“Every American media discussion of Gaza should start with the fact that people in Gaza, most of them, are not from Gaza. They are people who are from families that were forcibly expelled from what is now Israel.”
— Peter Beinart, Editor-at-Large at Jewish Currents, February 6, 2025.
President Donald Trump suggests that the two million residents of Gaza should be evacuated to up to a dozen different locations, including Egypt and Jordan, so that Gaza can be rebuilt.
Rather than a desire for ethnic cleansing, Trump is framing his call to “clean out” Gaza as arising from his concern for the people there. Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls Trump’s plan “a very generous move.”
But Trump and his allies are no friends to Palestinians.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a senior advisor to the President during his first administration. In March 2024, Kushner recommended that Israel bulldoze an area of its Negev desert and move Gazans there.
Furthermore, Trump’s choice for ambassador to Israel, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee has stated that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian.” And Huckabee insists that any future Palestinian state must be located outside the land of Israel, and within “Islamist controlled properties and territories.”
Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s security agency Shin Bet, has condemned the “terrorism” of militant West Bank settlers. Violent militants are conducting a campaign of murder, arson and intimidation against Palestinians in the West Bank in order to expel them from their land.
Yet Donald Trump lifted the Biden Administration sanctions on the Israeli settlers involved in these attacks.
And notably, Trump has chosen Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as United Nations Ambassador. In her Senate confirmation hearing, Stefanik acknowledged that she believes that Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank. And she refused to answer whether Palestinians have the right to self-determination.
According to Article 49 of the Geneva Convention:
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.
At his confirmation hearing, Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, refused to say whether the U.S. should abide by the Geneva Convention. Hegseth has also called a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “lip service.”
The fundamental issue in this conflict is the lack of Palestinian human rights and the lack of legal equality between Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
In the words of U.S. political scientist John Mearsheimer:
“If you don’t want a two-state solution, then what are you going to do?…Israel has turned into an apartheid state… And the Israelis understand that over the long term this is probably not viable… They want to get out of that situation, and the best way to do that, from their point of view, is to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and the West Bank…”
President Donald Trump and his administration seem more than willing to help Israel with this goal.