The US president told the Western world’s press in Washington on February 4 that the American plan for Gaza is to permanently remove all Palestinians from the territory:

“I don’t think people should be going back to Gaza. I think that Gaza has been very unlucky for them. They’ve lived like hell.”

Asked for clarification on whether the Palestinians would have a right to return to Gaza after its reconstruction, or just be relocated temporarily while work was underway, President Trump said the plan was to build them housing in other countries that was “really beautiful” so they would not want to return:

“It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return. I hope that we could do something where they wouldn’t want to go back. Who would want to go back? They’ve experienced nothing but death and destruction.”

According to the Times of Israel, Steve Witkoff, the President’s envoy, said that: “Gaza today is uninhabitable and will probably be uninhabitable for at least 10 to 15 years.”

The US President said all this with a straight face, with his honoured guest by his side grinning like a Cheshire Cat – the man who was most responsible for visiting “death and destruction” upon the Palestinians and making Gaza “a Hell” and “uninhabitable for at least 10 to 15 years.” He looked very pleased with his work and the endorsement it was being given by the Leader of the Free World.

Asked how many people the US President was talking about removing, Trump replied “All of them.”

The US President then stated that the US would make Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East”:

“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it. We’ll own it. We will be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, 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.”

There have been mixed messages coming from both Trump and his officials about who exactly were the “people of the area” who would benefit from the “unlimited numbers of jobs and housing” US annexation would create. But since the Palestinians were to be entirely cleared and Israeli settlers would have the major incentive to resettle the wasteland left by the IDF the answer was pretty clear and understood across the political spectrum.

Most bizarrely Trump suggested that the clearing and relocation of the 2 million Palestinians would be paid for and facilitated by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar. One wonders how Trump will sell a deal to these states which would involve them taking in hundreds of thousands of angry, discontented people who will undoubtedly organise themselves for revenge attacks on Israel, with all the consequences this will bring for Jordan, Egypt and the Gulf States. Jordan, in particular, would have a demographic problem with a large influx of Palestinians since the Hashemite Arabs are becoming a minority already with all the refugees since 1948.

Trump’s pronouncement was greeted with overwhelming support in Israel. Polls found 97% of Israelis in favour of Trump’s plan and only 3%, described by Israeli commentators as “the extreme left concerned at ethnic cleansing,” opposed.

The Israeli vlogger Shaiel Ben Efraim (Israel Explained), a thoughtful, moderate Zionist, reported:

“Israelis are really sick of the Palestinians and they want to see them gone.

Now as regards the West Bank, Trump said he had been discussing it with many people, including settlers, who, he said, had represented themselves well. Trump said “we haven’t taken a position on it yet” but he’s been talking to a lot of people who want Israel to annex the West Bank, but he hasn’t yet made a decision on it.

If he makes the decision to allow Israel to annex the West Bank what we could be seeing is a dramatic attempt to solve totally and permanently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by changing it demographically. If 2 million Palestinians are removed from Gaza, Jews will have a much bigger majority.

Right now, they have a minority, but this will become a majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That would make for a permanent annexation and integration of the West Bank into Israel, especially once you have that precedent of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. So, you could see, at least partially, a cleansing from the West Bank guaranteeing permanent Jewish majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and seeing a complete change in the conflict to what would basically be complete Jewish dominance over the historical land of Israel/Palestine.

Really you couldn’t think of a more dramatic press conference than the one we’ve just seen!”

This gets to the whole nub of the issue: the struggle for Israel is nothing to do with October 7 or the hostages or a war on enemy militias. If that had been the case Israel would have begun its war with the selective assassination of the Hamas leadership and the successful pager operation against Hezbollah. But it did not. It did a year of carpet bombing the civilian population of Gaza in its homes, schools and hospitals and pretended these were all Hamas bases. The clear objective was to make Gaza unliveable.

It is all about demographics and has involved Israel, since its foundation, reducing the size of the Palestinian population, by one means or another, until it is an insignificant minority or, ideally, does not exist at all.

