“All the gloves come off in Gaza.”
Trump unleashes the ultra–Zionists.
7 FEBRUARY—Donald Trump does not seem to have too much trouble shocking people. In the three weeks since he resumed his residency in the White House, he has shocked the Danes (America must have Greenland), the Canadians (Canada will become our 51st state), the Panamanians (the Canal is ours), and the Mexicans (It’s “the Gulf of America” now). Along with Elon Musk, his frighteningly fascistic sidekick, our new president has shocked (and awed) Washington more or less daily these past three weeks. All of this, fair to say, has also left the rest of the world, as it watches the Trump circus, in one or another state of shock.
But nothing comes close to the shock of Trump’s declaration Tuesday that the U.S. will assert its sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, remove the two million Palestinians who live there, and turn the territory into “something really nice, really good”—into, indeed, “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The implications of this plan—to the extent Trump makes plans as against making it up as he goes along—are nearly too far-reaching to calculate.
Let’s do our calculations to the extent we can at this early moment. We will find that, among all that is shocking about Trump’s Gaza thinking—is this my word?—there are things that are, on careful consideration, entirely in keeping with American policy over the course of many decades and so are shocking only to those lost in the game of eternal pretend that prevails in our late-stage imperium.
As all paying-attention people will know, Trump announced his over-the-top plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip and turn it into some kind of paradise built atop the bones of terrorist Israel’s victims in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu, who, as of the International Criminal Court’s Nov. 24 ruling, is now a fugitive charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Zionist state’s prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the Trump White House, and we can count his presence in the Oval Office a shock in its own right, however “normalized” America’s repellent relations with “the Jewish state” may be. But here I mean to mention a couple of remarks Netanyahu made in response to Trump’s presentation.
Trump held forth a good long while before the Israeli PM, beaming the psychotic’s smile with which we are familiar, took the microphone. According to an early transcript produced by Roll Call, apparently machine-generated, he began by praising Trump for the infamous transgressions of Trump’s first term: “You recognize Jerusalem asa Israel’s capital. You moved the American Embassy there. You recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You withdrew from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.”
All regrettably true: Trump had just boasted of these disgraces. Then came the spew of lies we commonly associate with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials—and, for that matter, with Israel. UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, “support[s] and fund[s] terrorists.” With reference to the Oct. 7 attacks, “Hamas monsters savage— savagely murdered 1,200 innocent people… They beheaded men. They raped women. They burned babies alive….” And so on.
You would think any Israeli speaking in public would avoid mentioning such matters, given every one of these assertions has been wholly discredited as part of Israel’s screen of fabricated propaganda. But no, within the walls of the Trump White House, if nowhere else in the world, one can say such things and be warmly welcomed.
In this moist hothouse of unreality, perfectly suitable to the occasion and the man hosting it, Netanyahu then turned to the just-revealed Gaza plan:
You cut to the chase. You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say…. This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace.
These last remarks may read like mere flattery, but there is something important in them. They seem to me key to our understanding of what just happened between Trump and his criminal guest. Among Trump’s various sins, so far as orthodox Washington considers it, is his habit of saying the unsayable, as I like to put it: He makes statements that seem preposterous but are perfectly true and have long been true but are carefully kept out of accepted discourse.
To Trump again: “We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this,” he said, “and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.”
This is Trump’s latest reference, a gentle, disguised reference, to the forced expulsion of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of which have made it clear in strenuous terms they will accept no new influx of Palestinians. During an earlier session with Netanyahu, Trump, as quoted in The New York Times, dismissed these objections out of hand. “They say they’re not going to accept,” Trump said. “I say they will.”
As is entirely clear and widely understood, Trump now proposes to ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip. While avoiding the phrase, he has made reference to this idea numerous times; it is now his formally stated policy. It must follow immediately there is no legal basis for any such project, at no point has the will of Palestinians been considered, and forced relocations under any circumstances are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions of 1948. There is, to state the obvious, no ground to withhold unqualified objection to Trump’s plan on this basis alone.
As we do, we must summon to mind that set of facts we know as history. Harry Truman declared U.S. recognition of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, 11 minutes after its founding. Al–Nakba, the forced removal of Palestinians from their land, was then six months under way. And from the precise moment of Truman’s declaration until ours, America has been the premier sponsor of the ethnic-cleansing that is now at issue in Gaza.
Let us not be mistaken as to what Trump proposed at the White House Tuesday. It is straight up and down condemnable. But we must be clear as glass as to what must be condemned. Impetuous as he is, as blessedly ignorant as he is of what is sayable and unsayable, Trump simply wants to get this done more openly than his predecessors and with more dispatch.
As a footnote here, it is worth noting a story behind Truman’s rush to recognize. Gore Vidal, longtime friend of the Kennedys, relates it in his introduction to Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto Press, 1994) by Israel Shahak. It goes this way:
Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. “That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.” As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather), we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics.
Possible, maybe, probable: We cannot weigh the truth of the tale with dead certainty. But Vidal saw fit to tell it in print, and Shahak, a Holocaust survivor, a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, and a respected if occasionally controversial student of Judaism, put it on page one of his book. At the risk of teleological reasoning, if Truman took $2 million ($26 million today) from the Zionists, it is right in line with what American pols have harvested from the Jewish lobby all the way up to the $100 million Trump reportedly accepted from Miriam Adelson, widow of arch–Zionist Sheldon Adelson.
