This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Fallout continues to grow over President Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza and displace the entire Palestinian population in order to turn Gaza into what he called, quote, “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Trump made the shocking announcement at the White House Tuesday while meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Trump administration has since tried to walk back some of the president’s comments. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Palestinians would only be temporarily removed from Gaza.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz has ordered the Israeli army to create a plan for what he calls the, quote, “voluntary departure” of Palestinians from Gaza. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned against any call for the ethnic cleansing of the territory. Palestinians have widely condemned Trump’s proposal. This is Qassem Abu Hassoun, a displaced Palestinian living in Rafah.
QASSEM ABU HASSOUN: [translated] No matter what the Israeli defense minister says about the displacement of the people of the Gaza Strip, this is not possible. This is our country, our land. We will hang onto it until the last moment. We’ve been waiting for a year and a half, just like the baby waits for food and water. We have waited for the ceasefire to start to come back to our homes, despite that we don’t have houses or homes anymore. So we got displaced to the rubble, and we built tents and stayed.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Palestinian American political analyst Omar Baddar. He’s a member of the National Policy Council of the Arab American Institute.
Omar, thanks so much for being with us. Respond to what President Trump laid out and Netanyahu underscored as they stood at a joint news conference in Washington, D.C. He talked about Gaza being rebuilt by the United States as a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean and again is pushing Arab countries to accept the Palestinian population. He said America would “own” Gaza.
OMAR BADDAR: You know, Amy, everything Trump says and does is a little bit extreme, but the lunacy of this particular proposal is really in a class of its own. Now, we’ve heard a lot of comments from Washington of politicians who glibly say racist things like “flatten Gaza and turn it into a parking lot,” or whatever else. But what Trump has done different is that he’s put this forward as a serious proposal, essentially making it official U.S. policy the destruction of Palestinian society, the scattering of Palestinians to neighboring countries, and, on top of that, for the U.S. to just come and take Palestinian territory over and make it part of the United States. I mean, this is just — it’s difficult to find the words to really describe how absurd that is.
But the most despicable part of it is that it was framed as concern for Palestinians, that’s why we’re doing this, at a time when he’s standing directly across the podium from another man, who’s smirking, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court because he is responsible for the destruction of Gaza and the devastation of a civilian population, the slaughtering of tens of thousands of children, and making it unlivable. All you would need in this case is for the U.S. to tell Netanyahu to stop destroying Gaza and allow it to be rebuilt so that Palestinians can live there as a free people in their own country. And yet, that seems to be not on the table, because Trump does not see Palestinians as human beings. He thinks they can be moved around like cattle. And that’s where this insane pronouncement actually comes from. And the fact that Netanyahu is sitting there with glee in his face, you could see it. The dream of the right wing in Israel for a very long time has been to drive Palestinians completely out of the area so that Israel can just expand and take over all over that territory. It’s difficult to imagine that we’d be living in a moment in which the president of the United States is openly advocating that position and facilitating one of the worst crimes that we would have ever seen in history if Israel is allowed to complete it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Omar, what do you think the impact of these statements will be? One of the other things that Trump said is that he’s discussed this plan with leaders in the region, and they all, quote, “love it.” So, if you could say, what do you think the impact will be? And how have leaders in the region actually responded?
OMAR BADDAR: Yeah, Trump is basically lying. I mean, there’s nobody who lies — more than he breathes, probably — than Trump does. And everybody in the region actually wants an end to this absolute horror show that has been put on for the past 15 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and they want a way to defuse the situation. And instead, Trump is proposing to exacerbate it, make it worse, and to also impose a refugee crisis on neighboring counties. All of it, nobody wants this, with the exception of Israel and some of Trump’s, you know, high-dollar donors, who are pushing for this idea that Israel should control the land from the river to the sea. That’s who wants this plan.