There is scepticism in Israel about the full feasibility of Trump’s plan, and his actual willingness to carry it through, but Bloomberg has reported a developing IDF plan that describes the logistics necessary to remove a few hundred thousand Palestinians, with Trump’s blessing, that will start a flood. Shaiel Ben Efraim is suggesting that Israel has the intention of applying intense military pressure, through the provoking of events in the coming weeks, that will encourage this relocation. Opposition to this within the overstretched IDF, concerned about a serious situation developing in the West Bank, has been informed that the relocation will be pursued relentlessly, and it is an opportunity not to be missed with the US President having put on it his Imprimatur. If Trump cannot do it, Israel will do it for him and regardless of consequences.   

It is all about Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This aim is something dear to the hearts of practically all Israelis, whether it involves extensive ethnic cleansing or genocide.

The President stating as US policy the clear intention of America organising a very straightforward and overt ethnic cleansing operation, involving around 2 million people, has produced a complete liberal meltdown in the US and the West.

Their discomfort lies in America being unmasked – revealing the true nature of the beast whose origins lie in the most successful programme of ethnic cleansing and genocide in history – and its willingness to openly assist Israel in its current genocidal objectives.

While the Western liberals have engaged in ritual hand wringing over Trump’s declared programme of ethnic cleansing, that most alarmingly puts no distance between genocidal Israel and liberal America, it must surely dawn on them that their own position in insisting on describing the most recent episode of attempted genocide as “Israel’s right to defend itself”, has provided Israel with the moral weight to carry out the mass killing. And Samantha Power who had won literary prizes, made a career and lots of money from chronicling genocides, remained silent, going off to Armenia to cry about a volutary exodus from Karabakh.

Early on in the present conflict, it was reported that Biden’s Secretary of State Blinken was trying to persuade al-Sisi to let the population of Gaza move to Egypt. It should be stated that Israel, at this point, before Trump’s declaration of intent, was operating a no-leave scheme from Gaza managed by strict use of permits. It was the Biden administration which was driving the scheme behind closed doors that his successor unleashed on the public.

Biden had been called by Netanyahu and asked to communicate with the Egyptians and Jordanians to get them to take the Palestinians as an alternative to Israel’s military operations against them that was concerning Washington. Al-Sisi, however, denounced the idea and warned that anyone trying to cross into Egypt without permission would be shot. Jordan replied that it already had millions of Palestinians who had been driven from the territory on which the state of Israel had been built and it could hardly take anymore without being destabilised. Blinken/Biden then shelved the idea, in favour of doing little or nothing but supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself” by reducing the size of the Palestinian population through aerial bombardment, starvation, disease and general harassment.

But this scheme could not be shelved forever, because it coincides with the general Israeli objective of demographic reduction, which is its ultimate aim.

Israel has failed to achieve any of the objectives it declared 15 months ago: It failed to get its hostages back outside of any deals with Hamas; and it has failed to destroy Hamas, who have looked well turned out and well-armed and in control of Gaza on Israel’s TV screens when they are handing over the hostages.

Trump is now seeking to give a helping hand to Israel, which has backed itself into a corner by failing to win the war in the time allotted to it by Washington. This had been made clear to Netanyahu during his last guest appearance in Washington when he was given a rapturous reception by Congress but told firmly, behind closed doors, that he had until the Presidential inauguration of Trump (or Harris) to complete his work. This information was leaked to the press to make sure the message was fully understood by all, particularly those in Israel who might want to carry on regardless. 

So now Trump has come upfront, publicly backing the Israeli Plan A – extensive ethnic cleansing by making Gaza simply unliveable. By implication, Plan B is genocide, and that was never the preferred option, given the implications this would have in the legal and moral spheres, which still count to a degree – particularly with regard to US reputation and soft power in the world against its enemies.

It is understood that if ethnic cleansing is not achieved, Israel will continue to have an unsustainable situation on the territory it controls, with too many millions of disenfranchised whom they cannot enfranchise for fear of demographic overwhelming of the Iron Wall built by Zionism against such a development.

