The Electronic Intifada 13 February 2025
US president Donald Trump gestures after meeting Jordan’s King Abdullah on 11 February 2025.
CNP/PolarisListening to US President Donald Trump’s insane mumblings about expelling all Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt, Jordan or anywhere else – repeated yet again on 11 February when meeting Jordan’s King Abdullah – I was reminded of Adolf Hitler’s infamous speech at the Reichstag on 30 January, 1939.
It was a few weeks after the Evian Conference, called to resolve the terrible problem of Jewish refugees from the German Reich in July 1938. Hitler taunted the leaders of the West, and especially of the US, who refused to take any refugees.
“I ask them, I say, are you prepared to harbor among you those who have poisoned the wells of Germany, of the whole Christian world? Gladly would we give each and every one of them a railroad pass and a thousand-mark note for pocket money to be rid of them.”
In many ways, Trump out-Hitlered Hitler in his press conference with Netanyahu last Wednesday. Like Hitler before him, he has attacked the most-maligned group on earth, which now happens to be the Palestinian people.
Instead of rebuilding Gaza for the traumatised and homeless survivors of US munitions delivered by a state falsely calling itself “Jewish,” Trump intends to “take over Gaza” and rebuild it as the “Riviera of the Middle East”, echoing Netanyahu’s plan of last year. To do that, he intends to force some Arab countries to take in the surviving Palestinians, and remove them from their homeland.
The deal of the century, indeed.
War on law
In a recent article co-written with Ramzi Nasir, we have proposed that while the Palestinians rebuild Gaza so that its people have somewhere to live, they should be housed in Israel. After all, this is where most of them came from, when it was still called Palestine, and this is the state that destroyed Gaza and should bear a burden for its reconstruction.
But the American emperor has better ideas, ideas that could also, incidentally, help his son-in-law make a lot of money.
The emperor has decided that he has the power to oppose not just the people of Gaza – the most wronged population on earth, harmed with the products of American capitalism in the hands of genocidal Israel – but all the people of Palestine, whose rights he denies, in order to turn their land into a Zionist stronghold of America.
Buying into the colonial agenda of Netanyahu, Trump has declared war not just on Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, but on the rest of the world, on the UN and on the very concept and practice of international law and legality itself.
The most powerful empire in the world’s history, in other words, has declared war on Palestinians and Palestine, a people and a land that have been targeted for over a century, not just by Israel and the US, but by the whole West.
This is not just a brutal act of defying law and justice – it is an act of defying humanity and history, of defying hope for a better world in which naked power should not enslave whole countries or ethnically cleanse millions at will and use genocide to threaten the rest into bending before its power.
Against the rest
The United States is not rising from the ashes to be great again; it is using one of the weakest communities on earth to demonstrate that its declining power is still able to hurt and punish those who dare to wish for freedom and human rights.
It declares the rule of the West against the rest.
Palestine, like South Africa before it, is a symbol of justice denied, of rights negated, of hopes crushed. By targeting the people of Gaza, Trump is denying not just law, justice and common humanity, but the ideas and ideals that led to America’s constitutional democracy.
Let us never forget, however, that the rise of the US was the result of one of the most terrifying genocides in history – a continent-wide destruction of the indigenous people of North America – as well as the enslavement of people brought from another continent, Africa.
The latest act of aggression by Trump is a cruel throwback.
Today’s genocide, made possible by the funding, arms and active support of the declining West, especially the US and EU, is intended as an object lesson for the rest of humanity: You either follow orders, or you perish horribly.
This is a huge challenge to humanity and its future. It cannot be ignored. The coming together of the richest man in the world and the Zionized tyrant of capitalist hubris is a call for action that must be heeded. Islamophobia is being used to attack Palestine as a symbol of struggle for Arabs and Muslims. But this will not end with Palestine, or Panama, or Greenland or Canada and Mexico. This is a global threat to all of us.
Trump has now tossed a glove into the international arena. Humanity must rise to meet that challenge, and must unite against the tyranny of raw power. If this challenge to our humanity, values and fragile system of international law and principles of justice is ignored, we shall all end up as serfs to the declining power – and the declining rationality – of the West.
Front and center
Jews must be front and center. Our long history tells us clearly that avoiding or ignoring such deluded tyrants exacts a terrible price, paid by whole continents. We cannot afford to be silent at such a testing time when Israel is acting in our name. We must step forward and join the rest of humanity in the quest for justice.
Trump’s solution is more crime. The real solution is very different – getting rid of the Zionist colonial project, and establishing a free democracy in Palestine where the Awda – the return of refugees – can happen with justice and equality from the river to the sea.
Those Israeli Jews refusing to live in equality, peace and justice with the Palestinians, should be invited by Trump to live with racists like them in the US. They have no place in Palestine.
Instead of being expelled, the people of Gaza should be welcomed back to their land, crossing into Israel as free citizens of the future Republic of Palestine, while Gaza is rebuilt by Palestinians for Palestinians.
This will require the UN to correct its terrible mistake in 1947, which cleared the way for the Nakba and destroyed Palestine. It will require the suspension of Israel from the General Assembly, as was done to Apartheid South Africa in 1974.
If this was right in 1974 in the case of South Africa, it is a thousand times more justified in the case of Palestine – under unlawful occupation, and suffering an apartheid form of rule along with ethnic cleansing and genocide. It will require other actions, such as a UN protection force to guarantee the lives of Palestinians in the transitional period.
None of us are free until Palestine is free, as we were told by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Nelson Mandela.
Never before has the wisdom of their words been as clear as it is today.
Prof. Haim Bresheeth-Zabner is a Professorial Research Associate at SOAS. His most recent book is An Army Like No Other: How the IDF Made a Nation.
