Gaza Ceasefire Celebrations Were Premature
Trump caps off his first week an office with explicit calls to fully ethnically cleanse Gaza, amongst a number of other regressive actions intended to favor Israel.
“You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
In the days leading up to Trump’s inauguration, humanitarians and Palestinians alike expressed jubilance and relief over some unexpected positive news for a region wrought by bombardment and the wanton killing of innocents for over a year: Israel’s genocidal campaign, a charge which has been handed down by multiple human rights groups and deemed plausible by the International Court of Justice, would seemingly finally be stopped in its tracks thanks to a ceasefire deal reached between Hamas and Israel. Of note is the fact that this ceasefire deal is virtually the very same one Hamas had agreed to back in May of last year. After months of numerous deliberate attempts by the Biden administration and his Defense Secretary Blinken to undermine ceasefire negotiations and international law, many eager to credit Trump's supposed anti-war bona fides sprinted to heap praise onto the then-incoming Trump administration for its role in forcing through the longstanding deal. Apparently, Trump’s new Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, being present and stern with Israeli leadership played a seminal role in expediting the deal.
But alas, this honeymoon period would not last long, and cracks began to form in the deal almost immediately. After being sworn into office, amongst a litany of disastrous executive actions, Trump almost immediately signed away a handful of gifts to the government of Israel. Trump reversed Biden’s ban on 2000 pound bombs to Israel (a restriction intended to limit devastation on the incredibly dense and urban topology of Gaza), as well as Biden’s sanctions on West Bank settlers, notorious gangsters who, often emboldened by the Israeli police and military, violently encroach on Palestinian homes in the West Bank, carving out the region from a continuous zone into what are effectively small Palestinian Bantustans and enclaves surrounded by new Israeli territories. Even as the deal itself has proceeded, there is some uncertainty about how long it will hold up, given that Netanyahu has assured his allies that the multi-phase deal would not be allowed to proceed into phase two, a condition that is supposed to be contingent on both parties’ adherence to the hostage exchange portions of the deal. Given that violence in the West Bank is escalating quickly, leading to many of the released Palestinian prisoners as part of the deal (many of them being children) being replaced by new prisoners, and Israel continuing to bombard Lebanon even as a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah is supposed to proceed, it is unsurprising that many are skeptical of this deal’s longterm staying power.
Most significantly, Trump has made increasingly ominous statements over the last week clarifying his vision for the future of the Gaza strip. At a press conference on inauguration day, Trump alluded to the potential allure and real estate potential of Gaza’s coastal location and climate, suggesting that he’d be interested in relocating its residents and redeveloping the area. Aboard Air Force One on Sunday, he doubled-down on this sentiment, stating broadly, “You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” adding that, “something has to happen.” He has made appeals to King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi to prepare to receive an influx of refugees, a proposal which both parties and obviously the Palestinians themselves have vehemently rejected. Regardless of what happens in the immediate future, it has become increasingly evident that Trump’s longterm vision shares much overlap with Israel’s and its Likud party’s vision of a Greater Israel, an expansion of Israel’s domain over territories between the Jordan and Mediterranean, maybe even beyond.
It would have been naive to trust that Trump would ever truly respect the autonomy and dignity of the Palestinian people. After all, we are talking about the candidate who used Palestinian as a pejorative slur to characterize Biden’s policy in the region. Trump and others in his orbit have accepted hundreds of millions in donations from staunch Zionists, such as the Adelson family business moguls, in exchange for which he recognized Jerusalem, an independent and contested territory, as the capital of Israel and enabled Israel to annex the Golan Heights in bordering Syria, an area Israel had been illegally militarily occupying since the 1967 war, during his first term. Additionally, Trump’s musings on this redevelopment fantasy echo shades of comments previously uttered by his son-in-law and former Middle East advisor, Jared Kushner. Kushner is also the architect of the Abraham Accords, a means of undermining Palestinian autonomy thinly veiled as a peace agreement between Israel and its neighbors. Palestinians were notably not considered as part of these negotiations, and Hamas cites this decaying Palestinian role in negotiating their future as a motivating underlying factor behind its October 7th attack.
In response to the throes of a society under siege that resulted in the killing of 815 civilians and 380 militants (many of whom were likely killed by friendly fire under the Hannibal Directive), Israel disproportionately responded by executing a years-long campaign of bombardment on an already battered people. Indiscriminate carpet bombing has killed anywhere between 40-60,000 people (80% minimum being civilians) directly and possibly hundreds of thousands more indirectly through the destruction of hospitals, the crippling of infrastructure, and the blockage of food and aid. An estimated 67% of the buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, leaving most who’ve survived no homes to return to. While a response to October 7th has served as a useful pretense for the operation to proceed, Israeli society and leading public officials have elucidated their genocidal intent thousands of times over. To those groups in the U.S. who not only rightfully rebuked the Biden administration’s full-throated enablement of this crime against humanity, but went as far as to sincerely endorse Trump, will you be there to hold him to account as he seeks to aid Israel in undermining the autonomy of the Palestinian people and driving them from their homes, or will you allow the decades-long rebuild effort be carried about by and for foreign real estate developers and settlers rather than Gazan natives? Time will tell.