Transcript:

Alex Kane: Hello and welcome to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Alex Kane, the Senior Reporter at Jewish Currents, and I’ll be your host today. On February 4th, President Donald Trump stood alongside Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and announced that all Palestinians in Gaza should leave the coastal enclave and go to other Arab countries such as Egypt or Jordan, a move that would mark the latest chapter in the Palestinians’ history of being ethnically cleansed. Israel immediately embraced the idea, and the Israeli Defense Minister ordered the Israeli military to draft plans to facilitate ethnic cleansing from Gaza. Egypt, Jordan and many other countries swiftly rejected the idea, but it has been repeatedly aired by Trump himself and his foreign policy team. While Trump has so far failed to bring Egypt and Jordan on board (in a recent Fox News interview, he said he’s not forcing the plan on them, though he will sit back and recommend it), he recently published an absurd AI-generated video imagining what a quote “Trump Gaza” would look like. The embrace of ethnic cleansing comes as the ceasefire in Gaza appears to be on the brink of collapse, with Israel announcing that it has stopped all humanitarian aid into the enclave, aid that is desperately needed in the territory that has been absolutely shattered by Israel’s bombardment.

AK: To discuss the dark implications of Trump’s plan, the historical context behind it, and what Trump’s comments mean for the teetering Gaza ceasefire, I have invited two guests. Mouin Rabbani is the co-editor of Jadaliyya and non-resident fellow at both DAWN and the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, and Tariq Kenney-Shawa is the US Policy Fellow for Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. Mouin and Tariq, thank you so much for coming on.

Mouin Rabbani: It’s good to be with you. Thanks for having me.

Tariq Kenney-Shawa: Thanks for having us, Alex.

AK: Before we get to the specifics of Trump’s Gaza comments or policy, I guess (if we could even term it that), I wanted to dig into some historical context. I was wondering if both of you could talk about some past moments when Israel desired (and, in some cases, succeeded) in forcibly displacing Palestinians. And I’m wondering if those moments set the stage for Trump’s Gaza scheme.

TKS: Well, first of all, thanks for having us on, Alex. I think this is obviously an extremely important conversation. I think we need to keep in mind Israel’s founding ethos here, which really revolves around the concept of achieving maximum land with minimum Palestinians. As we all know, since 1948, Israel has really engaged in what is, in many ways, a constant Nakba: a constant process of ethnic cleansing and corralling that is focused on achieving that wider goal of maximum land, minimum Palestinians. And I think it’s really important to highlight the strategy Israel has adopted to achieve these goals, which is a process of gradual and piecemeal ethnic cleansing (versus one that is conducted in one fell swoop).

TKS: And so, of course, we have moments throughout history where Israel has carried out mass expulsions in one fell swoop. We have 1948, we have 1967, ’73, and now again in 2024 and ’25. But I think much of Israel’s ethnic cleansing strategy has also taken place during the years in between, carried out in individual home demolitions in the West Bank, wiping out entire family lines in Gaza, encroaching on land here and expelling there. And, in doing so, gradually, Israel has successfully avoided a lot of the international pushback that they might have received if they had, for example, booted entire populations in one fell swoop. So, see, this process really normalizes what would otherwise be seen as unacceptable. I think that’s why it’s really critical to see and understand the historical context here, because, while the atrocities Israel is currently committing are unparalleled in terms of their size and scale, it’s also in combination with this legitimization process that has been ongoing for decades.

TKS: So now we’re seeing echoes of this strategy in Gaza, but also combined with the one-fell-swoop approach. And Israel is realizing that they can actually get away with quite a bit more than what they expected to be able to without triggering a wide-scale reaction from the international community. And so, we need to remain prepared for the absolute worst. But what makes the Biden administration so reprehensible is that they really laid the foundation for the discussion that we’re having now. They set the conditions for Israel to destroy Gaza, and a year-and-a-half of constant weapons transfers, diplomatic shielding, has really given Israel both the ability—in terms of the technical weapons they needed to do it and the political cover to destroy Gaza. Now we’re facing the consequences of that approach. Because the truth is, at this point, nobody appears willing or able (at least in the West), from the United States and in Europe, to stop Israel from getting away with its ultimate goals of ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

MR: Yeah, in addition to what Tariq said, I think it’s important to recognize the Gaza Strip did not exist before 1948. The Gaza Strip is a product of the Nakba. And as a result of the Nakba, the Gaza Strip’s population increased, virtually overnight, from approximately 80,000 native Gazans to more than 250,000. And about three-quarters of the population of the Gaza Strip since it was formed in 1948 have been refugees. And Israel, from the outset, has been uncomfortable (in my view, rightly so) with the presence of these large numbers of Palestinians who it dispossessed and transformed into stateless refugees sitting right across its border, often within walking distance of their homes. And so, it’s within this context that Israel, since the early 1950s—in other words, since almost two decades before the occupation began in 1967—began putting forward a variety of proposals to reduce the population of the Gaza Strip, primarily reducing its refugee population. And in the ’50s and ’60s, you had all kinds of schemes being proposed: to send them to Libya, to send them to Iraq, to send them to other places.

