Trump’s innovation is not the threat to ‘clean out’ Gaza. It is dropping a long-standing aim to dress up Palestinian expulsion as a peace plan

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intention from day one of his “revenge” attack on Gaza, launched 16 months ago, was either ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza.

His ally in genocide for the next 15 months was former US President Joe Biden. His ally in ethnic cleansing is current US President Donald Trump.

Biden provided the 2,000lb bombs for the genocide. Trump is reportedly providing an even larger munition – the 11-ton MOAB, or massive ordnance air blast bomb, with a mile-wide radius – to further incentivise the population’s exodus.

Biden claimed that Israel was helping the people of Gaza by “carpet bombing” the enclave – in his words – to “eradicate” Hamas. Trump claims he is helping the people of Gaza by “cleaning them out” – in his words – from the resulting “demolition site”.

Biden called the destruction of 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings “self defence”. Trump calls the imminent destruction of the remaining 30 percent “all hell breaking loose”.

Biden claimed to be “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” while encouraging Israel to continue the murder of children month after month.

Trump claims to have negotiated a ceasefire, even as he has turned a blind eye to Israel violating the terms of that ceasefire: by continuing to fire on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank; by refusing entry into Gaza of vital aid trucks; by allowing in almost none of the promised tents or mobile homes; by denying many hundreds of maimed Palestinians treatment abroad; by blocking the return of Palestinians to their homes in northern Gaza; and by failing to engage with the second phase of the ceasefire negotiations.

Those Israeli violations, although widely reported by the media as Hamas “claims”, were confirmed to the New York Times by three Israeli officials and two mediators.

In other words, Israel has broken the agreement on every count – and Trump has stood foursquare behind this most favoured client state every bit as much as Biden did before him.

‘Hell breaking loose’

As Israel knew only too well in breaching the ceasefire, Hamas only ever had one point of leverage to try to enforce the agreement: to refuse to release more hostages. Which is precisely what the Palestinian group announced last Monday it would do until Israel began honouring the agreement.

In a familiar double act, Israel and Washington then put on a show of mock outrage.

Trump lost no time escalating the stakes dramatically. He gave Israel – or maybe the US, he was unclear – the green light to “let hell break out”, presumably meaning the resumption of the genocide.

This will happen not only if Hamas refuses to free the three scheduled hostages by the deadline of noon this Saturday. Trump has insisted that Hamas is now expected to release all of the hostages.

The US president said he would no longer accept “dribs and drabs” being released over the course of the six-week, first phase of the ceasefire. In other words, Trump is violating the very terms of the initial ceasefire his own team negotiated.

Clearly, neither Netanyahu nor Trump have been trying to save the agreement. They are working tirelessly to blow it up.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported as much last weekend. Israeli sources revealed that Netanyahu’s goal was to “derail” the ceasefire before it could reach the second stage when Israeli troops are supposed to fully withdraw from the enclave and reconstruction begin.

“Once Hamas realizes there won’t be a second stage, they may not complete the first,” a source told the paper.

Hamas insisted on a gradual release of hostages precisely to buy time, knowing that Israel would be keen to restart the slaughter as soon as it got the hostages home.

The Palestinians of Gaza are back to square one.

Either accept that they will be ethnically cleansed so that Trump and his billionaire friends can cash in on reinventing the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East”, paid for by stealing the revenues from Gaza’s gas fields, or face a return to the genocide.

Quiet part out loud

As should have been clear, Netanyahu only agreed to Washington’s “ceasefire” because it was never real. It was a pause so the US could recalibrate from a Biden genocide narrative rooted in the language of “humanitarianism” and “security” to Trump’s far more straightforward tough-guy act.

Now it’s all about the “art of the deal” and real-estate development opportunities.

But of course Trump’s plan to “own” Gaza and then “clean it out” has left his allies in Europe – in truth, his satraps – squirming in their seats.

As ever, Trump has a disturbing habit of saying the quiet part out loud. Of tearing away the already-battered veneer of western respectability. Of making everyone look bad.

