“Like a bad, sick joke”: Trump’s plan for a Gaza purge amounts to “ethnic cleansing,” critics say

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday a plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip of its two million Palestinian inhabitants, suggesting that U.S. forces could then move in to occupy the area and transform the besieged territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Standing next to him was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seemed to agree with Trump’s proposal for “long-term ownership.”

“The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Mr. Trump said at a press conference Tuesday evening. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.”

Trump suggested that he’d not just get rid of the destroyed buildings but also Gaza’s population, scattering them across neighboring countries. “Gaza maybe is a demolition site right now … you can’t live in Gaza right now. I think we need another location,” he said. “It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return. Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”

A reporter then interjected: “Because it’s their home, sir!”

Netanyahu, the man who directed the Israeli military offensive that destroyed Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and displaced much of its population, praised Trump’s idea. “You say things others refuse to say,” Netanyahu said. “And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘You know, he’s right.’”

Others, however, have called Trump’s plan cruel, destabilizing and wildly impractical.

“You can report that I was speechless,” Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said after hearing the news. “That’s insane. I can’t think of a place on earth that would welcome American troops less and where any positive outcome is less likely.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that the proposal to remove 2 million Palestinians amounted to “ethnic cleansing by another name” after they had already suffered from an Israeli onslaught that human rights organizations have described as genocide.

“[Trump] says he talked to a lot of people and they think it’s a great idea. Well, we know that just a few weeks ago the Arab countries had an emergency meeting and responded forcefully against this idea and said it’s unacceptable. So what the president is doing here is really throwing a match in an already very volatile region,” he said.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only Palestinian-American in Congress, argued in a social media post that despite Democratic opposition to the plan now, the president’s willingness to “spew this fanatical bullsh*t” was made possible by “bipartisan support in Congress for funding genocide and ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, one of Israel’s most strident backers, Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., suggested that while Trump’s comments were “provocative,” he’d be open to a U.S. occupation of the Gaza Strip because the Palestinians have supposedly “refused or have been unwilling to deliver a government that provided security and economic development for themselves.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., predicted that an attempted U.S. occupation would lead to disaster not just for the Palestinians, but for the Middle East and the U.S. itself. “He’s totally lost it. A U.S. invasion of Gaza would lead to the slaughter of thousands of U.S. troops and decades of war in the Middle East,” he tweeted. “It’s like a bad, sick joke.”

Trump’s vision of boots in Gaza is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of his second-term embrace of imperialist expansion. He has already threatened to annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal, but those potential occupations have not yet been accompanied by threats of mass eviction of the native inhabitants. Several experts have warned that any effort to forcibly remove Palestinians would violate international humanitarian law as detailed in the Geneva Conventions and other treaties.

The idea resembles an earlier scheme proposed by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build luxury properties on Gaza’s “very valuable” waterfront.

Hamas, which has slowly re-asserted control over much of the Gaza Strip, quickly rejected Trump’s proposal.

“Our people in Gaza will not allow for these plans to come to pass,” a Hamas spokesperson said. “What is needed is the end of the occupation and the aggression against our people, not expelling them from their land.”

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has signaled that he could renew an offensive in the Palestinian territory, despite a current ceasefire. When asked about his commitment to bring home the remaining Israeli hostages held in Gaza, he replied: “I support getting all the hostages out and meeting all our war goals. That includes destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and making sure that Gaza never poses a threat to Israel.”