WE CAN’T say the mask has slipped. US President Donald Trump has never masked his contempt for human rights or international law.
But the US president saying the United States will “take over” the Gaza Strip and expel all its inhabitants is a watershed moment. It is an unambiguous demand for ethnic cleansing on a huge scale.
Trump doesn’t mince words about what he sees happening to Palestinians who refuse to be driven out, saying they have to go to “some place they can live and not die.” Nor is the erasure of the Palestinians to be confined to Gaza; he moots Israel’s annexation of the West Bank too.
It hardly needs saying that if Trump wanted Palestinians to “live and not die,” he would not continue to arm the Israeli war machine that has killed them in their tens of thousands over the past year, or connive, by extending the suspension of funds to the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, at starving them of food and medicine.
The same point applies to the British government.
The mood music from Labour’s Trump apologists is that there’s nothing to see here — it’s just Trump, he says a lot of wild things. Scottish Blairite Jim Murphy says we shouldn’t take him “literally in what he says because he often has no intention of doing it.” Cabinet Minister Steve Reed says there’s no need for a “running commentary” on US presidential statements and we should give Trump credit for securing the current ceasefire.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy likewise refuses to acknowledge the US government’s extremism, saying “Trump is right” to want to rebuild Gaza — a ludicrous evasion of the central part of Trump’s proposal, which is to rebuild it without Palestinians — before reiterating support for the two-state solution.
To say Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is too outlandish to take seriously ignores the brutal fact that the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is already happening.
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Original article at https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/editorial-trumps-ethnic-cleansing-plan-britain-already-complicit
