The US Plan for Gaza: Ethnic Cleansing Plus WWIII

The Neighbors are not Amused

"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." Balfour Declaration, 1917.

In the runup to the 2020 Presidential election, a television interview was aired in the US that featured Chinese businessfolk speaking about their interactions with American politicians. What the Chinese said--- ever so gently, was that Americans tend to believe that US politicians are motivated by ideology--- Democrats v Republicans, Left v Right, etc. However, as the businessfolk offered, they (American politicians) are simply corrupt. They negotiate deals to benefit themselves while hiding behind sanctimonious drivel about ‘freedom’ and ‘human rights.’

To explain what is motivating Donald Trump’s renewal of the US – Israeli genocide in Gaza, the first stop of Democrats and ‘the left’ appears to be ideology. That Trump was paid $100 million by ultra-Zionist Miriam Adelson to re-launch the genocide in Gaza suggests otherwise. The question of what sort of morally depraved sociopath would launch a genocide for any amount of money is left out of consideration. Joe Biden was the top recipient of bribes from ‘the Israel lobby’ when he launched his own genocide in Gaza in 2023.

What is striking about the pronouncements emanating from the Trump administration is how detached they are from any reality that is shared by the rest of us. Forcibly removing two million Palestinians from Gaza is ethnic cleansing, a War Crime. Even if Egypt and Jordan were to ‘accept’ the Palestinian refugees, where will the money to build roads, houses, schools, hospitals, and civic institutions come from? Answer: nowhere.

What the Palestinians know that Mr. Trump’s American audience doesn’t is that if they are forced from Palestine, it will be to die in the desert. Mr. Trump’s infantile fantasy, or misdirection if you prefer, that they will be sent to live in nice houses with employment and community is purely for the consumption of his American audience. The Palestinians will be sent to refugee camps to live short, miserable, lives. Within a few decades, all memory of Palestine will have been erased. This is what genocide means.

Theories abound that Mr. Trump is being tactical with his pronouncements, imagining that putting forward the most horrific case will move the different parties towards the best deal that is practicable. However, without using force, there is no enticement that Trump can offer that will move the Palestinians from Palestine. And seven decades of American duplicity renders Trump’s fabulist nonsense about new housing and employment laughable. Where is the money to pay for these coming from again?

While the light has apparently finally turned on that Israel doesn’t own Gaza, and therefore has no legal authority to sell it to the US, where is the money coming from to ‘buy’ Gaza in Trump’s view? And in whose name would ownership lie if such a transaction were feasible? In other words, is MAGA really going to let Mr. Trump use the Federal purse to buy Gaza for his son-in-law’s real estate deal? And at what cost? $100 billion? $1 trillion? $10 trillion? And who receives the proceeds? The nations committing the genocide?

Through his ultimatum that Hamas ‘release all of the hostages’ by noon of this coming Saturday (February 15^th, 2025) or face ‘the consequences,’ Trump appears to be giving the start date of phase two of the US – Israeli Greater Israel Project. Regular readers know that I’ve previously made an historical analogy between the launch of phase two and Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland that launched WWII. No, I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler. The analogy regards recklessly setting the world on fire with no conception of how to put it out.

Mr. Trump’s idea that national decline will somehow be reversed misses that the US genocide in Gaza is the purest expression of it. Does he really imagine that American youth will be lining up to die to Make Israel Great Again? I was there (2005) when the people who have historically fought America’s wars turned on the George W. Bush administration for lying the US into the Iraq War. The US military has been unable to meet its recruitment goals ever since. It is currently scouring economically depressed areas of the US in a desperate search for ‘volunteers.’

Graph: Both enlistments and applications for Americans to join the military are at the lowest levels recorded. And subsequent data extended this decline in military recruitment to the present (2024). With Donald Trump claiming that the US military will ‘clear’ and hold onto Gaza, get ready for the US to draft Americans to fight for Israel. Source: US Department of Defense.

Further, it took all that the IDF and the US had in terms of both materiel and forces to level Gaza. And doing so appears to have had little impact on the capacity of Hamas to fight. This is in part because Israel is a proxy war battleground for both the US and the regional ‘resistance.’ And it is in part because 1) Palestinians have an historical right to all of Palestine and 2) there is nowhere else for the Palestinians to go if they are forcibly expelled by the US – Israel.

With the IDF having been previously unable to expel Hamas from Gaza, even with unlimited support provided by the US, what has changed? Donald Trump appears to be earnestly stating that he intends to send US troops to fight in Gaza. To what ends? A quick bet has it that drafting Americans to die in Gaza in order to secure a real estate deal for Trump and his son-in-law would end MAGA politically for the next ten million years.

In the mid-1970s, Rastafarians in Jamaica took to assassinating Western tourists on golf courses to dissuade them from taking up residence in Jamaica. Were a similar tactic to be used in a rebuilt Gaza, Mr. Trump’s Disneyland-by-the-Sea fantasy would soon enough revert to attrition warfare. The overlap between tourists wishing to stay in five-star hotels and those willing to be shot to demonstrate their support Jared Kushner’s real estate holdings is likely quite limited.

In terms of domestic politics, early interpretation of Trump’s plan recalled an appellation applied to George W. Bush, ‘crazy like a fox,’ to suggest that Trump was posturing to gain a strategic advantage. The best case for Palestinians under this scenario is imagined to be a hand-off by Trump to Israeli fascists who will further kill or displace them. With this history as a guide, Mr. Trump is either going to restart the draft and send Americans to expel the Palestinians, or his plan will not work.

Much as the US catastrophe in Vietnam became ‘Nixon’s war’ upon Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, Donald Trump will be soon be known as the ‘butcher of Gaza;’ as the rich American who expelled millions of poor, brown, Palestinians from their ancestral home to die in the desert for a real estate deal. Parsing stupidity from evil here is a thankless task. But the bottom line is that Donald Trump’s price for being amongst the greatest monsters in human history is $100 million.

Trump won election promising to shift the focus of the Federal government back to the interests of the American people. And yet his first major act is to launch a genocide in which he is proclaiming that Americans will fight and die for the benefit of another country in return for a $100 million campaign contribution that he, alone, received. How is this ordinary scumbaggery being confused with an interest in doing right by his fellow citizens? What happened to ‘America first?’

Trump’s plan for Gaza will not work as he intends. But what it will do is light the world on fire during a time of rising international tensions. That Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and yet is currently negotiating for rare earth minerals that Russia controls in return for extending the conflict, suggests that his supporters have been played. Amongst my Republican friends, some who had ‘Trump for Peace’ posters in their yards, there is a wait-and-see attitude.

While it seems premature, mere weeks into Mr. Trump’s second term, to label his political resurrection a failure, his efforts to explain his Gaza policy leave him seeming way, way, way, out of his depth. That the only frame that he can apparently conjure to explain the world is a real estate deal demonstrates a critical lack of intellectual flexibility. And his threat to use force--- against one of the ‘sides’ only, suggests that he knows that he isn’t negotiating with the Palestinians, he is strong-arming them.

God help us all if Trump moves forward with this genocidal farce.