Blowback Like Never Before Will Follow A U.S. Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza

Edited by Sam Thielman

SINCE IT SEEMS LIKE mainstream news organizations won’t name this forthrightly, we have to be clear here. Yesterday, beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump, reading from notes, proposed that the U.S. "take over the Gaza Strip" and remove what remains of the Palestinian population. This is ethnic cleansing.

I've worked in newsrooms for most of my life. I have experienced the pressure, in ways subtle, blatant and even internalized, to sanitize atrocities proposed or committed by the powerful. (Watch how often news organizations use the word "bizarre" as a proxy for what they're unwilling to say.) I know how reluctant editors, charged with representing the long-term interests of a news organization, can be to call something what it is. You definitely saw that with the way most American news organizations did not call Israel's post-Oct. 7 military campaign in Gaza genocide, long after even skeptical genocide experts like Omer Bartov shed their skepticism as they confronted the awful evidence of their senses. You are also seeing it right now in the reluctance of these same news organizations to call what Elon Musk is doing a coup. 

But the president is proposing ethnic cleansing, and ethnic cleansing committed—not just abetted, which is horrific and unacceptable enough, but committed—by the United States. At least The Guardian, where Sam and I used to work, got those words into the dek, albeit not the headline. I'm appalled to see a New York Times headline calling the ethnic cleansing of Gaza "an improbable idea" and treating it as if it's nation-building. If mainstream journalism isn't willing to call the thing it is covering what that thing is, then I can't see a point to it. 

This is not going to be an edition about journalism. The damage that matters here is the imminent danger to human beings. That is why it matters that we call this ethnic cleansing: to remove any veneer disguising the mass violence the plan entails. 

But even when staring into the face of this proposed atrocity, what may still be obscured is the mass violence that ethnically cleansing Gaza will provoke. 

It does not need to be said that Palestinians will fight to the end to remain in Gaza. They will be relentlessly demonized as terrorists for doing so. They will also be incentivized to inflict as much horror as desperate people can inflict when faced with the prospect of losing everything. And, once unleashed, no one can ever know where and when it will end. 

If U.S. forces are deployed to Gaza, we can expect them to come under attack. The agonies of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars may even be eclipsed, since those Iraqi and Afghan fighters confronted occupation but not the prospect of the Americans removing them from their land and heritage. (I recognize that in Iraq in 2005-7, for many Sunni insurgents, this distinction blurred when Iraq’s civil war inflicted sectarian violence on people already under occupation, but not even George W. Bush flirted with population transfer, let alone broadcast it live from the White House.)

Once under fire, the U.S. military will retaliate. There will then be no more distinction possible between the U.S. materially supporting Israel in a genocidal campaign – again; that is horrific and unacceptable enough – and being a co-belligerent in that campaign. And, yet again, once unleashed, no one can ever know where that violence will end.

Middle East Eye is reporting that even Jordan—which normalized relations with Israel in 1994—will be compelled to declare war on Israel in the event of ethnic cleansing. Its former deputy prime minister, Mamdouh al-Abadi, told MEE that Trump's "unprecedented colonialism" amounted to "a declaration of war on the Arab people." Whether or not Jordan, which hosts U.S. military bases, would take such a momentous step, and regardless of Jordan's military capabilities, I would take al-Abadi's assessment very seriously. You can read this al-Jazeera roundup of regional rejections of this horrific idea. 

Cleansing Gaza of Palestinians will make the entire Middle East a battlefield, and not a static one. Israel has inflicted sufficient damage on the Iranian coalition this summer and fall to, I think it's fair to say, set a regional balance of power, for now, in its favor. An ethnic cleansing campaign will ensure a return to the post-October 7 regional war, but way, way escalated. And as you can see from the reporting about Jordan, Israel and the U.S. will be opposed by more than just the Iranian coalition.

We in the United States should not expect to be safe from the violence. In REIGN OF TERROR, I wrote about the effects of ignoring the stated material and geopolitical explanations offered by al-Qaeda for its terrorism and focusing only on its religious justifications. You don't have to (and shouldn’t) sympathize with al-Qaeda to recognize that the U.S.-backed suffering of the Palestinians prompted people who would otherwise have lived much different lives into a determination to, as they saw it, strike back against the American behemoth that threatened the future of the Palestinians. 

I'm currently writing a book about someone named Majid Khan. To oversimplify, the onset of the Second Intifada was a major catalyst for Majid, as a troubled young man, to convince himself that heroism lay in joining with a group that was waging war on America. You will see in the book how this process unfolded—and how his experience of late-90s and early-2000s material prosperity, of the sort that far fewer Americans can expect a generation later, was not an impediment for him making that choice. How many more people will choose similarly once they see a U.S.-enforced ethnic cleansing of Gaza commence? The War on Terror has roots in the suppression of Palestine, and I can only look at what we are facing now as a full-circle moment. 

After October 7, I wrote often about the damage that the U.S.' Rules-Based International Order has inflicted on what remains of international law. This is where that leads: back to a world of statecraft "without moral limits," as Peter Beinart put it in his newsletter today:

This is the world without moral limits. The world with absolute disregard for the humanity of people who are not white and Christian, or Judeo-Christian, and Western. And this is the barbarism of our time. It’s monstrous to watch, but this has been a long time in coming. Every American politician, every rabbi, every Jewish leader who was not willing to say enough years and years and years ago has now found themselves in a position and will not be able to say enough now. And because we have a mad king in Donald Trump who wants to be a 19th century imperialist, he will help Israel in that project today, and people will go along with it.

But we must not talk in bloodless terms about the damage to laws, to treaties, to structures, to norms, to reputations. We have to talk in urgent terms about the damage to the human beings of Gaza. This afternoon, Netanyahu will meet at the Pentagon with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

WHILE I DON'T WANT TO REDIRECT THE NEWSLETTER'S FOCUS at a time like this, I thought John Ganz had an excellent structural conception of the Musk coup that's worth reading.

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.