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Date: February 11, 2025 at 12:09:52
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: All the Gloves Come Off on Gaza

URL: https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/11/patrick-lawrence-all-the-gloves-come-off-on-gaza/



Patrick Lawrence: All the Gloves Come Off on Gaza
February 11, 2025

At this fraught moment, Americans cannot use Trump to hide from themselves,
as many of them, especially their purported leaders, are very prone to doing.

Donald Trump does not seem to have too much trouble shocking people. In the
three weeks since he resumed his residency in the White House, he has
shocked the Danes (America must have Greenland), the Canadians (Canada
will become our 51st state), the Panamanians (the Canal is ours), and the
Mexicans (It’s “the Gulf of America” now).

Along with Elon Musk, his frighteningly fascistic sidekick, our new president has
shocked (and awed) Washington more or less daily these past three weeks. All
of this, fair to say, has also left the rest of the world, as it watches the Trump
circus, in one or another state of shock.

But nothing comes close to the shock of Trump’s declaration last week that the
U.S. will assert its sovereignty over the Gaza Strip, remove the 2 million
Palestinians who live there, and turn the territory into “something really nice,
really good” — into, indeed, “the Riviera of the Middle East.” The implications of
this plan — to the extent Trump makes plans as against making it up as he goes
along — are nearly too far-reaching to calculate.

Let’s do our calculations to the extent we can at this early moment. We will find
that, among all that is shocking about Trump’s Gaza thinking — is this my word?
—there are things that are, on careful consideration, entirely in keeping with
American policy over the course of many decades and so are shocking only to
those lost in the game of eternal pretend that prevails in our late-stage
imperium.

As all paying-attention people will know, Trump announced his over-the-top
plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip and turn it into some kind of paradise built
atop the bones of terrorist Israel’s victims in the presence of Bibi Netanyahu,
who, as of the International Criminal Court’s November 2024 ruling, is now a
fugitive charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Zionist state’s prime minister was the first foreign leader to visit the Trump
White House, and we can count his presence in the Oval Office a shock in its
own right, however “normalized” America’s repellent relations with “the Jewish
state” may be. But here I mean to mention a couple of remarks Netanyahu
made in response to Trump’s presentation.

Trump held forth a good long while before the Israeli PM, beaming the
psychotic’s smile with which we are familiar, took the microphone. According to
an early transcript produced by Roll Call, apparently machine-generated, he
began by praising Trump for the infamous transgressions of Trump’s first term:
“You recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. You moved the American embassy
there. You recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. You withdrew
from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal.”

All regrettably true: Trump had just boasted of these disgraces. Then came the
spew of lies we commonly associate with Netanyahu and other Israeli officials
— and, for that matter, with Israel. UNRWA, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency,
“support[s] and fund[s] terrorists.” With reference to the Oct. 7 attacks, “Hamas
monsters savage — savagely murdered 1,200 innocent people… They
beheaded men. They raped women. They burned babies alive….” And so on.

You would think any Israeli speaking in public would avoid mentioning such
matters, given every one of these assertions has been wholly discredited as
part of Israel’s screen of fabricated propaganda. But no, within the walls of the
Trump White House, if nowhere else in the world, one can say such things and
be warmly welcomed.

In this moist hothouse of unreality, perfectly suitable to the occasion and the
man hosting it, Netanyahu then turned to the just-revealed Gaza plan:

“You cut to the chase. You see things others refuse to see. You say things
others refuse to say…. This is the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle
East and bring peace.”

These last remarks may read like mere flattery, but there is something
important in them. They seem to me key to our understanding of what just
happened between Trump and his criminal guest. Among Trump’s various sins,
so far as orthodox Washington considers it, is his habit of saying the unsayable,
as I like to put it: He makes statements that seem preposterous but are
perfectly true and have long been true but are carefully kept out of accepted
discourse.


Trump at the White House on Feb. 4 announcing his plan for the U.S. to take
over with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on. (The White
House, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
To Trump again:

“We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there
are many of them that want to do this,” he said, “and build various domains that
will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending
the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.”

This is Trump’s latest reference, a gentle, disguised reference, to the forced
expulsion of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of which have made it clear in
strenuous terms they will accept no new influx of Palestinians. During an earlier
session with Netanyahu, Trump, as quoted in The New York Times, dismissed
these objections out of hand. “They say they’re not going to accept,” Trump
said. “I say they will.”