The truth is that over 15 months Israel failed to achieve either of its stated objectives in Gaza – eradicating Hamas and securing the return of the hostages – because neither was ever really the goal.

Even Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, had to concede that Israel’s mass slaughter had served only to recruit as many fighters to Hamas as it had killed.

And Israeli military whistleblowers revealed to the website +972 last week that Israel had killed many of its hostages by using indiscriminate US-supplied bunker-buster bombs.

These bombs had not only generated huge blast areas but also served effectively as chemical weapons, flooding Hamas’ tunnels with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating the hostages.

The indifference of the Israeli leadership to the hostages’ fate was confirmed by Israel’s former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in an interview with Israeli TV Channel 12.

He admitted that the army had invoked the so-called Hannibal directive during Hamas’ breakout of Gaza on 7 October 2023, allowing soldiers to kill Israelis rather than risk letting them be taken hostage by the Palestinian group.

These matters, which throw a different light on Israel’s actions in Gaza, have, of course, been almost completely blanked out by the western establishment media.

Damage limitation

Israel’s plan from the outset was the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And now Trump is making that explicit.

So explicit, in fact, that the media have been forced to go into frenzied damage-limitation mode, employing one of the most intense psy-ops against their own publics on record.

Every euphemism under the sun has been resorted to to avoid making clear that Trump and Israel are preparing to ethnically cleanse whoever’s left of the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

The BBC speaks of “resettling“, “relocating” and “moving away” the population of Gaza.

In other reports, Palestinians are inexplicably on the brink of “leaving”.

The New York Times refers to ethnic cleansing positively as Trump’s “development plan”, while Reuters indifferently calls it “moving out” Gaza’s population.

Western capitals and their compliant media have been put in this uncomfortable position because Washington’s client states in the Middle East have refused to play ball with Israel and Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan.

Despite the ever-mounting slaughter, Egypt has refused to open its short border with Gaza to let the bombed, starved population pour into neighbouring Sinai.

There was, of course, never any question of Israel being expected to allow Gaza’s families to return to the lands from which they were originally expelled, at gunpoint, in 1948 in order to create a self-declared Jewish state.

Then, as now, the western powers colluded in Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations. This is the historical context western media prefer to gloss over – even on the rare occasions when they concede that there is any relevant background other than a presumed Palestinian barbarism. Instead the media resort to evasive terminology about “cycles of violence” and “historic enmities”.

Backed into a corner by Trump’s outbursts of the past few days, western politicians and the media have preferred to suggest that his administration’s “development plan” for Gaza is actually an innovation.

In truth, however, the president isn’t advancing anything new in demanding that Gaza’s Palestinians be ethnically cleansed. What’s different is that he is being unusually – and inadvisably – open about a long-standing policy.

Israel has always harboured plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt and from the West Bank to Jordan.

But more to the point, as was noted by Middle East Eye a decade ago, Washington has been fully on board with the Gaza half of the expulsion project since the latter stages of George W Bush’s second presidency, in 2007. For anyone struggling with maths, that was 18 years ago.

Every US president, including Barack Obama, has leant on Egypt’s leader of the time to allow Israel to drive Gaza’s population into Sinai – and each one has been rebuffed.

Open secret

This open secret is not widely known for exactly the same reason that every western pundit and politician is now pretending to be appalled that Trump is actually advancing it.

Why? Because it looks bad – all the more so couched in Trump’s vulgar real-estate sales pitch in the middle of a supposed ceasefire.

Western leaders had hoped to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza with more decorum – in a “humanitarian” way that would have been more effective in duping western publics and maintaining the West’s claim to be upholding civilised values against a supposed Palestinian barbarity.

Since 2007 Washington and Israel’s joint ethnic cleansing project has been known as the “Greater Gaza Plan.”

Israel’s siege of the tiny enclave, which began in late 2006, was designed to create so much misery and poverty that the people there would clamour to be allowed out.