MR: And after ’67, when Israel was in physical control of the Gaza Strip, that’s when you began to see actual initiatives to encourage Palestinians to, for example, move to the West Bank; to exile activists and their families to what was then the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. Israel cut a deal with the Neo-Nazi regime in Paraguay, I think it was in late ’60s or early ’70s, to export about 10,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Paraguay every year, until that was sabotaged by a Palestinian attack on the Israeli consulate in Asunción. And then, also even within the Gaza Strip, Israel had a program whereby it built these housing projects, such as Sheikh Radwan and Tel al-Sultan and Rafah and others, where Palestinian refugees who lived within one of the strip’s eight refugee camps could purchase homes in these new housing projects at reasonable prices—provided that they demolished their homes within the refugee camp before moving there. So, this was another initiative, not so much to reduce the population of the Gaza Strip by expelling people but to reduce the density of refugee camps and the population of refugee camps. Because Israel viewed (here, I think wrongly) the refugees as its main challenge, and in addition to that, viewed the refugee camps as the main focus of opposition to its policies. And this, of course, was proven wrong in a spectacular fashion in 1987, when not only every refugee camp but also every town and city (and for that matter, every village) throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip rose up in rebellion against the Israeli occupation. So, there’s a long history here of various plans, proposals, schemes to try to reduce, if not collectively eliminate, the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip since 1948.

AK: Do you think there’s anything significantly different in what Trump has proposed and what Israel has embraced from the past? Or is it very much the same? What is genuinely new, if anything, and what is merely a continuation of Israel’s long desire?

MR: Well, I think the main difference has perhaps less to do with substance and content than with author. This is, to the best of my recollection, the first time that a Western head of state, that an American head of state, formally proposes the mass expulsion, the forcible mass expulsion of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip. I mean, we’re not talking about the Israeli far right here; we’re talking about the White House. And on top of that, to take over the Gaza Strip, to turn it into--what does he call it, the Gaza Riviera? I mean, this reminds me of the ’90s after Oslo, where people were touting that the Gaza Strip was going to be transformed into Singapore on the Mediterranean.

MR: Well, under conditions of occupation, it was never going to be more than Soweto on the Mediterranean. And that is exactly what it has been. But I think the point about Trump’s proposal—and I call it a proposal because it’s not a plan, it’s not an initiative, it’s just words being tossed about—the real issue with Trump’s plan is not if it’s going to be implemented. And anything even remotely approaching the way it’s been presented by Trump, that’s never going to happen. It’s a non-starter. It’s dead in the water. The issue with it goes deeper than that. First of all, it puts mass forcible expulsion front and center on the policy agenda. It makes it a legitimate part of the policy discussion, just as it was for a brief period in October 2023 when Antony Blinken conducted a tour of America’s closest Arab client regimes to propose something very similar and was basically shown the door. Secondly, it seeks to transform the question of Palestine from a political question that needs to be addressed through issues like self-determination, decolonization, statehood, into a humanitarian question that needs to be resolved by providing housing, jobs, social services—and on top of that, by providing these in the Arab world rather than in Palestine. So, it’s these kinds of issues that I think are what is significant about this Trump proposal, rather than that we’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and find out half of Gaza’s Palestinians are in the Sinai Peninsula and the other half are in the Jordanian desert.

1TKS: No, I agree with everything Mouin put forth, and I would also say that I think it’s important to see Trump’s comments as in concert with the other factors that are at play. And the other factors are that Israel has thoroughly destroyed most of the Gaza Strip. And I think it’s really important to see this in its contextual connection with the previous administration, and seeing how the decisions the previous administration made, when it came to their refusal to hold Israel accountable and the blank check it allowed the Israeli government to operate with, that really set the foundation for where we are now. So, in very many ways, I really see the Trump administration as a continuation of a long line of Israeli impunity. And as he so often does, Trump says the quiet part out loud in a way that other US politicians, other US presidents, haven’t in the past. And I think, of course, we should be concerned. But at the same time, I think it also opens opportunities, because this is really the first time the United States is presenting itself not as an honest peace broker (which is the claim it’s made for decades) but as Israel’s lawyer, essentially taking the stand and saying: No, we are on Israel’s side, we fully agree with and aspire to Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing objectives here, and we are going to be figuring out how to achieve those ends.

