Trump and the Destruction of Gaza

Will We Be Complicit?

We are now one month into the American nightmare. And the worst fears of Project 2025 are proving to have been overly optimistic. I won’t go into the full-on attack on democratic institutions underway in the land of the red, white, and blue. I am more worried about how the convicted predator from Mar-a-Lago is dismantling the international rule of law.

On his very first day in office, Trump threatened to invade a NATO ally (Greenland). Then, he claimed he was going to take over the Panama Canal. Last week, Canada stared him down over his threat to destroy our national sovereignty - this is the first time in 200 years that Canada has had to consider aggressive annexation from our southern neighbours. And we know this is far from over.

Erratic? Bombastic? Perhaps. But Trump is shaking the Western alliances to their core. And now, he has moved on to more malevolent ground, musing about America’s participation in the mass ethnic cleansing of the battered people of Gaza.

Last week, during his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump floated the idea of forcibly removing Palestinians. The fact that his first invited guest was an indicted war criminal speaks volumes. Who knows? Perhaps Vladimir Putin was busy.

However, rolling out the red carpet for Netanyahu does not necessarily put Trump offside with longstanding American policy. In the weeks after the horrific violence launched by Hamas, world leaders declared their full support for Israel. Bob Woodward’s book War describes how, in the aftermath of October 7, countries across the Middle East and the West were determined to help retrieve the hostages as quickly as possible.

But Netanyahu is a man like Trump. Early in the hostage crisis, it became apparent that he saw other opportunities in the horrific violence being unleashed in Gaza.

Haaretz, the brave dissident publication in Israel, has consistently warned that the real focus of the massive military action was mass ethnic cleansing. In November, an editorial titled “Netanyahu’s Ethnic Cleansing on Display for All to See” laid bare the truth. And yet, for the longest time, the West refused to see the facts. As the UN and other human rights agencies documented the deliberate killing of journalists, attacks on medical facilities, and the relentless targeting of civilians, American, Canadian, and European leaders continued to pretend there wasn’t anything to see here.

But then the International Criminal Court issued massive indictments against Netanyahu for war crimes, including the use of mass starvation as a weapon of war. Reluctantly, the countries that support the international rule of law stated their willingness to arrest Netanyahu if he came within their territories. President Biden was having none of it. Instead, he invited Netanyahu to the White House.

As the death toll mounted, Americans looked to Kamala Harris to steer foreign policy onto a different path. But she failed the test. If one pinpoints the moment Harris lost her moral standing in the 2024 campaign, it was when she sent Bill Clinton to Michigan to mansplain genocide to an increasingly frustrated Arab American voting bloc. Dearborn abandoned the Democrats in droves.

The ceasefire is finally here, but don’t expect much peace for the brutalized people of Gaza. The Israeli army is already preparing for the mass expulsion of upwards of two million people.

And Trump loves the idea. He seems to think this mass charnel house would make an excellent site for luxury hotels.

Will he send soldiers to help drive the expulsion? Who knows. What is clear is that the forced expulsion of civilians is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, forcible deportation of civilians meets the test of a crime against humanity. Trump’s willingness to cross into this territory may not simply reflect his lack of moral character—it hints at a larger destabilization campaign.

In just his first month, Trump has seriously undermined NATO with his threats against Greenland and Denmark. He is leaving Ukraine out on a limb as the fight against Russia grows more desperate. Trump has targeted the International Criminal Court for reprisals. And now, he appears to be aligning the United States with the destruction of the Palestinian people.

And we are just 30 days into this nightmare.

Nobody expects much from the opposition in the United States at this time—they are too shell-shocked from the onslaught of Project 2025.

The question is, what will the rest of the world do?

Will we tiptoe around potential crimes against humanity in the hopes of avoiding a tariff dispute? Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly seems afraid even to use the term ethnic cleansing.

Failure to speak up will embolden reckless and immoral actors. At stake is the erasing of a people.

We are moving into uncharted territory, yet in some ways, we are returning to dark and familiar historical realities. A friend recently told me I needed to reread Hannah Arendt. It’s been years, but I have begun the re-education.

Arendt wrote that what terrified her most about Eichmann was not his bestiality but society’s willingness to normalize his actions as part of government operations:

“From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

The stakes with Trump, Musk, and their gang are dangerously high. The erasure of Gaza’s Palestinian community would raise them even higher.

And so the international community needs to take the Arendt test.

Surely to God, we have to set our standards higher than simply worrying about pissing off a corrupt real estate speculator and his fascist tech-bro sidekick.

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