This was when Israel began formulating a so-called “starvation diet” for the people of Gaza, counting the calories to keep them alive but only barely.

Israel’s conception of Gaza was that it was like a tube of toothpaste that could be squeezed. As soon as Egypt relented and opened the border, the population would flood into Sinai out of desperation.

Every Egyptian president was bullied and bribed to give in: Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. They all refused.

Egypt was under no illusions about what was at stake after 7 October 2023. It fully understood that Israel’s levelling of Gaza was designed to squeeze the tube so hard the top would be forced off.

Pressure on Egypt

From the outset, officials like mage limitation Israel’s former national security adviser, stated publicly that the goal was to make Gaza “a place where no human being can exist”.

Just a week into Israel’s slaughter, in October 2023, military spokesperson Amir Avivi told the BBC that Israel could not ensure the safety of civilians in Gaza. He added: “They need to move south, out to the Sinai Peninsula.”

The next day, Danny Ayalon, a Netanyahu confidant and former Israeli ambassador to the US, amplified the point: “There is almost endless space in the Sinai Desert… We and the international community will prepare the infrastructure for tent cities.”

He concluded: “Egypt will have to play ball.”

Israel’s thinking was divulged in a leaked policy draft from its intelligence ministry. It proposed that, after their expulsion, Gaza’s population would initially be housed in tent cities, before permanent communities could be built in the north of Sinai.

At the same time, the Financial Times reported that Netanyahu was lobbying the European Union on the idea of driving the enclave’s Palestinians into Sinai under cover of war.

Some EU members, including the Czech Republic and Austria, were said to have been receptive and floated the idea at a meeting of member states. An unnamed European diplomat told the FT: “Now is the time to put increased pressure on the Egyptians to agree.”

Meanwhile, the Biden administration supplied the bombs to maintain the pressure.

Sisi was only too aware of what Egypt was up against: a concerted western plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. None of it had anything to do with Trump, who was more than a year away from being elected president.

In mid-October 2023, days into the slaughter, Sisi responded in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz: “What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted.”

That was precisely why he dedicated so much effort to shoring up the short border shared between Gaza and Sinai both before and after Israel’s genocide began.

Peace sales pitch

Part of what makes Trump’s sales pitch so surreal is that he is half-heartedly sticking to the original script: trying to make the plan sound vaguely humanitarian.

At the same time as re-arming Israel and warning of “all hell breaking loose”, he has spoken of finding “parcels of land” in Egypt and Jordan where the people of Gaza “can live very happily and very safely”.

He has contrasted that with their current plight: “They are being killed there at levels that nobody’s ever seen. No place in the world is as dangerous as the Gaza Strip… They are living in hell.”

That seems to be Trump’s all-too-revealing way of describing the genocide Israel denies it is carrying out and the one the US denies it is arming.

But the talk of helping Gaza’s population is just the rhetorical leftovers from the old sales pitch when previous US administrations were preparing to sell ethnic cleansing as integral to a new stage of the fabled “peace process”.

As Middle East Eye noted back in 2015, Washington had been recruited to the Greater Gaza Plan in 2007. Then the proposal was that Egypt would give 1,600 sq km area in Sinai – five times the size of Gaza – to the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

Palestinians from Gaza would be “encouraged” – that is, pressured through the siege and aid blockade, as well as intermittent episodes of carpet bombing known as “mowing the lawn”– to flee there.

In return, Abbas would have to forgo a Palestinian state in historic Palestine, undermine the right of return of Palestinian refugees enshrined in international law, and pass the burden of responsibility for repressing the Palestinians on to Egypt and the wider Arab world.

Israel advanced the Sinai plan between 2007 and 2018 in the hope of sabotaging Abbas’ campaign at the United Nations seeking recognition of Palestinian statehood.

Notably, Israel’s large-scale military assaults on Gaza – in the winter of 2008, 2012 and again in 2014 – coincided with reported Israeli and US efforts to turn the screws on successive Egyptian leaders to concede parts of Sinai.