AK: Does this signal anything larger about the global geopolitical order that Trump is presiding over or wants to have? We’re talking, of course, in the aftermath of Trump explicitly jettisoning the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy and making moves toward perhaps abandoning Ukraine as the war grinds on there. I just wonder if either of you have any analysis of what the Gaza proposal means in the context of this larger upheaval on foreign policy. And what does this mean for traditionalists in both parties who are trying to manage this upheaval, where the liberal order is not being used to provide justifications for war crimes—it’s just being jettisoned—and there’s a naked attempt at domination?

MR: There’s a tendency to view Trump as a radical departure from, let’s say, traditional US foreign policy, or established US foreign policy. I think certainly, at the rhetorical level, there’s a case to be made on that. I mean, as Tariq said, this is the guy who says the quiet part out loud. And in my view, we should also take a different perspective on Trump; looking at him not as the radical departure but as a logical culmination. Go back to his first term and look at all of his initiatives that supposedly formed a radical break with US foreign policy: You have his extension of US recognition over Israel’s claims of sovereignty over Jerusalem, and its claim to have established its capital in Jerusalem, and the relocation of the US Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Well, the only thing Trump did is he stopped signing waivers to postpone the implementation of bipartisan congressional legislation that had been on the books for decades.

MR: Take, for example, his cutting off of aid to UNRWA. I mean, Congress has been working itself into a hysterical frenzy about UNRWA for decades. Trump simply picked up where Republicans and Democrats left off, shutting down the PLO mission in Washington and expelling its diplomats. An overwhelming bipartisan majority in 1987, I believe it was, adopted congressional legislation designating the PLO as a terrorist organization. And the only thing that happened is that Trump stopped signing waivers allowing the PLO to operate in the United States. It’s not as if they invented this policy. They picked up where their predecessors left off. You want proof? Well, look at the Biden administration. Biden did not reverse a single one of Trump’s Middle East policies, up to and including the Iran nuclear agreement, which was the signature diplomatic achievement of the administration in which he was a vice president. And now, this proposal we’re talking about—it was a Biden administration that sent Blinken to the Middle East in October 2023 to urge Arab governments to cooperate with the US-Israeli proposal to forcibly expel the population of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula. Trump isn’t the first American leader to come up with this. The difference is, he is saying it publicly and out loud rather than behind closed doors, as a result of which, Arab leaders are publicly rejecting it out loud rather than telling Blinken to take a hike behind closed doors. So, yes, he is a disruptive president and all the rest of it. But I think, when it comes to foreign policy, I see much fewer breaks, radical breaks with the past, than in foreign and particularly Middle East policy.

TKS: Yeah, absolutely. So, I think I would add to this that I think the differences that differentiate Trump from previous presidents and his administration from previous administration is both rhetorical and, to a certain extent, tactical. I think that up until now, US Presidents have pursued US interests with a strategy that uses international law and the international rules-based system as a means to an end. And in order to do so, they had to adopt liberal rhetoric, often lofty, flowery human rights rhetoric that was, in their eyes and in their words, supposed to justify US actions (oftentimes of which they were, brutal, violent military actions) in order to secure US interests. But they would justify them within the frameworks of international law, within the frameworks of our human rights rhetoric—when the US intervenes in any given country, it’s because they’re in pursuit of democracy, right? And that is an example of a liberal US president using liberal rhetoric to justify inherently illiberal ends.

TKS: I think that what sets Trump apart is not only does he do away with the empty rhetoric, but he’s also doing away with the approach to securing US interests that frames it within the international rules-based system. He’s saying: We don’t need this rules-based system to achieve US interests and make America great again. We can do so by reverting to this very grueling realist approach that many expected to have left in the past. And basically, that’s what I see sets him apart. And for decades, when it comes to Israel/Palestine, the US has tried to masquerade as an honest peace broker. And from afar, the multi-decade US-brokered peace process looks to many like simply a failed approach that many Israelis or Americans or liberals would argue broke down just because of extremists on “both sides,” quote, unquote.