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From The New York Times piece quoted earlier:
In unveiling the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that forcible removal of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign policy consensus in both parties.
This sentence is true from start to finish. But we must read the last bit, concerning the foreign policy consensus in Washington, very carefully. I hope we can all now agree, having witnessed Joe Biden’s unconditional support for Israel’s genocide, that Trump’s proposal to ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip is entirely in line with “decades of American foreign policy consensus” but for the crudity of Trump’s way at it. The question on which Trump broke the bounds of convention turns on sovereignty. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said at his news conference with Bibi Tuesday evening. He elaborated:
We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs… level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out…. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different.
After he and Bibi spoke, a reporter asked Trump if this project would require the dispatch of American troops. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he replied with that strange nonchalance he affects. “We’re going to take over that piece and develop it.” He has since stepped back from this. “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” he declared Thursday on Truth Social, his digital megaphone. “No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed!”
Two points. One, it is hard to imagine executing a project of this magnitude in a locale as politically charged as Gaza without involving American troops. Two, troops or no troops seems a small distinction in the scheme of things. There are already reports of “foreign contractors” assisting Israeli forces on the ground in Gaza.
This is the first time an American leader at any level of government has publicly favored the physical acquisition of land beyond America’s borders in who knows how long. The shock here is Trump’s proposed introduction—or reintroduction, better put—of territorial dominion of the imperial sort, and by force if force is needed. His topic Tuesday was the 140 square miles that comprise the Gaza Strip. But note the similarity with his ideas for Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal. This is what Trump meant in his inaugural speech when he spoke of America as “a growing nation —one that increases our wealth, expands our territory….”
As those remarks plainly indicated, Trump is well aware that he presides over an imperium. He could not otherwise think and speak as he does. But it is remarkable how often this man fails to recognize the rather basic facts concerning our imperium’s history and conduct. His theme is land, or as he would be comfortable putting it, real estate. But the imperium’s theorists and managers are not into real estate anymore— not on any kind of permanent basis.
America laid the foundations of the empire that now burdens us and the rest of the world during the Spanish–American War, an eight-month affair in 1898. There were early disgraces such as the Philippines, which the U.S. wrested with great brutality from the Spanish and kept as a colony for nearly five decades. Guam was seized as a coaling station for American cargo vessels sailing to and fro “the East.” Ditto American Samoa. This was the way it was done. The Europeans had empires, and now we must have one: This was the orthodox reasoning when figures such as Twain and William James formed the Anti–Imperialist League in response to the war against the Spanish.
Washington granted Filipinos independence in 1946.The date is significant. By that time, the eve of the independence era, London and Paris recognized that territorial dominion was a 19th century technology, way out of date. What we call neocolonialism was the new thing. Washington understood this, too. It has, accordingly, had no interest in taking over other peoples’ lands since the 1945 victories. Those operating the imperium are interested in dictators, pushover puppets, and other sorts of compradors through whom to project power. This is why the postwar decades are pockmarked with coups, assassinations, color revolutions and the like. It isn’t about land, or the American flag luffing in the wind above it.
How can Trump fail to see this? (And who in hell advises him in these matters, you have to wonder.) But are we now supposed to continue pretending Washington has not run an empire for nearly 80 years? Caitlin Johnstone, the spiky Australian commentator, occasionally remarks of the skill required to maintain an empire and hide it from the American populace. True enough. But so far as I can make out, fewer of us by the day are so deceived. If there is any virtue in Trump’s plans, Gaza and the rest of them, there is no hiding the reality of empire anymore.
Trump proposals breach international law. America has been breaching it for decades. Trump proposes to ethnic-cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza. America has sponsored that project since Israel came into existence. Trump may sanction the Zionist state’s annexation of the West Bank in coming weeks—another big one he let drop Tuesday. Such a sanction has been informally in effect since the settler movement began.
Trump wants to take over Gaza. The U.S. will be yet more a participant in Israel’s terror than it was under the Biden regime. This is new. It is egregious, altogether shocking. But I ask a couple of questions, genuinely posed: How new, exactly? Is Trump’s plan simply another step along the road Washington has traveled since Truman, if he did, accepted that suitcase on that day in May 77 years ago?
Many officials, political figures, and commentators have expressed doubt this week that Trump’s Gaza plan can ever be executed. I must withhold judgment on this question for now. But his announcement, all by itself, has already set free ultra–Zionists of all sorts. It is now perfectly acceptable for public officials—Mike Huckabee, Elise Stefanik, Tom Cotton, numerous others—to advocate Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. Some of these retrograde cretins, The Times reported Tuesday, now take to rejecting “the West Bank” in favor of the Biblical “Judea and Samaria.” This is a significant shift in nomenclature, amounting to a vicious statement of intent. Ownership of Gaza or no, Trump has turned a significant corner.
But all of this week’s shocks, excluding none, have been latent in American policy for decades—since May 1948, indeed. Let us not miss this. At this fraught moment, we cannot use Trump to hide ourselves from ourselves, as many Americans, especially their purported leaders, are very prone to doing.
Courtesy of ScheerPost.
Fine article, thank you. I’m less confident than you are, however, that more and more Americans are seeing through the empire. From where I sit in northern Virginia, more and more ordinary Americans are pretty cool with the notion of territorial expansion - IF it makes gas cheaper and the USA “greater”. In short, you identify three cretins: you’re around 250 million out.
Thank you for this. I may use the Gore Vidal president Truman anecdote, next week, it is exquisitely appropriate.