Donald Trump’s proposal to evict 2 million Palestinians from Gaza is an unashamed declaration of support for ethnic cleansing. As so often, he seems ready to ignore moral and legal codes alike. “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” is listed in the Rome statute of the international criminal court as a crime against humanity. And yet a US president has put that idea on the table. Trump insists this would be in everybody’s interest. According to him, Palestinians would not want to return to their homes. “I have heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them,” he recently said. The population is, in Trump’s words, “living in hell”, with “death and destruction and rubble and demolished buildings falling all over”. He made no mention of Israel’s responsibility for that death and destruction and rubble.
More than 30 years ago, during the early months of the bloody Bosnian war that I had been reporting on as the eastern Europe editor of the Independent, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić, explained to me that the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population that was then under way was, in fact, doing the Bosnians a favour. “We let them go,” Karadžić explained with a smile, “with their luggage and everything.” Like Karadžić, Trump does not hide the fact that Palestinians who are forced to abandon their homes would have no choice in the matter. Sitting next to Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested: “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”
In 2019, Israeli election posters boasted of Netanyahu’s friendship with Trump, showing pictures of the two smiling men together. The Israeli prime minister praised the US president for “the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace”. Netanyahu’s own perspectives on peace are questionable. Only two months ago, a panel of judges at the international criminal court unanimously confirmed a request made six months before that by the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, for the issue of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in connection with murder, starvation and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population. (Khan also requested indictments against Hamas leaders, for the brutal and lawless attacks of 7 October.)
Stop passing the buck to everyone else! For a country with the words “right to keep and bear arms” and “necessary to the security of a free state” in your constitution, you all roll over to nazis awfully fucking quickly. But yeah, maybe Italy can fix your dictator problem for you by asking him politely to stop.
I wonder what would happen if the push back against Trump-Elon got loud and violent. The Reighstag fire turned the Nazis up to 11.
They have the #1 (USAF), #2 (US Army Aviation), #4 (US Navy), and #7 (USMC) largest air forces in the world, plus nukes. What do you expect Billy Bob and his AR-15 to accomplish?
I was reading a story recently about an Italian plumber’s brother doing big things with less equipment.
And how many secret service agents were guarding that ceo?
There were already two failed assassination attempts. If it were that easy it would have happened already.
It has to be American people and courts.
Or just one daring American with nothing left to lose. Animals are dangerous when backed into a corner and threatened.
Pretty much. China DGAF, and everyone else has minimal leverage.
Will they do it? Much harder to say, first they need to have that moment where the realise they can’t ignore Europe’s and the world’s issues away. Like the article says:
European governments seem more eager to placate the dangerous bully than to confront him.
I’ll leave it to you to guess which person they mean, since there’s more than one.
China as well as Russia are against it unless it has changed.
Russia is second best in Ukraine at the moment, so they fall into “everyone else”. China, of course, is willing to disapprove, but there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell they do anything about it.