TKS: But in reality, what Oslo did in practice on the ground was it entrenched Israel’s domination in a way that would make sure it was sustainable in the long run: separating Palestinians from Israelis in increasingly isolated bantustans or enclaves; removing Palestinian economic leverage by separating Palestinian workers from the Israeli economy; fracturing the Palestinian people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what the traditionalists (we’re talking about US traditionalists) want to do, they want to resurrect that process. They want to resurrect an approach where they’re achieving US interests, pursuing Israeli interests, but within a legitimizing framework. And what Trump is doing, is he’s doing away with all that bullshit. And he makes it clear and undeniable that the US is not—and, in fact, never was—an honest peace broker in this equation. And he’s making it clear that the US is and has always been Israel’s lawyer and protector. Trump, he’s going to make it clear that he’s going to pursue those same objectives through brute force. But the important thing is that, at the end of the day, these are the same objectives. They’re the same end goals. It’s different rhetoric, and it’s different tactics here and there to get there.

TKS: And I think Mouin’s example of comparing the policy records of the first Trump administration to the Biden administration pre-October 7 was a great example of this. Like Mouin said, the Biden administration barely reversed any of the policies that Trump instated, whether it was moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem or recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan. But at the same time, Biden did adopt all sorts of flowery human rights rhetoric about a two-state solution and yada, yada, Palestinian human rights and all that. But at the end of the day, on the ground, Israeli expansion continued, the Israeli occupation tightened, and then we saw Israel launch its genocide, and we saw the Biden administration’s reaction was to give the Israeli government more money than any previous administration had in the past. So, I very much see the differences that separate Trump from previous administrations as rhetorical, tactical, but all fitting within the same ultimate end goals.

AK: Tariq, how do you view the history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and the current desire for more of it alongside continued forcible displacement, both in Gaza and the West Bank? How does that interact with other strategies of management that Israel has attempted, namely, particularly in Gaza; the blockade and siege that has existed since 2007 but hasn’t involved Israeli ground troops within Gaza? Like, what do you see as the significant differences and the context behind why it is that these strategies of management are changing at this point? And how do they reinforce each other?

TKS: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, again, we have to go back to Israel’s founding ethos. I think how Israel has treated Gaza is a very interesting case study of how Israel has pursued maximum land with minimum Palestinians because it’s not necessarily always going to be ethnic cleansing. Sometimes it’s going to be a process of simply corralling as many Palestinians as possible into shrinking and increasingly isolated enclaves, in which they are a lot more easily controllable, in addition to just being separated from the rest of Israel and Israelis. So, they achieve that sense of separation and effectively render Palestinians invisible without needing to either expel them or ethnically cleanse them all in one fell swoop, or kill them, slaughter them entirely through genocide.

TKS: Obviously, since October 7, we’ve seen this process of erasure reach new heights. And I think, at the beginning of the genocide, Netanyahu said himself that his goal was to thin out the population of Gaza. And what Israel is doing has already thinned out the population; I mean, around 100,000 Palestinians were able to leave Gaza before Israel took control of Rafah, and now, they’re living in Egypt and Jordan and various countries. I mean, the official number is around 60,000 killed, but it’s probably a lot higher, in the hundreds of thousands when you include indirect deaths. So, in many ways, the population is already thinned out. And over the coming months and years, what Israel is going to try to get away with is further thinning it out. And we’re going to see a continuation of the process in which Israel has deliberately rendered much of Gaza unlivable in order to leave Palestinians (or as many as possible) with no other option but to leave if given the opportunity.

TKS: And I think that the model we are seeing in Gaza is increasingly going to be used in the West Bank because Israel has found out that it can get away with this level of ethnic cleansing, this level of mass atrocities on an industrial scale. We are going to see this model of corralling Palestinians into ever shrinking enclaves or whatever you want to call them--bantustans, concentration camps--that are a lot more easily controllable, spaces in which Israel can really put its extremely advanced surveillance technology to test. And basically, we’re looking at a future in which millions of Palestinians are squeezed into these very, very small, very densely populated urban ghettos and concentration camps that are easily controllable by Israel. And I think that is a model that they have been working toward for decades but that now we’re seeing in accelerated form in the Gaza, and now in the West Bank and in places like Jenin.

AK: One more question on the current geopolitics of this. Mouin, you mentioned earlier in our conversation that we’re not going to wake up one day where half the population is in the Sinai and half the population is in Jordan. And I’m not quite sure if people understand why it’s such a red line for Egypt and Jordan, given their status as key US allies who depend on the United States for military and economic aid. And I wonder if you could unpack that for me.

