Ethnic Cleansing Under The 'Rules-Based International Order'

The wages of impunity are found in telegraphing the removal of Palestinians from their land en masse

Edited by Sam Thielman

THIS IS LIKELY going to be a light week for this newsletter. On Wednesday, weather permitting, I'll be speaking to a class at Connecticut College. The rest of the week I've got to chase down a tip that, should it pan out, you'll see in this newsletter in one form or another. On top of that, at the end of the month, I'm taking a reporting trip very far away for the book I'm writing, and I'll need to prepare for that in between IRON MAN scripts, lettering passes and so on. ...Yet I recognize that by writing this, I'm tempting the news gods into forcing my hand for more editions of FOREVER WARS this week.

That said, President Trump made it clearer today that he is not ad-libbing about the U.S. completing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. In a Fox interview you may have heard about, Bret Baier asked if Gaza's Palestinians would be permitted to return home once the U.S. completes Trump's alleged redevelopment of the strip. "No, they wouldn’t, because they’re going to have much better housing," Trump said. 

I was put in mind of Andrew Jackson and the ethnic cleansing of the native tribes of the southeast: 

To achieve his purpose [cleansing the area of its native population], Jackson encouraged Congress to adopt the Removal Act of 1830. The Act established a process whereby the President could grant land west of the Mississippi River to Indian tribes that agreed to give up their homelands. As incentives, the law allowed the Indians financial and material assistance to travel to their new locations and start new lives and guaranteed that the Indians would live on their new property under the protection of the United States Government forever. With the Act in place, Jackson and his followers were free to persuade, bribe, and threaten tribes into signing removal treaties and leaving the Southeast.

Spoilers for Manifest Destiny, but those and many other tribes were not, in fact, granted Much Better Housing. There was not Much Better Housing awaiting the Armenians whom the Young Turk government at the end of the Ottoman Empire forced to march into the Syrian desert at Deir az-Zour. No one knows these histories better than Palestinians, who will not go anywhere.

As I watch, I think of how relentlessly American Exceptionalism has taken a sledgehammer to international law over many, many decades in order to get to the point that an American president would openly declare that he will cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. Or, for that matter, for his predecessor to pressure Egypt and Jordan for their removal while mumbling through the part about their unlikely return. My friend Mary Ellen O'Connell of the University of Notre Dame, an expert in international law, last week used Trump's lack of "interest in fig leaves to obscure his contempt of law" to force a reckoning with the "Rules-Based International Order" or RBIO: 

[O]n one of the most important issues, war and peace, we have been divided on substance as well as the critical structural principle of sovereign equality. The RBIO evolved at the end of the Cold War as a claim that the U.S. as the leading democracy has the inherent power to replace the UN Security Council in authorizing the use of force. The RBIO replaces the principle of equality with a variation on virtue ethics—the democratic leader of the largest military state sets the rules. Biden created his own, secret rules for targeted killings, and, as late as October 24, 2024, with Trump nearing the presidency, Biden released the National Security Memo on AI committing to the standards of the “RBIO”, not international law.

The RBIO may well be history. Trump has no interest in fig leaves to obscure his contempt of law. He thereby lays bare the need for a unified approach—an end to double standards. Instead of looking for legal interpretations that allow maximum flexibility to national leaders wishing to use force, the peremptory status of law against war can again form the common understanding. The prohibition on force does not shrink. It is a natural law norm. Natural law is the bedrock and anchor of all law. In the aftermath of the catastrophic Second World War, international lawyers renewed their understanding of and reliance on natural law. They knew why the prohibitions on the use of force, genocide, torture, slavery, apartheid, and civilian targeting bind regardless of contrary state practice. The very precepts that the law binds and rests on principles of equality and good faith, all endure.

Trump is not a departure from American history, but instead a product of it. Viewed through a certain lens, he's a fulfillment of longstanding currents in American history. The Palestinians are in the crosshairs of those historical choices, and they will not be the last ones. 

Meanwhile, with the King of Jordan slated to visit Trump at the White House, today Hamas' Qassem Brigades said that they're not going to release more hostages until the Israelis comply with unmet obligations under the ceasefire. Al-Jazeera understates things by writing that "the entire atmosphere at the moment is quite charged with fear and anticipation."

NOURA ERAKAT HAS AN EXCELLENT and REIGN OF TERROR-ish essay looking at the residue of repression smeared across the United States due to its support for the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Now that there's been a repulsive glee in some liberal corners about Trump's proposed ethnic cleansing being just deserts for Arab-American refusal to vote for Kamala Harris, this line of hers stood out at me as crucial for a productive response: 

It was thus unsurprising that throughout the election cycle, nearly all the mainstream liberal pundits sounding the alarm about white supremacy, jingoism, xenophobia, and political violence failed to connect these things to U.S. imperial violence. What if, rather than blaming Palestinians, Arab Americans, and American Muslims, these pundits had seen their treatment—under Biden and for decades before him—as central to the Trump-led repression looming before us?

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM makes explicit that migrants caged at Guantanamo Bay may very well be there indefinitely. Stay for the part of this CNN interview where she also doesn't rule out that people arrested on suspicion of things like theft may indeed be sent there as well. And just as it was 20 years ago, she makes sure to drop the "worst of the worst" line to pre-convict such people in the minds of viewers. 

NO IDEA IF THIS WILL HAPPEN, but al-Monitor reported last week that the Kurdish separatist militant group PKK—whose Syrian affiliate is the kernel of the U.S.' proxy force in eastern Syria, known as the SDF—may disarm following an anticipated call from its imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan. I also don't know if that will change any dynamics of the Turkish proxy force's fight against the SDF, but it's bound to inaugurate a new phase of Kurdish politics as regards Turkey.  

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.