As is entirely clear and widely understood, Trump now proposes to ethnic-
cleanse the Gaza Strip. While avoiding the phrase, he has made reference to
this idea numerous times; it is now his formally stated policy. It must follow
immediately there is no legal basis for any such project, at no point has the will
of Palestinians been considered, and forced relocations under any
circumstances are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions of 1948. There is,
to state the obvious, no ground to withhold unqualified objection to Trump’s
plan on this basis alone.

As we do, we must summon to mind that set of facts we know as history.
President Harry Truman declared U.S. recognition of the state of Israel on May
14, 1948, 11 minutes after its founding. Al–Nakba, the forced removal of
Palestinians from their land, was then six months under way. And from the
precise moment of Truman’s declaration until ours, America has been the
premier sponsor of the ethnic-cleansing that is now at issue in Gaza.

Let us not be mistaken as to what Trump proposed at the White House last
week. It is straight up and down condemnable. But we must be clear as glass as
to what must be condemned. Impetuous as he is, as blessedly ignorant as he is
of what is sayable and unsayable, Trump simply wants to get this done more
openly than his predecessors and with more dispatch.

As a footnote here, it is worth noting a story behind Truman’s rush to recognize.
Gore Vidal, longtime friend of the Kennedys, relates it in his introduction to
Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto Press, 1994), by Israel Shahak. It goes
this way:

“Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian,
John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much
abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American
Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-
stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through
so fast.’ As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my
grandfather), we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the
serene corruption of American politics.”


Truman in the Oval Office, evidently receiving a Menorah as a gift from Israel’s
Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, on right, with Abba Eban, Israel’s U.S.
ambassador, May 8, 1951. (Government Press Office of Israel, Wikimedia
Commons,CC BY-SA 3.0)
Possible, maybe, probable: We cannot weigh the truth of the tale with dead
certainty. But Vidal saw fit to tell it in print, and Shahak, a Holocaust survivor, a
professor of chemistry at Hebrew University, and a respected if occasionally
controversial student of Judaism, put it on page one of his book. At the risk of
teleological reasoning, if Truman took $2 million ($26 million today) from the
Zionists, it is right in line with what American pols have harvested from the
Jewish lobby all the way up to the $100 million Trump reportedly accepted from
Miriam Adelson, widow of arch–Zionist Sheldon Adelson.

From The New York Times piece quoted earlier:

“In unveiling the plan, Mr. Trump did not cite any legal authority giving him the
right to take over the territory, nor did he address the fact that forcible removal
of a population violates international law and decades of American foreign
policy consensus in both parties.”

This sentence is true from start to finish. But we must read the last bit,
concerning the foreign policy consensus in Washington, very carefully. I hope
we can all now agree, having witnessed Joe Biden’s unconditional support for
Israel’s genocide, that Trump’s proposal to ethnic-cleanse the Gaza Strip is
entirely in line with “decades of American foreign policy consensus” but for the
crudity of Trump’s way at it.

The question on which Trump broke the bounds of convention turns on
sovereignty. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it,
too,” Trump said at his news conference with Bibi Tuesday evening. He
elaborated:

“We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous
unexploded bombs… level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it
out…. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of
jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something
different.”


Trump receives a menorah from Miriam and Sheldon Adelson at the Israeli
American Council National Summit, Dec. 7, 2019, in Hollywood, Florida. (White
House, Joyce N. Boghosian)
After he and Bibi spoke, a reporter asked Trump if this project would require the
dispatch of American troops. “If it’s necessary, we’ll do that,” he replied with
that strange nonchalance he affects. “We’re going to take over that piece and
develop it.” He has since stepped back from this. “The Gaza Strip would be
turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” he
declared on Truth Social, his digital megaphone. “No soldiers by the U.S. would
be needed!”

Two points. One, it is hard to imagine executing a project of this magnitude in a
locale as politically charged as Gaza without involving American troops. Two,
troops or no troops seems a small distinction in the scheme of things. There are
already reports of “foreign contractors” assisting Israeli forces on the ground in
Gaza.

This is the first time an American leader at any level of government has publicly
favored the physical acquisition of land beyond America’s borders in who
knows how long. The shock here is Trump’s proposed introduction — or
reintroduction, better put — of territorial dominion of the imperial sort, and by
force if force is needed. His topic last week was the 140 square miles that
comprise the Gaza Strip. But note the similarity with his ideas for Greenland,
Canada and the Panama Canal. This is what Trump meant in his inaugural
speech when he spoke of America as “a growing nation — one that increases
our wealth, expands our territory….”