And there’s no question that even though the entire region would absolutely reject it, what I’m worried about — because there’s been a lot of commentary of, “Of course, he’s just bluffing. You know, he would never send the U.S. military to try to do that.” I think all of that is true. But if all Trump does is simply allow Netanyahu to continue what he’s been doing for the last 15 months indefinitely — you know, Gaza is already unlivable. There is no infrastructure. There is no clean water. And if you prevent it from being rebuilt and allow Netanyahu to just continue treating it as a killing field, just this concentration camp with millions of people in it being devastated over and over again, the fundamental reality is that we are heading to the complete destruction of Palestinian society in Gaza as a matter of status quo.
And the world really has a choice to make right now of whether we have to stand up collectively and say that “never again” meant something and this is absolutely the time to stand up and say this has to come to an end, or whether we’re just going to sit there and watch as Netanyahu continues decimating that concentration camp endlessly in the hopes that we can eventually get Palestinians either to die or to leave.
AMY GOODMAN: Omar Baddar, it’s clear the U.S. is pushing very hard especially Jordan and Egypt. I mean, you have — the president has just invited the king of Jordan to the White House within the next few weeks, and the State Department announcing it’s approved a potential foreign military sale to Egypt for the acquisition of what’s called AN/TPS-78 long-range radar systems. It’s more than $300 million worth of weapons in that system alone.
OMAR BADDAR: Yeah, there is — Trump continues to be under the impression that you can buy people. And there are some things in which you can’t just buy people. You can bribe your way however you want, but the question of Palestine is one — it’s the lens through which the entire Arab world views international relations.
The entire region understands that there is a very, very deep grievance in the fact that Palestinians have not been allowed to be a free people in their own country, and the fact that Israel’s atrocities and occupation and apartheid and just the endless list of crimes that has been imposed on them, that is live-streamed on people’s phones and computers throughout entire region, is a source of deep resentment. People are furious watching all of this.
And I don’t think that any amount of money is going to convince these governments to, say, risk being in complete disalignment with your people. I mean, let’s be serious. Those are not particularly democratic regimes, but they understand that they can’t go so far out of step with where their people are, because that makes those regimes on shaky ground, as well. And I think that Trump is going to discover that no amount of money in the world is going to convince these governments to essentially risk committing suicide.
And whether he might be able to convince them to take on a small symbolic number, a few thousand here and there, just so Trump can brag and pretend that his plan worked in some way, I don’t know about that. But certainly, the plot of complete and total displacement of Palestinians from Gaza is not going to be something that anybody in the region is going to agree to. We understand what this is. We know it’s an attempt at destroying Palestine and Palestinian society. Everybody in the region understands that. And it’s not going to be something that anybody is going to accept or stand by and watch happen.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Omar, could you say, finally, what do you think the impact of this is going to be on the ceasefire, which so far is holding?
OMAR BADDAR: Yeah, I worry deeply about that ceasefire, because Trump’s tone has changed significantly on it. He came in talking about the importance of the ceasefire, threatening to unleash hell if it were not to come about. And now he’s saying he has no confidence that the ceasefire is going to hold.
And judging by the glee on Netanyahu’s face, it seems clear that Netanyahu is about to be given a free hand to continue the slaughter in Gaza in order to, quote-unquote, “complete and achieve the aims of the war.” And by the way, the aims of the war are not achievable. The forcible retrieval of hostages through violence has actually killed infinitely more hostages than it has rescued. And the alternative of also defeating Hamas is also a nonstarter.
The real aim of that war is something Netanyahu said early on in a private conversation that was reported in Israeli press, which is to thin the population in Gaza down to a minimum. That is the real aim. And that is precisely what Netanyahu hopes to continue doing, in order to get rid of what Israel views racistly as a demographic problem, the fact that there are too many Palestinians who exist on the land that Israel wants. That’s always been the problem, because it gets in the way of establishing this Jewish supremacist state. It makes it a permanent apartheid state, to have a Palestinian majority, and that is precisely what Israel is fighting tooth and nail to undo, and no matter what the cost is to the lives of literally tens of thousands of children killed so far and possibly millions impacted if this project continues.
AMY GOODMAN: Omar Baddar, we want to thank you for being with us, Palestinian American political analyst, member of the National Policy Council of the Arab American Institute, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.
Coming up, Peter Beinart, author of the new book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Stay with us.
