It’s back to the future, as Nazi-neocon insanity prompts Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This enduring quote is commonly attributed to the late genius Albert Einstein. Decades after his death in 1955, politicians are still rediscovering his meaning today as they reinvent government policies while proclaiming their newfound passion for Trumpism. I hoped in vain that the crazy first-term Donald Trump would remain behind closed doors as long as possible in his second term in office, but, lo and behold, there he was across Wednesday’s headlines after the US President called for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip.

According to Trump, 2.2 million Palestinians who have withstood 16 months of Israel’s genocide and 57 years of illegal occupation, should be displaced from the “big pile of rubble” that is Gaza. He forgot to mention that the rubble was created by the man sitting next to him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with bombs made in the United States and given to the occupation state in the full knowledge that they would be used to commit war crimes and thus against US Federal Law. Without even a pretence of some care for the future wellbeing of the Palestinians, he said that they can go to Jordan or Egypt, and that America would “take over” Gaza and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

This was greeted with outrage across the region, not least in Riyadh, Amman and Cairo. Opposition to his proposal for yet another ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians grew from Europe to China, Russia to Turkiye and beyond.

Quite what authority Trump thinks he has to make such a proposal is unclear.

However, his inherent love of real estate deals soon became obvious.

“I do see a long-term ownership position, and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East, and everybody I’ve spoken to, this was not a decision made lightly,” he told journalists. “Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent in a really magnificent area that nobody would know.”

Personally, I don’t think this was his idea. He normally rants from the podium after signing an executive order, but this time he made his announcement from a script devoid of his usual drivel.

Demonstrating the emotional intelligence of a brick, Trump sat shamelessly before the world’s media alongside the wanted war criminal Netanyahu, the fourth world leader to face an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Israeli leader is in the company of Vladimir Putin of Russia, Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan and the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

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Of course, this isn’t the first time that an American president has proposed illegal plans to redraw the map of the Middle East. Which brings me back to Einstein’s view on recycling old ideas that simply cannot be made to work. The Jewish genius was not a big fan of Israel or its violent behaviour. He once wrote a brief letter that did not hold out much hope for a long-term future for the Zionist state, as I wrote in MEMO a couple of years ago.

During Adolf Hitler’s rule in Germany, long before he introduced the so-called “Final Solution” for Europe’s “Jewish question”, the Nazis pushed the idea of displacing all European Jews to the island of Madagascar, which was a French colony at the time.

The “Madagascar Plan” fell apart at the notorious Wannsee Conference in Berlin when Hitler and his leading Nazi henchmen gathered on 20 January, 1942, to discuss another plan submitted by Hermann Goring. Six months earlier Goring had issued orders to Reinhard Heydrich to prepare the plan for the “Final Solution”. In attendance at Wannsee was Adolf Eichmann, the head of Jewish affairs for the Reich Central Security Office.

The Madagascar Plan was dropped as unworkable during war time, and yet the Nazis felt able to divert a huge amount of resources from the war effort in order to round up and kill Jews, homosexuals, disabled people and Roma on an industrial scale in what we now know as the obscenity of the Holocaust.

Fast-forward a few decades and the mass displacement of oppressed people was on the agenda once again.

The then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Berlin when she announced that the George W Bush Administration wanted to settle displaced Palestinians in Argentina and Chile rather than let them fulfil their legitimate right to return to their homes and land in what is now Israel. Rice made the proposal in a June 2008 meeting with US, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators during a discussion about international funding to compensate refugees.

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All refugees, not just Palestinians, have the right to return to their homes. This is enshrined in international law, but it is a right which the Zionist state has always resisted, even though allowing Palestinians to return was a condition of Israel’s membership of the UN. Moreover, the right of return is an individual right, so it cannot be negotiated away en masse, even by a compliant Palestinian leadership.

Rice’s proposal appears to have been influenced by the transfer of 117 Palestinian refugees to Chile between March and April 2008, a few months before the Berlin meeting. The refugees had lived in Iraq for many years but were stranded in a grim camp on the Syrian border amid the post-Saddam Hussein chaos. Chile already had around 200,000 citizens of Palestinian descent, and hosted the 117 in response to a UN appeal.

At the time Rice made her proposal the Palestinians from Iraq appeared to be settling well in La Calera, a city north of Santiago. They were greeted with promises of help with housing, jobs and language training. The subsequent Rice plan was so sensitive that it was years before the secret minutes of the 24 June 2008 meeting surfaced in full.

Mass deportation, therefore, is something that Jews and Palestinians have in common over the past hundred years or so. And yet it was Zionist Jews who ethnically-cleansed Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, and today’s extreme far-right Zionist Jews in Israel are enthusiastic about Trump’s illegal, and very Nazi in nature, ethnic cleansing proposal. “Never again” clearly means nothing to them when the victims of genocide are Palestinians.

Why did Trump come out with the idea of mass expulsion? Take a look at the smirk on Netanyahu’s face sitting beside him.

The Israeli tail was again wagging the Washington dog.

Trump has been poorly advised on Gaza and I believe that he will jettison the plan quickly given the denunciations from around the world. However, I would not be surprised to see Israel forget about the ceasefire phases two and three and re-start its genocide.

Nevertheless, I suggest that Trump should sit down with people from outside his billionaire circles and seek their advice about Gaza. He likes doing the unexpected, so why not sit with ordinary Palestinians and ask them what they would like to happen next? You can’t get more off-the-wall thinking than that. And do you know what? It almost certainly hasn’t been done before.

Let’s have some fresh thinking on Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine, instead of going back to the future with old, illegal and cruel policies that were devised by Nazis, Zionists and Bush-era neocons. Trump has the opportunity to be remembered for doing something positive for a change. Will he take it? As Einstein might have said: it’s not rocket science, but even that might be beyond The Donald’s comprehension.

READ: 80% of Israeli Jews support US President Trump’s proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza, survey finds

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.