As those remarks plainly indicated, Trump is well aware that he presides over an
imperium. He could not otherwise think and speak as he does. But it is
remarkable how often this man fails to recognize the rather basic facts
concerning the imperium’s history and conduct. His theme is land, or as he
would be comfortable putting it, real estate. But the imperium’s theorists and
managers are not into real estate anymore — not on any kind of permanent
basis.

America laid the foundations of the empire that now burdens us and the rest of
the world during the Spanish–American War, an eight-month affair in 1898.
There were early disgraces such as the Philippines, which the U.S. wrested,
with great brutality from the Spanish and kept as a colony for nearly five
decades. Guam was seized as a coaling station for American cargo vessels
sailing to and fro “the East.” Ditto American Samoa. This was the way it was
done. The Europeans had empires, and now we must have one: This was the
orthodox reasoning when figures such as Mark Twain and William James
formed the Anti–Imperialist League in response to the war against the Spanish.

Washington granted Filipinos independence in 1946. The date is significant. By
that time, the eve of the independence era, London and Paris recognized that
territorial dominion was a 19th century technology, way out of date. What we
call neocolonialism was the new thing. Washington understood this, too. It has,
accordingly, had no interest in taking over other peoples’ lands since the 1945
victories. Those operating the imperium are interested in dictators and other
sorts of compradors through whom to project power. This is why the postwar
decades are pockmarked with coups, assassinations, color revolutions and the
like. It isn’t about land, or the American flag luffing in the wind above it.

How can Trump fail to see this? (And who in hell advises him in these matters,
you have to wonder.) But are we now supposed to continue pretending
Washington has not run an empire for nearly 80 years? Caitlin Johnstone, the
spiky Australian commentator, occasionally remarks on the skill required to
maintain an empire and hide it from the American populace. True enough. But
so far as I can make out, fewer of us by the day are so deceived. If there is any
virtue in Trump’s plans, Gaza and the rest of them, there is no hiding the reality
of empire anymore.

Trump proposals breach international law. America has been breaching it for
decades. Trump proposes to ethnic-cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza.
America has sponsored that project since Israel came into existence. Trump
may sanction the Zionist state’s annexation of the West Bank in coming weeks
— another big one he let drop last week. Such a sanction has been informally in
effect since the settler movement began.

Trump wants to take over Gaza. The U.S. will be yet more a participant in Israel’s
terror than it was under the Biden regime. This is new. It is egregious, altogether
shocking. But I ask a couple of questions, genuinely posed: How new, exactly?
Is Trump’s plan simply another step along the road Washington has traveled
since Truman, if he did, accepted that suitcase on that day in May 77 years
ago?

Many officials, political figures and commentators have expressed doubt that
Trump’s Gaza plan can ever be executed. I must withhold judgment on this
question for now. But his announcement, all by itself, has already set free ultra–
Zionists of all sorts. It is now perfectly acceptable for public officials — Mike
Huckabee, Elise Stefanik, Tom Cotton, numerous others — to advocate Israel’s
annexation of the West Bank. Some of these retrograde cretins, the Times has
reported, now take to rejecting “the West Bank” in favor of the Biblical “Judea
and Samaria.” This is a significant shift in nomenclature, amounting to a vicious
statement of intent. Ownership of Gaza or no, Trump has turned a significant
corner.

But all of last week’s shocks, excluding none, have been latent in American
policy for decades — since May 1948, indeed. Let us not miss this. At this
fraught moment, we cannot use Trump to hide ourselves from ourselves, as
many Americans, especially their purported leaders, are very prone to doing.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most
recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via
Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American
Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them
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assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s
mounting derelictions. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue
model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to
independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American
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urgent now. In recognition of the commitment to independent journalism,
please subscribe to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect
those of Consortium News.


Responses:
[56927]


56927


Date: February 11, 2025 at 15:35:25
From: chaskuchar@stcharlesmo, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: All the Gloves Come Off on Gaza


true words. i was five when israel stole Palestine
land. i have favored Palestine all my life. oh well.
only God can make it right. johnson gave israel
permission to sick the liberty. that is plain to see.
bibi is evil and trump is greedy. he thinks he knows
what gaza and palestine need.

hard to type that without mistakes. oh well.


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