The war will be strategically lost by Israel without ethnic cleansing. Hamas is still standing and ready and willing to continue resistance if required, and perhaps 95 per cent of the Palestinian population has survived the onslaught and are determined on returning to what is left of their homes, despite everything that was thrown at them for 15 months.

Only a continuation and ramping up of the destruction, starvation and disease is likely to drive them out. And how would that be justified in the absence of war? Could the Nazis have achieved what they did in solving “the Jewish problem” in Europe without a war? At least they had the decency not to proclaim their objectives to the world at press conferences.

The liberal West – politicians and media instruments – have been keen to utter their gasps of horror at what the President of the US is suggesting. It has thus tried to treat the Trump affair as an aberration, the sole creation of a madman, who has “overturned the whole US policy of 70 years in one press conference” according to the BBC’s North America editor, Sarah Smith (daughter of former Labour leader). This diversionary line is from the general anti-Trump instinct of the liberal establishment, represented in the BBC by Smith and Justin Webb whose “Americast” reports have been long propagandist efforts for the Biden/Harris campaigns aimed at keeping America the Good.

The BBC “fact checkers” have been employed almost exclusively against Russia and Donald Trump. Never have they dared to challenge the lying statements of the Israeli government over October 7 and after.

The powers-that-be at the BBC, knowing that the public nature of the Trump/Netanyahu ethnic cleansing joint conference makes denial impossible, have been happy to divert Israel criticism into Trump criticism, a routine pursuit that is safe from any charges of “anti-Semitism” against the BBC from Israeli diplomats and lobbyists.

And the very same people who expressed concern and anguish at the prospect of news of Palestinian suffering derailing Kamala Harris’ campaign and letting Trump back into the White House now cry crocodile tears about the awful things President Trump might do to the poor Palestinians, whose plight they vigorously suppressed in the interests of liberal America. “Hush Up!” said Kamala to those who would queer her pitch. But for those US Democrats who hushed up for Kamala it is now too late. They have colluded in the making of the situation that has enabled what Trump/Netanyahu are using to advantage.

It is most inconvenient that the visiting of mass “death and destruction” upon the Palestinians and the making of Gaza “a Hell” and “uninhabitable for at least 10 to 15 years” has all been achieved by Israel under the watch of the Biden administration. As we have often said, without the US acting as Israel’s quartermaster and providing moral cover for it, what Israel has been doing is impossible.

The Washington Post reported on March 30 last year:

“The Biden administration in recent days quietly authorised the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that threatened the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter. The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. These officials, like some others, spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because recent authorizations have not been disclosed publicly.”

This subterfuge came as a result of two of Biden’s own government agencies informing him that Israel was deliberately blocking humanitarian aid to the blockaded Palestinians in Gaza, something which required him, under US law, to immediately suspend weapon shipments to Tel Aviv. However, Biden/Blinken just carried on regardless in their support of the Israeli killing spree.

What Biden/Blinken attempted was damage limitation to US reputation, pleading with Israel to minimise its overt slaughter of the innocent while sending signals, in the nicest possible way, that its patience was not inexhaustible – although it really was, until the very end.

And the reporting of the civilian slaughter the US was facilitating was minimised and tightly managed to protect the West as much as possible from the collateral damage in what Israel was doing, while the US finance and military aid continued to flow, apart from a brief interruption aimed at virtue signalling.

The fact of the matter is the problem that faces President Trump was made for him during the administration of Biden/Blinken.

It is indeed a real problem – around 2 million people cannot hope to survive in a wasteland of debris and unexploded US ordnance delivered by the IDF, with no food, fuel or shelter. The creation of that problem for the Palestinian population was the Israeli intention all along after October 7, using a crisis as an opportunity, after the West gave them carte blanche to do what they must, as part of “Israel’s right to defend itself” instead of restraining them. The opportunity had presented itself of decimating Hezbollah, perhaps even Iran, and not just to “mow the lawn” but, this time, to pull up the roots for a Final Solution of the Palestinian question, completing the Nakba begun in 1948.

What is Trump really up to?

Shahid Bolsen is a unique intellectual who wishes to promote Arab agency by holding out the hope of a better future for the Islamic world through Eurasian development.

