Sam Kiley
The Independent / January 26, 2025
The US president’s controversial comments on Gaza ignite debate over human rights, writes Sam Kiley, but could be seen as a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’
The US president’s controversial comments on Gaza ignite debate over human rights, writes Sam Kiley, but could be seen as a policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’
The lessons of Trump’s Presidency 2.0 are that if he says it, he probably means it. He said he’d stop US aid to Ukraine, and he has. In his latest comments on Gaza, he has thrown his weight behind a far-right Israeli-fringe idea to depopulate the enclave.
He told reporters flying with him on Air Force One that he’d just had a call with Jordan’s king, Abdullah II. “I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,’” Trump told reporters.
He added that he would also like Egypt to take in more Palestinians and that he would speak to the country’s president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, on Sunday.
In saying this, and apparently trying to persuade two of Israel’s neighbours to agree to absorb hundreds of thousands of people who have been bombed out of their homes by Israel, the US president is endorsing the views of Israeli politicians like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.
They have both argued for the “voluntary” removal of Palestinians from Gaza, where over 45,000 people have been killed, and the enclave of around 2.3 million people largely reduced to rubble.
A deliberate policy to drive civilians from their homes would amount to a war crime under international law. But president Trump is reported to have told reporters that Gaza is “literally a demolition site right now”.
“I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change,” Trump said.
“You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.”
Palestinian refugees from the 1947-1948 Arab-Israeli war fled into the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. More followed the Israeli conquest of Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.
Lebanon and Jordan then faced decades of instability, civil war, and armed insurrection as Palestinian groups fought to dislodge Israel and return to their homes. King Abdullah I was killed by an assassin in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in Jerusalem in 1951, at a time when his critics saw him as taking too soft a line of the newly born Jewish State.
Jordan and Egypt will be aghast at Trump’s latest statements. They reveal no knowledge of recent history.
Gaza and the West Bank have always been seen as the lands where a future Palestinian state may be established. By endorsing the concept that Palestinians could be rehomed, either temporarily or permanently, in Jordan or Egypt, Trump risks being accused of supporting a policy of “ethnic cleansing”.
Sam Kiley is World Affairs Editor of The Independent
