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.)