It has been suggested by Bolsen that Trump’s plan is perhaps a bargaining tactic aimed at both Israel and the Arab states. Bolsen notes that what distinguished Trump’s position from that of Biden/Blinken was his asking the Egyptians and Jordanians if they had any better ideas than his plan.

Biden’s only alternatives were the ethnic cleansing Plan A or the attempted genocide Plan B. Bolsen suggests that Trump wants the issue resolved and has put it to the Arab states that he is going to go along with Netanyahu’s plan – unless they can propose something else to him. He is telling the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council, comprising Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) to propose a functional alternative to Zionist ethnic cleansing, supported by American power.

Bolsen speculates that Trump anticipates such a proposal will probably involve Gulf states funding the reconstruction and redevelopment of Gaza with prime real estate on the beach front going to Jarod Kushner’s Affinity, his son-in-law’s company, along with the Gulf elite (Kushner is from an Orthodox Jewish background and was one of the driving forces behind the Abraham Accords).

Bolsen is not enthusiastic about the potential of a GCC/Kushner/Trump deal in which the Palestinians would be provided with basic apartments, but a degree of safety and security from the Zionists. He sees a situation in which they would be under the future administration of the Palestinian Authority, acting as an instrument of the GCC. And the last thing that this “Riviera of the Middle East” would need would be Zionist settlers.

Bolsen recognises that such a scheme would give plentiful work to local Palestinians, who used to work in construction in Israel and have the skills for it. And he suggests that only one state in the world could accomplish such a huge logistical challenge as the reconstruction of Gaza within a short time, with the population remaining largely in situ, and that would be China.

Of course, for such a deal to be realised the ceasefire would need to be sustained and the hostages returned, with pressure taken off Netanyahu through the hardliners being fed the fantasy of US doing their dirty work for them. Alternatively, Trump could force the removal of Netanyahu – a much more straightforward task than some of the other proposals he has made. That, with the main obstacle to the return of the hostages removed, would clear the decks for a peace plan involving the Gulf States, the US and realists in Israel.

Ted Sasson, in an informative piece in the Times of Israel, has reinforced Shahin’s Bolsen’s estimation of Trump’s intention:

“Donald Trump does not want to own Gaza any more than he intends to invade Panama or impose punitive tariffs on Mexico or Canada. The US president is deal-making and intends to do so from strong starting positions. In the case of Gaza, the takeover-makeover fantasy he described during Tuesday’s White House press briefing has four audiences.

The first is Hamas and the message is: Return the hostages and leave the Gaza Strip. If you don’t, we will transfer every Palestinian from Gaza until we get to you. (“It will make us somewhat more violent,” if all the hostages are not returned, Trump warned.)

The second is the Arab states that Trump needs to pressure Hamas to exit the scene and provide a plan for Gaza’s security and reconstruction. To the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia the message is: Do your part now or the United States will take actions that enrage the Arab public and destabilize the region.

The third is the Israeli far right, including Netanyahu’s coalition partner Betzalel Smotrich. Trump is telling the Israeli right: Good things will come if you support the ceasefire with Hamas through the second stage of hostage negotiations. Gaza will be redeveloped for settlement by “world people” which presumably includes Jews. And not only that. The Trump team is reconsidering the United States’ stance on Israeli annexation of Judea and Samaria, the far right’s ultimate wish. (“People do like the idea,” Trump teased.)

Finally, the fourth audience is the Republican party base. Trump is reminding his voters that the Biden administration delayed weapons shipments and distanced the United States from Israel, thereby emboldening Hamas. As Netanyahu put it, “when the other side sees daylight between us, and occasionally over the last few years to put it mildly they saw daylight, then it’s more difficult.” Trump will allow no daylight between the United States and Israel.

Trump’s endgame is partly about Gaza but not only. He wants to secure both phases of the ceasefire, end the war, and bring the hostages home. He also intends to bring Saudi Arabia into the Abraham Accords through normalization with Israel. For these goals, Trump’s seemingly offhand remark about Israeli annexation of the West Bank is significant. Trump said that his team is working on the issue and will make an announcement over the next four weeks… That time frame keeps Netanyahu’s coalition together through the negotiation of the second phase of the hostage deal. It also piles up the bargaining chips for a grand deal with Saudi Arabia. The offer to the kingdom: Drop the demand for a Palestinian state, and the United States will desist from occupying Gaza and green-lighting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.”

