearly wants to build some sort of empire with him as emperor. That will end democracy as we understand it, normalise aggressive expansionism, and plunge the world into total violent disorder. That is the cost of normalising crimes of this scale. And we cannot allow it.