On Monday, US President Donald Trump welcomed war criminal Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House for an emergency meeting to give an update on the genocidal US-Israeli campaign to exterminate and displace the Palestinian people and annex their land.
In an Oval Office press briefing following their meeting, Netanyahu said that the two discussed Trump’s “bold vision” of expelling the Palestinians from Gaza. “We’re working on it,” the Israeli president said.
Netanyahu said they discussed the “countries that might be amenable and are amenable to accepting Palestinians.” When asked about the ethnic cleansing plan, Trump beamed with pride, saying, “Now people are copying it. People are talking about the Trump plan.”
Netanyahu is, indeed, “working on” the plan, announced by Trump at an earlier meeting with Netanyahu in Washington on February 4, to “take over” and “own” the Gaza Strip. Contrary to its portrayal in the American media, Trump’s proposal is not a pipe dream but Israel’s actual operative plan in Gaza. The ethnic cleansing plan has four interrelated components:
- The deliberate starvation of the Palestinian population through the blockade of food and water.
- The daily bombardment and mass systematic killing of the civilian population.
- The full military occupation of the Gaza Strip.
- The creation of the infrastructure for transporting the entire remaining population out of Gaza.
Every component of this plan is being actively implemented.
Last month, in defiance of the terms of the January 19 ceasefire, Israel initiated the full blockade of all food, water and electricity into Gaza. No humanitarian supplies have entered the enclave in over a month, and the United Nations has been forced to shut down all remaining bakeries.
The creation of a deliberate, man-made famine is accompanied by the daily terrorist bombing of the civilian population. Last month, Israel broke the ceasefire agreement with a new aerial and ground offensive against Gaza.
This onslaught has been accompanied by full-scale summary executions. On March 23, Israeli forces attacked and systematically killed 15 clearly designated humanitarian workers, including multiple members of the Palestine Red Crescent and at least one employee of the United Nations. Subsequent investigations revealed that the victims were shot multiple times at close range, with several showing signs of being bound before their executions.
On Monday, an Israeli airstrike on a media tent killed one journalist and multiple others. Footage of the horrific attack prompted shock and outrage around the world.
Israel’s ongoing offensive in Gaza is not presented, as in earlier incursions, as a temporary operation. It is preparation for permanent military occupation. Last month, NPR, the Financial Times, and Haaretz reported that the Israeli military has drawn up a plan to fully occupy the Gaza Strip, internally displace the remaining population and provide only the “minimum caloric amount necessary for survival,” in the words of Haaretz.
The full military occupation of Gaza and the internal displacement of its population are the necessary prerequisites for the forcible expulsion of the Palestinians from the territory.
On March 23, Israel’s security cabinet formally voted to establish an office dedicated to overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Defense Minister Israel Katz stated that the bureau would manage the
departure to third countries, including securing their movement, establishing movement routes, checking pedestrians at designated crossings in the Gaza Strip, as well as coordinating the provision of infrastructure that will enable passage by land, sea and air to the destination countries.
The US-Israeli plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is a war crime, a crime against humanity and a crime against peace. It flagrantly violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the forcible transfer of civilians during armed conflict.
Trump’s plan to steal Palestinian land also breaches the 1970 United Nations Declaration on Principles of International Law, ratified by the United States, which affirms:
The territory of a State shall not be the object of acquisition by another State resulting from the threat or use of force.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court approved an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Netanyahu traveled to the United States from Hungary, following a meeting with Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Just hours after Netanyahu landed in Hungary on Thursday, the International Criminal Court sent a request to the Hungarian government to arrest and surrender Netanyahu to its detention center in The Hague, which the Hungarian government denied.
Upon leaving Hungary, Netanyahu’s plane took “a flight path about 400 kilometers (248 miles) longer to avoid flying over countries that might enforce the ICC arrest warrant issued against him in the case of an emergency landing,” according to Haaretz.
The ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a central component of the broader US military offensive in the Middle East, aimed at securing total domination over the region. Trump has launched near-daily airstrikes on Yemen since last month and is deploying aircraft carriers, destroyers and bombers within striking distance of Iran. In a recent statement, he warned that unless Iran accepts his terms, “there will be bombing … the likes of which they have never seen before.”
The Trump administration’s plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is a central axis of both its international and domestic program. Amid a deepening and pervasive crisis of capitalism, the American ruling class has dispensed with any remaining restraints on the brutality of its class rule—through imperialist war abroad and the intensified suppression and exploitation of workers at home.
The move toward dictatorship at home and the adoption of genocidal measures abroad express the fundamental tendencies of American capitalism. The Trump administration, representing a criminal financial oligarchy, is engaged in a calculated conspiracy to establish a fascistic dictatorship in the United States. It sees in Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza a model of unparalleled brutality and criminality to be emulated—both in the conduct of imperialist war and in the violent repression of opposition at home.
The Democratic Party is not an opposition to the Trump administration—It is a critical partner in the assault on democratic rights and in the campaign of imperialist violence abroad. In May of last year, then-President Joe Biden labeled nonviolent demonstrations on college campuses—opposing the US government’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza—as “antisemitic” and “against the law.” Last week, the vast majority of Democrats in the Senate voted to advance legislation that would send $9 billion more in weapons to the Israeli regime.
Trump’s meeting with Netanyahu came just days after protests by over one million people broke out in cities across the United States, reflecting widespread opposition to his administration’s assault on social programs, mass layoffs, attacks on democratic rights and its sponsorship of the Gaza genocide. Trump’s response has been to escalate, doubling down on the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and intensifying the repression of those who resist it.
Over the past two months, Trump has targeted pro-Palestinian demonstrators for persecution, seizing Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil into ICE detention and forcing others, including Momodou Taal, to flee the country under threat of arrest. This domestic repression is part of a unified strategy of war abroad and dictatorship at home.
The struggle against the Gaza genocide and the broader fight against imperialist war are inseparable from the resistance of workers to mass layoffs, trade war policies and the destruction of bedrock social programs. It is significant that just two days after the protests in the US, Palestinian workers launched a general strike across the West Bank in solidarity with the working class in Gaza.
The fight against genocide must develop into a global movement of the working class, fused with the fight to defend social and democratic rights and to oppose the war drive of American imperialism. This requires a clear and conscious political program: the expropriation of the oligarchs, the establishment of workers’ power, and the reorganization of society on the basis of socialism.