In summary, Trump has concluded that the two states solution is a dead end. It has no momentum and there is little will to actually carry it forward. He is now using the fait accompli – the turning of Gaza into an uninhabitable wasteland – as the pivot point for a new dispensation. This will involve emptying the territory of the problem, as he sees it, taking control of the area and remaking it so that future peace and security is possible.

It is all very logical and very American. After all, wasn’t the removal of the problem of the native populations in America and other places the key to the development, prosperity and power of the United States and the West generally – How the West was Won.

It should be finally noted that the Hamas provocation of October 7, even it results in the completion of the Nakba, has been amazingly successful at exposing both Israel for what it is and the US for what it is – behind its liberal mask. And it has come at a time when the ultra-liberalism produced by the liberal elite in the West is coming under unprecedented attack by the Leader of the Free World, the US President, and his powerful allies in the powerful and influential tech world.

It is noticeable that the forces of woke and anti-woke in the West now share common attributes. This is, perhaps, only natural since the anti-woke are often lapsed liberals themselves who have recoiled at the results of ultra-liberalism. Elon Musk being a case in point.

The Woke have remade the conservatives, the traditional ballast of Western society, in their own image. They exhibit the same hysterical debasement of language that leads to the obscuring of definition and meaning. The rhetorical exaggerations of the President of the US and the Leader of the Opposition in the UK are the other side of the coin to the transformation of everyday language by the Woke. And this ranges across the whole gamut of social life from weather reports and “climate science”, to “misogyny” and sexual politics, to “hate crimes” and ethnic politics, and of course, “anti-Semitism.”

In the end the result is a completely incompetent leadership of the West, exemplified in the person of the current UK Prime Minister, populated by shallow careerists on the make, who gain position through the satisfaction of gender and ethnic entitlements, or the ability to pay lip-service to such. This has replaced the hard-knocks of life experience and the proving of competence for leadership through doing, that sifted those out who were unfit for high office, leaving those who were tried and trusted to be statesmen or women.

But one reaps what one sows! Out of the ultraliberal Woke came the counter Woke. What was sown in the US and what then spread across the West has reaped President Trump, for a second time, and now an effort at reimagining not just the US but the world – not at all to the liking of those who thought they were progress itself.

Henry Kissinger once said: “Moral purpose was the key element of motivation behind every American policy and every war in the twentieth century.” That is why it was inconceivable that someone openly without moral compass should be commander-in-chief in the White House, disabling the moral impulse that motivates the expansion of American power and influence.

Can American power be effectively sustained on the basis of no moral purpose, through unpredictable disruption of the established order, naked threats of dire consequences for all who stand in Washington’s way in the manner of the small man who is confronted by the ruthless developer?

Can chaos and disruption be the precursors of the new world?

The Islamic world has its certainties of existence, as have other traditional forms of existence. Through this there is contentment, even in great adversity and disaster. But the Western world exists on few certainties except the certainty of its own moral superiority, inevitable progress and the expectation of a better material standard of life for the future. There is great anxiety now over the smallest disruption to routine in the West and Trump and Musk are buccaneers of a former era, that of President McKinley, determined to disrupt the constraints that bring the few certainties to Western existence, and all for the benefit of America alone.

That is at the heart of the issue that is troubling the Western liberals, from America to Europe right now, and provoking a meltdown.

We can expect little resistance in the West to stop President Trump in his global wrecking spree. Europe, which had begun to believe it was something apart from the US and had developed economic relations with Russia to give it an economic edge, has been successfully cut down by Washington and reduced to putty in its hands by events starting with the coup in Ukraine in 2014. It is now in a panic about what America First means as Trump starts to look serious about his mission.

America has not only been unmasked but unleashed on the World.

The destiny of the liberal West now lies with its enemies because the only independent substance that exists in the World lies outside it.