Trump’s call to ‘clean out’ Gaza is immoral and ineffective

By Marc Champion

Celebrating Gaza’s ceasefire last week, the father of an Israeli hostage said this was what victory looked like. It was an honorable take on what the 15-month war has been all about, and one that any parent would profoundly identify with. If only it were true.

Victory in war is ultimately about breaking the other side’s will to fight on, because, short of a political settlement, ethnic cleansing or genocide, there’s always someone left to pick up a gun. That’s never been more clear than in Gaza, and it’s why the conflict is unlikely to end with the current three-stage truce.

Hamas views any end to the fighting as victory, because it means it’s broken Israel’s resolve to continue with the attempt destroy them. Its fighters made that point emphatically by emerging from their tunnels to celebrate amid the rubble once the ceasefire took hold. After inviting destruction on Palestinians by the extraordinary savagery of its Oct 7 attack on Jewish civilians more 15 months ago, a win for Hamas required only for it to survive without surrendering.

According to the former US Biden administration, Hamas has recruited almost as many new fighters since the start of the war as it has lost. That should come as no surprise. So long as there are more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza and no settlement in view, the readiness to fight and means to do it will persist.

Israeli nationalists and their settler shock troops were infuriated by the ceasefire for precisely this reason. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned and withdrew the support of his ultra-right Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, party from the government. He called the deal a “catastrophe.”

Israel’s theory of victory has never been clearly stated. In public, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set his war aim as returning the hostages by eliminating Hamas. But because the point of taking hostages is to use them as shields and bargaining chips, and because Hamas is both an ideology and a deeply embedded social movement, this was never remotely plausible.

More consistent with events on the ground since Oct. 7 is a scenario in which Gaza would be made so uninhabitable that as soon as borders reopen, which eventually they must, its population would flee. Nationalists such as Ben-Gvir have been open about this, arguing that Jewish settlers should then move in and rebuild.

They’ve been open, too, about their desire to annex at least part of the West Bank, and about their belief in a Biblical right for the Jewish state to include all of the Holy Land. And while Netanyahu hasn’t called for the displacement of Gaza’s populace, he has been consistent across his two decades as prime minister in opposing the two-state solution that, absent ethnic cleansing, offers the only viable long-term closure for Israel’s three-quarter-century-old Palestinian question.

In Donald Trump, Israel’s nationalists now have a US president who supports their theory of victory. On Jan 25, he said that because Gaza had become a demolition site, the best way forward would be to “clean out that whole thing,” sending about 1.5 million people to Egypt and Jordan, either temporarily or permanently. He portrayed this as a humanitarian gesture.

Trump isn’t a fool. He knows that any exodus from Gaza would be permanent. It’s also important to call things by their name. As others have said, this would be a textbook case of ethnic cleansing, because the demolition of Gaza didn’t just happen. It was carried out by the Israel Defense Forces, as they brought justified retribution to Hamas for Its Oct 7 savagery. But at a certain point, this conflict stopped being simply a response to a terrorist attack and, for both sides, became something bigger.

A Greater Israel that includes the territories occupied as a result of the 1967 war must require ethnic cleansing, or the sheer number of Palestinians absorbed as new citizens would undermine the voting majority needed to maintain a Jewish democracy. This is the reason, too, for which no Israeli leader can accept the so-called right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Ethnic cleansing has, historically, been a very effective way for countries to achieve victory, which is to say political goals. It removes an enemy that either still has the will to fight or may do so again in the future. For that reason, it’s also much more common than we care to think, in some cases rising to genocide. In recent memory, Armenians ethnically cleansed Azeris around the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, and then — last September — Azeris did the same to an even larger number of Armenians.

Ethnic Georgians were expelled from Abkhazia in 1992 and from South Ossetia in 2008. It was to reverse or prevent the ethnic cleansing of Croats, Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars by Serbs in the 1990s that the US and its European allies intervened militarily in the former Yugoslavia. Turkey and Greece exchanged each other’s minority populations by agreement, at the end of a war, in 1923. The fading Ottoman Empire killed or expelled the vast majority of ethnic Armenians in 1915, fearing their use by Russia as a fifth column. The Russian Empire expelled or killed over 95 per cent of Circassians and a majority of Abkhaz during its invasion of the North Caucasus, in the mid-to-late 19th century. A full list would, sadly, be much longer.

In an era of rising nationalism, we are likely to see more attempts at ethnic cleansing. The question is whether this becomes accepted once more as a means of victory. A separate question for Israel is, in its unique circumstances, whether the clearance of Gaza’s population into the lands of fellow Muslims would solve the Jewish state’s Palestinian problem, or reignite a much larger pan-Arab one.

The first question is a moral one, and, as we mark the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, epicenter of the worst of genocides, its answer should be a hard no. As for the second — an issue of identity and the long-term economic and military math of 7 million Jewish Israelis surviving alongside hundreds of millions of Arab Muslims — I fear it simply is “no.”