Trump Proposes a Crime Against Humanity in Gaza

The blitzkrieg of Donald Trump’s furious if not führerish opening days has salt-pillared his party and as if disappeared Democrats in concrete walls. 

More revolting still, it’s turned supposed beacons of liberalism like the New York Times into a 1950s-style servant of his establishment, reporting and analyzing his demolition of democratic norms at home and restoration of imperial aggression abroad as if each were a minor policy memo from an undersecretary of state in the Eisenhower administration. 

America is comatose, and the president is pulling a Josef Mengele on the patient. 

To start a sentence with words like nowhere is that more true than… would be naive because there’s no hierarchy of folly. No sooner does he order one monstrosity–eliminating foreign aid except for Israel and Egypt, denying transgender human beings the right to exist, launching a Chritian crusade against ruins of the church-state wall, backdooring apartheid by taking Zyklon-B to DEI–than he outdoes it with an atrocity. 

Let’s take one: the proposal to ethnic-cleanse Gaza of Palestinians, transfer them to Jordan, Egypt and other Arab countries, and apparently annex Gaza’s 141 square miles (about the size of Palm Coast and the barrier island combined) to the United States, or at least rezone it as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s grasp of the Middle East is roughly equivalent to that of a third grader at Old Kings Elementary: He knows the word middle. He might know the word east, though perhaps as a street sign rather than a cardinal point. 

As with every one of his executive orders or policy proposals, this one had the thoughtfulness of a chicken scratch on a flea’s tit. He sees Gazans as so many more tenants to expel from 100 Central Park South, as he did in the mid-1980s so he could build Trump Park East. He thinks of Arab countries as empty neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, and Gaza as just another land without a people for a Riviera without a dock. (It was American evangelist and Christian Zionist William Blackstone who in 1881 coined one of the founding myths of the non-existence of Palestinians by describing Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.”)

This is what the late Israeli terrorist Meir Kahane–whose OpEd, “For a Jewish State, Annex and Expel” ran in The New York Times on Oct. 18, 1983–and settler terror cults like Gush Emunim (“a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy,” in Yizhak Rabin’s words) and the more contemporarily violent Hilltop Youth have been preaching. “For me, the moral answer lies in annexation of all the lands and the completion of an exchange of populations begun in 1948,” Kahane had written in that OpEd seething with euphemistic lies: there was never an “exchange,” only expulsions, massacres and expropriation. He continued, “let us carry out the second stage: The removal of the Arabs in the Land of Israel to their own Arab lands.” 

Now the president of the United States is normalizing a terrorist dream. 

Trump’s pin-up hero Andrew Jackson did something similar while defying a Supreme Court order. He expelled most Native Americans  from east of the Mississippi. Jackson’s Indians are Trump’s Palestinians. 

Working out the math, the crime, as all population transfers are under international law, would be the biggest population expulsion and land expropriation since Stalin’s internal deportations and killing of 6 million Soviets in the 1930s and 40s. The comparison can be applied in style and purpose to Israel, with its expulsions and ethnic cleansing of the late 1940s, 1967 and in regular wars since, up to the recent genocide in Gaza. But it’s been on a different scale. Trump would Stalinize the cleansing: Gaza’s population before Israel’s latest razing was 2 million. 

The Israeli press, always freer and more honest than America’s when Israel is the subject, is calling the atrocity by its name. “Even if Trump disregards international law,” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz editorialized Thursday, “it’s crucial to remind Israelis, that the forced expulsion or transfer of civilians violate international humanitarian law, constitute a war crime and amount to a crime against humanity.” Gur Megiddo, one of the paper’s columnists, called Trump’s idea “crazy, deranged, perverse and unfeasible” before he got to “crime against humanity on a historic scale.”  

As of today The New York Times hasn’t thought it worthy of an editorial. The paper has treated the premeditated crime as another news story owed its share of front-page analysis and reactions from both sides, journalism’s poison of fake balance. The normalization of the proposal, which Israel’s prime minister and architect of the latest genocide called “thinking outside the box,” normalizes not the dehumanization of the Palestinian people–Israel accomplished that since 1967–but their obliteration. 

Until now Israel has denied the Palestinians the right to exist, thus ensuring that flower-child ideals like the two-state solution never had a chance. The solution was incinerated with the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli extremist, ceding the way to Palestinian extermination by a thousand cuts and 700,000 colonists that Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu enacted since. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat had the last near-miss of a breakthrough in 2000. Sharon ensured its demise with his intentionally provoking visit to the Temple Mount, the site sacred to Muslims and Jews, triggering the second intifada, or uprising. 

Now Netanyahu has an American partner in his image: expulsions and population transfers have been Americanized. So has the myth of non-existent Palestinian identity. They’re all Arabs, after all, that mass of people between Persia and North Africa that all sound alike and look alike and are naturally interchangeable with Palestinians. Slave-traders thought likewise of Africans, as did Abraham Lincoln, who had enthusiastically embraced Black-population transfers back to Africa.

Trump’s plan has zero chance of success. But like Gen. Westmoreland’s pacification of Vietnam, the second Bush’s democratization of Iraq, or America’s 20-year futility in Afghanistan, it will exact a catastrophic price if attempted. And Gaza is just a template of what’s ahead for us here as this unwell man denies human beings their identity, ignores the law and reduces policy to pop up-books. Pity the nation. 

Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece airs on WNZF.

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