By International Workers’ Unity-Fourth International
Donald Trump, at a press conference on the occasion of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States, made an aberrant statement that has caused a worldwide uproar. The ultra-right-wing Trump announced the proposed expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza, and their relocation to other countries in the region, specifically mentioning Egypt and Jordan. The head of imperialism said: “The United States will take control of the Gaza Strip…. We will own it.” They could even send troops into Gaza if necessary.
His interventionist statements were so repudiatory and reactionary that even the UN rejected them. So too did the reactionary governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and other members of the Arab League.
Cynically, he said they would turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’, a reference to the French Riviera, the seaside resort, and summer resort of the world’s millionaires. Israeli companies planned large real estate deals while the army destroyed Palestinian property.
Trump’s claims were backed up by the criminal Netanyahu, who with a smile on his face said: ‘the job is not finished’. Israel’s three unmet objectives are destroying Hamas, freeing hostages, and neutralizing Gaza’s threat. At this point, he endorsed Trump’s plan to expel the Palestinians, adding that ‘it’s worth paying attention to that idea’.
An unprecedented act: an American president is pushing for Gaza’s ethnic cleansing. This would make it possible to create Greater Israel, the strategic objective of Zionism, Likud, and Netanyahu’s far-right-wing government.
This would practically cancel the third phase of the ceasefire agreement, which involved the reconstruction of Gaza and the return of the population to their homes. Once again threatening the lives of the Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump dropped the euphemisms and lip service to the two-state project, which had been the road map of the various US and European governments, and brutally, in his typical imperialist ‘bully’ style, proposed the permanent expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza.
He justified this by saying that the strip has been ‘a symbol of destruction and death for so many decades’; that today it is a ‘demolition site’, ‘all the buildings are crumbling’.
He said that the people living in Gaza ‘have been very unlucky’, and that ‘they have lived a terrible existence there’, all this as if this destruction and death had been caused by natural causes, as if the US had nothing to do with it, when the death and calamities of the Gazans have been the consequence of years of bombardments and invasions by the Zionist army financed and armed to the teeth by US imperialism itself and its European allies. It is not chance that has condemned the Palestinians of Gaza to death and destruction.
He brazenly said that the Gazans should be allowed to live somewhere else where they will not be shot and killed. But he did not say that it was precisely his Israeli allies, whose prime minister Netanyahu was standing next to him at the press conference, who shot and killed them.
However, it is the Palestinian people of Gaza who have already responded to Trump with deeds that they do not intend to leave the Strip. For a week now, hundreds of thousands of Gazans, who had to move south in the face of Zionist bombardment and aggression, have been returning to northern Gaza with their families in donkey carts, old cars or on foot with the few possessions they still have. ‘Gaza is our home’, they say openly. Their return is the defeat of Zionism and Trump. This shows the heroic Palestinian resistance.
The IWU-FI urges global mobilisation against Netanyahu’s plan to expel Palestinians from Gaza, a process started with the Nakba in 1948.
It’s crucial for American youth to take to the streets again, as with the university camp-outs, now to reject what Trump said, and to support the genocidal Netanyahu. Arab and Middle Eastern youth should demand their governments support Palestine and sever ties with Israel.
The international movement of solidarity with Palestine must stand up again, as it did to confront and repudiate the genocidal bombings. The IWU-FI calls for the broadest unity of international action to repudiate Trump’s bigoted remarks and to defeat any attempt of military intervention in Gaza and anywhere in the world.
International Workers’ Unity-Fourth International (IWU-FI)
5 February 2025
