WE CAN’T say the mask has slipped. US President Donald Trump has never masked his contempt for human rights or international law.
But the US president saying the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel all its inhabitants is a watershed moment. It is an unambiguous demand for ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
Trump doesn’t mince words about what he sees happening to Palestinians who refuse to be driven out, saying they have to go to “some place they can live and not die.” Nor is the erasure of the Palestinians to be confined to Gaza; he moots Israel’s annexation of the West Bank too.
It hardly needs saying that if Trump wanted Palestinians to “live and not die,” he would not continue to arm the Israeli war machine that has killed them in their tens of thousands over the past year, or connive, by extending the suspension of funds to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, at starving them of food and medicine.
The same point applies to the British government.
The mood music from Labour’s Trump apologists is that there’s nothing to see here — it’s just Trump, he says a lot of wild things. Scottish Blairite Jim Murphy says we shouldn’t take him “literally in what he says because he often has no intention of doing it.” Cabinet Minister Steve Reed says there’s no need for a “running commentary” on US presidential statements and we should give Trump credit for securing the current ceasefire.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy likewise refuses to acknowledge the US government’s extremism, saying “Trump is right” to want to rebuild Gaza — a ludicrous evasion of the central part of Trump’s proposal, which is to rebuild it without Palestinians — before reiterating support for the two-state solution.
To say Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is too outlandish to take seriously ignores the brutal fact that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is already happening.
It has been happening, across the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, for decades, and Israel is enabled to pursue it through military, economic and diplomatic support from the US-led “free world,” including Britain.
So Lammy should not be able to get away with more lip service to a future sovereign Palestine that Britain actively blocks. Every Labour MP must be put on the spot: when will Britain recognise a Palestinian state, previously Labour policy? What will it do, practically, to prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by a genocidal Israeli government empowered by the United States?
Maps are being redrawn, and not just in the Middle East, where Israel is expanding into Syria as well as Palestine. Wars to conquer territory are back: they rage in Ukraine, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and recently saw the Armenians ethnically cleansed from Nagorno-Karabakh. Just because we are not used to US presidents talking as Trump does, we should not dismiss the possibility that he is serious about Gaza, about Greenland, about the Panama Canal.
We cannot separate a “good” Nato from a “bad” United States either. Nato is the military extension of US imperialism: it places European armies, and our own, in structures under ultimate US military command. The case against Nato, and against our alliance with an erratic and increasingly aggressive superpower, grows stronger by the day. Britain needs an independent foreign policy.
And we need the freedom to fight for one. Those who said there was no need to march for Palestine now a ceasefire is in place must eat their words. The cause of Palestine is more urgent than ever, and the arrests of demonstrators and obstruction of marches must be beaten back.
The next national demonstration for Palestine is on February 15. It should be a huge show of defiance against Trump and his lackeys in the British government.
