Trump: The Green Light for Ethnic Cleansing and No Statehood for Palestinians
July 31, 2025•993 words
Examine closely the deep disappointment and hostility expressed by U.S. President Donald Trump in response to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recognition of a Palestinian two-state solution. Trump’s reaction, particularly his dictatorial threat to withhold any future trade deal with Canada, reveals the extent of his rigid stance on total unconditional support for Israel, even when blatant starvation and genocide is committed against the Palestinians.
Trump has demonstrated a profound animosity toward the Palestinian people of Gaza. This remains true even in the face of overwhelming evidence of mass starvation and what many international observers are calling genocide, carried out directly by the Israeli government and military, and indirectly supported by U.S. policy. Despite these ongoing atrocities against the indigenous Palestinian population, Trump continues to embrace a mindset aligned with ethnic cleansing and remains firmly opposed to any form of Palestinian statehood.
“What we are witnessing is not merely ethnic cleansing. It is a systematic erasure of a people, their history, and their right to exist, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.” - Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories
“Dispossession is the language of empire. Trump simply made it vulgar, loud, unapologetic, and efficient in its cruelty.” - Edward Said, cultural critic and author of The Question of Palestine
“Trump's green light to Israel’s annexation ambitions and settler violence turned international law into a joke, a world where impunity is policy, and justice is nowhere.” - Sarah Leah Whitson, former Executive Director at Human Rights Watch, MENA Division
“The Trump administration’s policy direction toward Gaza amounts to a deliberate strategy of ethnic cleansing, a crime under international law, and a permanent stain on global conscience.” - Amnesty International Report (2025)
“What Trump and Netanyahu are proposing is not diplomacy, it’s demographic engineering, the forced redesign of a land to erase its indigenous population.” - Rashid Khalidi, historian and author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine
“Ethnic cleansing has become rebranded under Trump, marketed as redevelopment, cloaked in security, and sanitized with AI-generated dreams.” - Gideon Levy, Israeli journalist with Haaretz
In its most blatant and unrepentant form, power aims to completely eradicate the Palestinians, the indigenous population of that region of the Middle East, in addition to defeating them. This ambition with a fascist mindset is evident in Donald Trump's approach to the Palestinian territories. Under his leadership, Gaza ceases to be a humanitarian issue and instead becomes an empty framework for imperial redesign. Trump publicly suggested that the United States "take over" and "own" the Gaza Strip in a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in February 2025. He suggested that the 2.2 million Palestinians living there be relocated in large numbers to Egypt or Jordan.
The message was an outspoken admission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and outrageous ethnic cleansing. Trump dispelled any notions of temporary status a few days later in an interview with Fox News, making it apparent that Palestinians "would not return" and would instead be given "better housing" and a "permanent place" elsewhere. Using AI-generated videos that glorify eviction as progress, he advocated for Gaza to become the "Riviera of the Middle East" and saw the total deportation of Palestinians as the final solution and a means of redeveloping the land for Israelis and Americans.
Global condemnation erupted in response to such images of ethnic cleansing. Navi Pillay and Francesca Albanese, among other UN officials, condemned Trump's plan of ethnic cleansing, calling it a blatant breach of international law and, in Albanese's own words, "worse than ethnic cleansing," a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed this decision, warning that Trump's plans amounted to crimes against humanity, specifically forced population transfer.
The plan was flatly rejected by Arab countries, which were supposed to bear the brunt of this ethnic cleansing. Egypt declined to consider relocation but did offer a reconstruction plan worth $53 billion; the Israeli and American governments hated such support for the Palestinians. Legal experts worldwide cautioned that these actions could expose U.S. politicians to prosecution under international law, and the Arab League condemned the proposals.
Power was used in the West Bank in a more sophisticated and subtle manner, but with the same goal in mind. Trump suggested that Israel annex the West Bank, which would end the territorial continuity of any future Palestinian state, and said that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank did not violate international law.
Israeli ultranationalists like Bezalel Smotrich cheered Trump's decision to lift sanctions on violent Israeli settlers, seeing it as a sign that the United States fully supported them, signaling the Israeli government that ethnic cleansing and genocide were authorized by these Trump policy decisions. Palestinians are forced into more dispersed enclaves with each new settlement, roadblock, and land confiscation, making it harder for them to travel freely, construct homes, or support themselves. Through official encroachments and overt expulsion, the ground beneath them shifts, limiting Palestinian mobility and stifling any kind of economic growth.
The objective is the same in Gaza and the West Bank, to strategically eradicate the native Palestinian population in order to redraw the political and demographic landscape in favour of Israeli supremacy.
Trump continually signals the Israeli government and military to bomb the populace into relocation and ethnic cleansing by calling for modernization and security for the state of Israel. Such differences in tone, language, and strategy have no bearing on the ideology of imperialistic power. What matters is the outcome, a land redefined, an indigenous Palestinian people, erased. Trump's legacy is one of deliberate ethnic cleansing, genocide, and Israel by proxy, all aimed at depriving the native Palestinian people of their right to identity, location, and future. The core of Trump's approach to power is to reshape the Middle East in an imperialist manner until only his real estate ideas and aspirations materialize.