Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump Evan Vucci/AP
The quotes from President Donald Trump’s press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do not do justice to the obscenity of the spectacle. An American strongman, who was indicted in multiple jurisdictions for trying to steal an election, casually proposing potential war crimes. An Israeli strongman, who is indicted at home for corruption and wanted abroad for crimes against humanity, listening with glee.
In the lead-up to Netanyahu’s visit, Trump had suggested that he wanted roughly 2 million Gazans forcibly removed from their homes so they could be transferred to neighboring Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan. Forced mass migrations of Palestinians from their land is at the heart of their decadeslong struggle. Such a move would be a clear violation of international law.
On Wednesday, Trump went even further: Not only did he support permanently displacing Palestinians from Gaza, but he also said he wanted the United States to assume control of the area and take a “long-term ownership position.”
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too,” Trump said during his press conference with Netanyahu. “We’ll own it…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.”
To help justify a US takeover of Gaza, Trump described the enclave as a “demolition site” where “virtually every building is down.” Rather than live in a “really very unlucky” place that has been a symbol of “death and destruction for so many decades,” Trump suggested that Gazans could live in an unspecified and currently nonexistent “beautiful” community.
“This could be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth,” Trump said of the places where Palestinians could be transferred. “It could be one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12—it could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site. But the people will be able to live in comfort and peace, and we’ll make sure something really spectacular is done.”
As Trump spoke, Netanyahu stood across from him. The president made no effort to connect Gaza’s status as a “demolition site” with the prime minister’s actions or the United States’ decision to supply many of the weapons that made the devastation possible. Nor did he have any interest in talking about why Gaza has been so “unlucky.” The wars and devastating Israeli blockade of Gaza that preceded October 7, 2023, were events, it seemed, over which humans had no control. Neither were the United States nor Israel at all to blame for the more than 61,000 people—including more than 17,000 children—in Gaza who have been killed since.
The reaction to Trump’s proposal abroad has been near-universal condemnation. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the plan amounts to “ethnic cleansing” and could make a Palestinian state impossible forever. Saudi Arabia, the key player in both Trump and former President Joe Biden’s ill-fated efforts to secure a Middle East peace deal, quickly made clear that its support for the “establishment of a Palestinian state is firm and unwavering.” The statement released by the Foreign Ministry of Saudi Arabia stressed an “unequivocal rejection” of any efforts to “displace the Palestinian people from their land.” Jordan and Egypt are similarly opposed, as are France, Germany, and Spain.
Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, told Reuters that the plan “would be a moral abomination.” Shakir stressed: “International humanitarian law forbids the forced displacement of the population of an occupied territory. When such forced displacement is widespread, it can amount to a war crime or a crime against humanity.”
Trump’s extreme rhetoric about taking over Gaza might obscure the things he already is doing to further immiserate Palestinians. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order that stopped US funding for UNRWA, the United Nations agency responsible for Palestinians, which is the most important humanitarian organization in Gaza. He and Elon Musk are also gutting the US Agency for International Development, which has provided more than $2 billion in humanitarian assistance to Palestinians since October 2023.
Trump sees the world through the lens of real estate deals, not morality or international law. That was obvious in the press conference. “We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” he explained about his Gaza proposal. “And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so—this could be so magnificent.” His rhetoric was in line with that of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has gushed about how Gaza’s “waterfront property could be very valuable.”
When asked who would live in this new Mediterranean paradise, Trump described something akin to a modern-day free port in the vein of Monaco or Dubai. “I envision world people living there, the world’s people,” the president said. “I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. And I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world will be there.”
The alternative, by which Trump meant Gaza remaining in control of the Palestinians, would “never work.” It was time instead to take advantage of an “opportunity” that “could be phenomenal.” Specifically, removing Palestinians.
Trump’s proposal is made even more abhorrent by the fact that about two-thirds of Palestinians in Gaza are already refugees. Most are there because settlers forced them off their land and never allowed them to return after the state of Israel came into existence. During the most recent war in Gaza, those same refugees have been displaced again—often multiple times. Now, Trump is proposing to uproot Gazans once more and render them even more isolated over the objections of essentially the entire world.
Trump frames his plans as a matter of aesthetics and hygiene. He wants to “clean out that whole thing” and make it a “riviera.” Instead of a “demolition site,” Gazans would be living somewhere “beautiful.”
His rhetoric emphasizes the cleansing in ethnic cleansing, a term that, despite all its horrific connotations today, was originally intended as a euphemism. As a group of academics explained in a 2007 journal article, Serbian President and genocider Slobodan Milosevic was the first politician to use the phrase to describe the barbarity he oversaw. It helped to obscure the unconscionable. The better word for his actions, the American and Israeli scholars wrote, was genocide.
