If Trump tries to take over Gaza, Palestinians will die where they stand
A Palestinian woman and children sit amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on 5 February 2025
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 5 February 2025:
We have all called out former US President Joe Biden’s role in acting as the quartermaster general for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. And rightly so.
But Biden did more than enable a war to continue for 15 months. He laid the foundation for something much worse to follow. It was not just a case of impotence; it was malice aforethought.
That has now been put into words and policy by his successor, Donald Trump. Some, particularly those who voted for Trump in the swing states, have been lulled into thinking that after the great horrors of what happened under Biden’s watch, Trump could only do better. They were lulled into thinking that Trump was sincere in his desire to shut down the war in Gaza, even for the wrong reasons.
At his inauguration last month, Trump surrounded himself with the families of the hostages. His Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, had forced the ceasefire deal over the line in the first place, so they assumed Trump would pile pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to carry on with the hostage and prisoner exchange.
How wrong they all were.
Many of those who voted for Trump did not take seriously the genocidal implications of his wish to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Eastern Mediterranean, nor indeed his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s musings about all that “valuable waterfront property”. Nor did they realise that Trump forms policy on the basis of the last person he talks to.
Clear mandate
When The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s idea to take over Gaza caught even his closest aides by surprise, that is what Trump’s ad-libbing on foreign policy means. Trump’s ad-libbing must be puzzling even his closest supporters. He ran on a ticket of stopping all the wars Biden engaged in. Just weeks into his term of office, he is not only giving a mandate to Israel to continue its war on Gaza, but he is owning it too.
After just one meeting with Netanyahu, the real-estate-developer-in-chief had pledged to take Gaza over as US property, to turn a “demolition site” into paradise. He said he would develop it for the “people of the Middle East”; in other words, for Israeli settlers too.