World

US President dresses up ethnic cleansing as real estate opportunity, and blew up ‘America First’

The leader of the free world advocates ethnic cleansing and dresses it up as a golden real estate opportunity. Here’s the dire, if hardly surprising, place we find ourselves just three weeks into the second Trump administration.

Fresh from calling for the annexation of Canada, takeover of Greenland and seizure of the Panama Canal, Trump has now turned his imperial gaze to Gaza.

With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu standing by his side for the first visit by a foreign leader since Trump’s return to office, the president  called for the United States to take ownership of the Gaza Strip. All 2.3 million Palestinians who live there would be forced to neighbouring Arab countries, with the battered enclave turned, according to Trump, into “the Riviera of the Middle East”.

US President Donald Trump (right) and Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, during a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.Credit: Bloomberg

Trapped by the need to work with Trump, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong cannot say what they really think about his outlandish idea. Not everyone is so constrained.

As Australian National University professor Don Rothwell, a leading expert on international law, quickly stated: Trump’s idea would represent a crime against humanity, with the forced removal of Palestinian children quite possibly constituting an act of genocide under the Genocide Convention. The US, Rothwell noted, had no legal right to control Palestinians in Gaza.

Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, a respected Middle East political analyst who grew up in Gaza, quickly blasted Trump’s idea as “ridiculous, preposterous, illegal, harmful, and is a God-sent pivot for Hamas & other elements of the ‘Axis of Resistance’ to use this ludicrous notion to distract from their failures and propagate new anti-American sentiments”.

Arab nations such as Egypt and Jordan have made clear they utterly reject any plans to move Palestinians out of their territory. Trump’s idea also went too far for Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Daniel Aghion, who said the peak body favoured the “comprehensive reconstruction of Gaza as a peaceful, prosperous territory”.

“However, the question of whether some Gazans choose to remain in the territory through this process, temporarily relocate or are permanently absorbed by neighbouring states is ultimately a decision for those affected, most of all, Gaza’s civilian population,” Aghion stressed.

Expelling Palestinians from Gaza would kill off any prospect of a two-state solution, the outcome Australia and virtually all other countries see as the ultimate way to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gaza, alongside the West Bank, has always been envisioned as crucial component of any Palestinian state. Take it off the table and the two-state solution instantly disintegrates.

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  • Source of information and images “brisbanetimes”

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