Gaza: ‘It would clearly be ethnic cleansing – it’s cynical to present it as a humanitarian solution’

Archie Bland

The Guardian  /  January 29, 2025

After Donald Trump’s remarks on “cleaning out” Gaza, Palestinians who live there voted with their feet. Hundreds of thousands of people made the journey back to the north of the territory on Monday after Israel opened military checkpoints as part of the ceasefire deal.

That mass movement of people is all the more extraordinary when so many buildings in the north lie in ruins. As one resident, 50-year-old Osama, told The Associated Press: “Whether the ceasefire succeeds or not, we will never leave Gaza City and the north again.”

That kind of flat refusal of the idea is one of the reasons that Trump’s comments have alarmed so many people. But it is not the only one.

Does Trump’s proposal amount to ethnic cleansing ?

In a word, yes. The United Nations defines ethnic cleansing as the deliberate policy of clearing out civilians from their lands “by use of force or intimidation”. If the residents of Gaza voluntarily left the territory without any threat of violence, that would not amount to ethnic cleansing. But the context of the assault on Gaza, and the fact that most people want to rebuild their lives there, is a long way from that scenario.

“It would clearly be ethnic cleansing,” The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont said. “And it is entirely cynical to present it as a humanitarian solution when so many of the levers that could change the circumstances of civilians in Gaza are in Israel’s hands.”

Crucial to understanding why the idea is so horrifying for many Palestinians is the history of what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, when Israeli forces expelled up to 750,000 people – the exact figures are disputed – from Arab towns and villages in the newly created state of Israel in 1948. The war since the 7 October attacks is viewed by many Palestinians as a new Nakba.

But that is not the only precedent that they will have in mind. “The history for decades has been that when Palestinian populations have been moved since 1948, they don’t get to come back,” Beaumont said. By the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, for example, hundreds of thousands had been displaced from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, mostly to Jordan.

Egypt and Jordan have rejected Trump’s idea that they could take in Palestinians forced to leave Gaza. “Public opinion tends to be much more pro-Palestinian rights than either King Abdullah’s regime in Jordan or that of Sisi in Egypt,” Beaumont said. “So it is politically hugely problematic for them.”

Who in Israel shares Trump’s view ?

The idea that Palestinians should be “transferred” to other countries, or into the Gaza Strip from Israel, has “floated around in Israel for decades” across the political spectrum, Peter said. But in the current crisis, the idea that Palestinians should be forced out of Gaza has been coupled with proposals for new Jewish settlements in Gaza. “That combination has definitely emanated from the far right.”

It has been pushed by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, the ultra-nationalist members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government whose votes are crucial to its survival: in October, both spoke at an event supporting the idea. Smotrich said that “without settlements, there is no security”.

Some advocates of moving Palestinians out of Gaza have explicitly called on Trump to support their cause. Eugene Kontorovich, head of the international law department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a conservative Israeli thinktank, wrote after Trump won the election that the Biden administration was guilty of “keeping [Palestinians in Gaza] trapped in Gaza” and that “now Trump can flip the script”.

He also criticised sanctions against “Jews living in Judea and Samaria”, a reference to settlers and would-be settlers in Gaza and the West Bank. On his first day in office, Trump rescinded those sanctions. During his first term, the US reversed decades of policy and said that it did not consider settlements illegal under international law.

Who are the voices influencing Trump on Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank ?

Many people in Trump’s orbit appear to be sympathetic to the views of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Last year, Jared Kushner – Trump’s son-in-law and former senior foreign policy adviser – said Israel should “move the people out [of Gaza] and then clean it up”, in part because “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable”.

Trump’s pick to be the US ambassador to the United Nations, Elise Stefanik, ​​ said recently that she agreed with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich that Israel has “a biblical right to the entire West Bank”.

And his pick as ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, told CNN in 2017: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

What does all this mean for the prospects of lasting peace ?

It is foolhardy to make predictions about what happens next in the Middle East – but the far right’s refusal to back down suggests they believe that Trump will support their cause as the first phase of the ceasefire ends. In this opinion piece, Ben Reiff of +972 Magazine notes that sources present in discussions between Smotrich and Netanyahu expect the fighting to resume. Trump has said he is “not confident” that the ceasefire will hold.

“Perhaps the war carries on in some low-level way,” Beaumont said. “When you look at Syria, where Israel now has an open-ended occupation in the buffer zone, or Lebanon, where there has been backsliding on an Israeli withdrawal – the notion that we should expect Netanyahu to bring the war to a complete end seems unrealistic.”

The consequences of an emboldened far right would not be limited to Gaza. Last week, a new Israeli crackdown began in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, causing hundreds to flee. The Palestinian health ministry said at least 10 people had been killed; Israel said it had killed eight militants. The Israel Defense Forces presented the operation as an attempt to prevent militants regrouping and attacking Israeli civilians; NGOs and the UN accused Israel of using indiscriminate and disproportionate force.

Meanwhile, as Bethan McKernan and Sufian Taha report in this piece, at least six Palestinian villages in the West Bank have been targeted by violent Jewish settler attacks.

Some have viewed the increase in activity in the West Bank as part of the price exacted by the far right for not bringing down the government over the ceasefire deal. “The big bet from Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is to make a lot of noise about a lot of issues – but it’s the US allowing Israel to annex the West Bank that they really want,” Peter Beaumont said. “The question is: if Netanyahu survives all of his legal travails and wins re-election, how far will he go to keep the far right on side?”

What does Trump really want to happen in Gaza ?

There is an apparent contradiction in Trump’s policy goals in the Middle East: on the one hand, advocacy of removing Palestinians from Gaza; on the other hand, the aim of a normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

“He has approved the reshipment of 2000lb bombs to Israel,” Baumont said. “But he is ultimately much more interested in relations with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states than he is in the fate of Gaza, and they would not accept the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians there.

“The mistake to be careful of is to join all of this up into some sort of master plan. His statements about Gaza and the idea of a deal with Saudi Arabia are not consistent, but perhaps this is someone who echoes pieces of the ideas of whoever he’s been talking to. It doesn’t look like a game of three-dimensional chess. It just looks like two entirely contradictory ambitions.”

Archie Bland is the editor of The Guardian’s First Edition newsletter