‘Waterfront property’

Trump is already deeply familiar with the Greater Gaza Plan from his first presidency. Reports from 2018 suggest he hoped to include it in his “deal of the century” plan to bring about normalisation between Israel and the Arab world.

In March that year the White House hosted 19 countries in a conference to consider new ideas for dealing with Gaza’s mounting, entirely Israeli-made crisis.

As well as Israel, the participants included representatives from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. The Palestinians boycotted the meeting.

A few months later, in the summer of 2018, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and architect of his Middle East plan, visited Egypt. A short time later Hamas sent a delegation to Cairo to learn about what was being proposed.

Then, as seemingly now, Trump was offering a purpose-built zone in Sinai with solar-power grid, desalination plant, seaport and airport, as well as a free trade zone with five industrial areas, financed by the oil-rich Gulf states.

Revealingly, a veteran Israeli journalist, Ron Ben-Yishai, reported at the time that Israel was threatening to invade and bisect Gaza into separate northern and southern sectors to force Hamas’ compliance. That is exactly the strategy Israel prioritised last year during its invasion and then set about emptying north Gaza of its residents.

Trump also sought to deepen the crisis in Gaza by withholding payments to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). That same policy was actively pursued by Israel and the Biden administration during the current genocide.

Since Trump took office, Israel has banned UNRWA activities anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Trump’s team revived their own interest in the ethnic cleansing plan the moment Israel launched its genocide – long before Trump knew whether he would win the November 2024 election.

In March last year, nearly a year ago, Kushner used exactly the same language Trump does now. He observed that “there’s not much of Gaza left at this point”, that the priority was to “clean it up”, and that it was a “valuable waterfront property”. He insisted the people of Gaza would have to be “moved out”.

Rabbit in the headlights

If Trump refuses to relent, the direction things head next for the people of Gaza hangs chiefly on neighbouring Egypt and Jordan: they must either accept the ethnic cleansing plan, or Israel will resume the extermination of Gaza’s population.

Should they demur, Trump has threatened to cut US aid – effectively decades-old bribes to each not to come to the Palestinians’ aid while Israel brutalises them.

King Abdullah of Jordan, during a visit to the White House this week, looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

He dared not anger Trump by rejecting the plan to his face. Instead he suggested waiting to see how Egypt – a larger, more powerful Arab state – responded.

But privately, as MEE has reported, Abdullah is so fearful of the destabilising effects of Jordan colluding in Gaza’s ethnic cleansing – which he regards as an “existential issue” for his regime – that he is threatening war on Israel to stop it.

Similarly, Egypt has shown its displeasure. In the wake of Abdullah’s humiliating visit, Sisi has reportedly postponed his own meeting next week with Trump – in a clear rebuff – until the ethnic cleansing plan is off the table.

Cairo is said to be preparing its own proposal for how Gaza can be reconstructed. Even Washington’s oil-rich ally Saudi Arabia is in revolt.

It is rare to see Arab states show so much backbone to any US president, let alone one as vain and strategically unhinged as Trump.

Which may explain why the US president’s resolve appears to be weakening. On Wednesday his press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested that Trump was now seeking from “our Arab partners in the region” a counter-proposal, a “peace plan to present to the president”.

And in another sign that Trump may be hesitating, Netanyahu walked back his threat to resume the genocide unless all the hostages were freed on Saturday. He is now demanding only the three that were originally scheduled.

Reports from Gaza are that Israel has also significantly stepped up its aid deliveries.

All of which is welcome news. It may buy the people of Gaza a little more time.

But we should not lose sight of the bigger picture. Israel and the US are still committed to “cleaning out” Gaza, one way or another, as they have been for the past 18 years. They are simply looking for a more propitious moment to resume.

That could be this weekend, or it could be in a month or two. But at least Biden and Trump have achieved one thing. They have made sure no one can ever again mistake the crushing of Gaza for a peace plan.