Calling for Deportation of Palestinians and
Seizing Territory — With Pentagon Aid —
May Be Bluster, But What If It’s Not?
Paul R. Pillar / Responsible Statecraft

(February 6, 2025) — President Trump’s most recent pronouncement about the Gaza Strip and the people who live there brings to mind Abraham Lincoln’s definition of a hypocrite as a man who murders his parents and then pleads for mercy on grounds that he is an orphan.

Trump is correct in saying that the residents of Gaza are “living in hell.” But in the same breath he supports the policies and actions of the foreign state that has turned the Gaza Strip into hell.

Trump is comfortable with the United States helping Israel to “murder” the Gaza Strip — and is increasing the supply of weapons to do so — while pretending to be merciful and compassionate toward the remaining people of Gaza who so far have survived the Israeli onslaught but are suffering immensely.

The hypocrisy only adds a further gloss to what already was morally indefensible support for ethnic cleansing. As debates about whether Israel is committing genocide get bogged down in semantics as a digression from substance, it is undeniable that Israel is conducting ethnic cleansing. The wordsas well as actions of senior Israeli officials make clear that removing Palestinians from Palestine is Israeli policy.

The United States formerly opposed ethnic cleansing. During the wars in the 1990s that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, the United States, after some hesitation, decisively opposed Bosnian Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of Muslims, going so far as to lead a military intervention that ended the Serbs’ deadly campaign. But now the United States is not only condoning but actively supporting Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The moral depravity of what is happening to the Palestinians is linked to multiple negative consequences for the United States to the extent Washington associates itself with the Israeli campaign. The consequences include lessened ability to achieve goals that require the cooperation of Arab states and increased motivation of terrorists to strike the United States.

Although these consequences had already existed due to longstanding U.S. toleration of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians, unwilling removal of the subjugated population from Palestine altogether would amplify the emotions involved and the related ill effects on the United States. Such removal evokes painful memories of the Nakba or “catastrophe” in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in the war in 1948 that followed Israel’s declaration of independence.

Trump’s assertions that Palestinians would be “thrilled” to move out of Palestine and that other Arab states would be willing to accept them bear no resemblance to reality. The strong attachment of most Palestinians to their homeland despite the miserable conditions in Gaza has been demonstrated by the determination of internally displaced families to return to north Gaza during the current ceasefire despite awareness that many of their homes had been turned to rubble.

As for acceptance by other Arab states, when Trump last month suggested that Palestinians should go to Egypt or Jordan, both those states strongly rejectedthe idea. Both have compelling reasons for their rejection involving their own internal security and domestic politics, in addition to repugnance over the injustice to the Palestinians.

Jordan sees a fresh mass influx of Palestinians as an existential threat. It would upset an already fragile internal situation that involves a large Palestinian population — many of them refugees from the original Nakba — living under a Bedouin-led regime. Such a displacement would be contrary to the understandings Jordan thought it had reached when signing its peace treatywith Israel in 1994. The displacement would risk collapsing a regime the United States has counted on as a reliable friend in a critical part of the Middle East.

When Trump said that some “really nice places” could be built for ethnically-cleansed Palestinians, he made it sound like moving from a crummy apartment in Queens to an attractive condo in mid-town Manhattan. Absent from his remarks was any appreciation for a sense of home and of place, especially for Palestinians who are attached to a homeland where their families have lived for centuries.

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