Trump just dressed up ethnic cleansing as a real estate opportunity, and blew up ‘America First’
By Matthew Knott
The leader of the free world advocates ethnic cleansing and dresses it up as a golden real estate opportunity. Here’s the dire place we find ourselves just three weeks into the second Trump administration.
Fresh from calling for the annexation of Canada, takeover of Greenland and seizure of the Panama Canal, Trump has now turned his imperial gaze to Gaza.
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing by his side for the first visit by a foreign leader since Trump’s return to office, the president called for the United States to take ownership of the Gaza Strip. The two million Palestinians who live there would be moved to neighbouring Arab countries, with the battered enclave turned, according to Trump, into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to visit Donald Trump since he returned to office in January.Credit: Bloomberg
Trapped by the need to work with Trump, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong feel they cannot say what they really think about his outlandish idea. Not everyone is so constrained.
As Australian National University professor Don Rothwell, a leading expert on international law, quickly stated: Trump’s idea would represent a crime against humanity, with the forced removal of Palestinian children quite possibly constituting an act of genocide under the Genocide Convention. The US, Rothwell noted, had no legal right to control Palestinians in Gaza.
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a respected Middle East political analyst who grew up in Gaza, quickly blasted Trump’s idea as “ridiculous, preposterous, illegal, harmful, and is a God-sent pivot for Hamas & other elements of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to use this ludicrous notion to distract from their failures and propagate new anti-American sentiments”.
Arab nations such as Egypt and Jordan have made clear they utterly reject any plans to move Palestinians out of their territory. Trump’s idea also went too far for Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, who said the peak body favoured the “comprehensive reconstruction of Gaza as a peaceful, prosperous territory”.
“However, the question of whether some Gazans choose to remain in the territory through this process, temporarily relocate or are permanently absorbed by neighbouring states is ultimately a decision for those affected, most of all, Gaza’s civilian population,” Aghion stressed.
Expelling Palestinians from Gaza would kill off any prospect of a two-state solution, the outcome Australia and virtually all other countries see as the ultimate way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gaza, alongside the West Bank, has always been envisioned as crucial component of any Palestinian state. Take it off the table and the two-state solution instantly disintegrates.
The most striking aspect of Trump’s proposal was how it upended his trademark “America First” approach to foreign affairs.
“I’d like to get out of the Middle East, we should have never been in the Middle East,” Trump said in 2019, summing up his long-standing view. “We should have never been there, and I’d like to get out.”
Trump, correctly, broke with Republican orthodoxy to call out America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq as a disaster and argue for it to extract itself from the costly quagmire in Afghanistan. It was time for the US to stop being the world’s policeman, he argued; it was time, he said, for American soldiers to stop dying in futile military adventures.
Now the man often dubbed an isolationist is calling for the US to “take over the Gaza Strip”, declaring: “We’ll own it and be responsible.” How is taking control of Gaza in America’s interests? How would Trump justify American soldiers being killed in the inevitable insurgency from Hamas and other militant groups? So many questions, so few answers.
Palestinians making their way home through Rafah, in Gaza, on January 20. Credit: Bloomberg
Once again, we return to the fundamental, inescapable Trumpian conundrum: whether to take his words literally or seriously or simply to dismiss them as hot air? At a wild Oval Office meeting between Trump and Scott Morrison in 2019, Trump mused about a US nuclear attack on Iran and shipping asylum seekers to Europe. Neither thought bubble came to pass.
There is also the question of whether Trump is using the prospect of US takeover of Gaza as an ambit claim to gain leverage over Hamas – just as he deployed the threat of tariffs to pressure Mexico and Canada to crack down on drug smuggling and illegal border crossings.
Under the second phase of the ceasefire deal that Trump helped broker, Israel and Hamas are supposed to begin negotiating a post-war settlement for Gaza. Could Trump, a believer in the “madman theory of international relations”, be trying to throw Hamas off balance and strengthen Netanyahu’s negotiating hand?
That is the most generous possible interpretation of Trump’s illegal and wildly unrealistic plan for post-war Gaza. As a baffled world wonders what on earth the US president is up to, we have to remain alive to the possibility that he doesn’t have the faintest clue.
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