MR: Look, these are US client regimes. These are regimes that depend on Washington, often for their very survival. We’re talking about governments and leaders that are very loyal to Washington. We’re talking about rulers and governments that have assumed the role of inert spectators for almost a year and a half while Israel has been slaughtering Palestinians within their homeland. But their loyalty does not extend to committing political suicide on Washington’s behalf. First of all, the Nakba and forced Palestinian displacement is absolutely central to Arab perceptions of Palestine. Opposition to that ethnic cleansing forms a central basis of Arab solidarity with the Palestinians. I’m not talking about rulers and governments; I’m talking about at the popular level. And the idea that any Arab government could actively cooperate with a scheme as crude and vulgar as Trump’s and somehow survive is a pipe dream, and these leaders know it. That represents a genuine national security threat to the Arab states.

MR: And let me explain how: I’ll take the example of Jordan. As the British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has documented in extraordinarily rich detail, the emirates of Transjordan, under the leadership of Abdullah I, the great grandfather of Jordan’s current king, colluded with the Zionist movement during the 1930s and the 1940s, basically to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state in Palestine. After 1948, he paid for it with his life. He was assassinated by Palestinians in 1951, I believe, or maybe 1952. Expelling them from their homeland didn’t get rid of them. It didn’t solve the problem because what did they do? They took up arms from their locations of exile. And, particularly after 1967, their main base was in Jordan, and it created a civil conflict between the Jordanian state and the Palestinian national movement, known as Black September, in 1970. And Jordan has absolutely no interest in repeating this experience of having its leaders in the crosshairs because they’re colluding with such a scheme or having to deal with civil strife within their borders.

MR: The other thing that happened, of course, was that when the Palestinian guerrilla movement established its main base in the Jordan Valley on the Jordanian side of the border; this also created direct conflict with Jordan. And you had intensive Israeli bombings of the Jordan Valley during the late 1960s. From the 1960s until the PLO was expelled from Lebanon in 1982, you had constant Israeli bombing of Lebanon, primarily of southern Lebanon. Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula; Syria lost the Golan Heights. Jordan lost the West Bank, which it had illegally annexed after the Nakba, and Lebanon lost southern Lebanon—all because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, they have absolutely no intention of repeating this experience. These Arab leaders know that any one of them who was seen to be cooperating is signing their own death warrant, or at least their own political death warrant. And as I suggested, their loyalty to Washington does not extend to the extent of committing suicide on the altar of this harebrained scheme.

AK: And I mean, to that point, this week, a number of news outlets are reporting on what they call an alternative to Trump’s Gaza Riviera proposal. Reuters reported that Egypt has drawn up a plan to, quote, unquote, “counter Trump’s ambition” and that the heart of it is some governing body would replace the Hamas-run government in Gaza, would be responsible for humanitarian aid, and Hamas would lose its dominant position within Gaza. And I wonder, first Tariq and then Mouin, if you could react to these alternatives that Arab states are putting forth right now. Are they serious? Should we seriously contemplate them? And what reaction do you think they might encounter from both Israel and the Trump administration?

TKS: Well, the first thing I’m going to say is I think it is very critical that not only are neighboring Arab governments like Egypt presenting reconstruction proposals, but Palestinians are presenting reconstruction proposals. And that is the most important bit because a lot of the conversation about the day after in Gaza has been dominated by the US, by Israel, by actors that do not have Palestinian interests at heart. So, for example, we have initiatives like the Gaza Phoenix proposal that presented a blueprint for what Palestinians see as reconstruction proposal and timeline and vision. But then, we don’t have the details yet (or at least I haven’t seen them), but Egypt is proposing a plan that I think they will release in entirety or in more detail at the culmination of the Arab League summit on March 4. So, the details of that should be coming out pretty soon.

TKS: But I think what is the most important to consider is what will be seen as a non-starter for both the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves. I think Palestinians have made it very clear that they want to be at the center of their own leadership in Gaza. And Hamas has already made it clear that it is absolutely willing to relinquish governing duties in Gaza. But the concern is, I think, that Israel will accept nothing less than the absolute disarming and surrender of Hamas in entirety, which might be the biggest obstacle to Egypt’s forthcoming proposal. And then, this is where I think that international and regional pressure has to come into play because the international community and the Arab region needs to make it clear that the only path forward in Gaza is Palestinian leadership. And that might be without Hamas. They might step down and make way for a technocratic unity government of sorts. But this is basically the time for Arab states to wield their diplomatic and economic leverage to pressure both the Trump administration and Israel to accept that plan.

TKS: And it’s the international community’s opportunity to fill the void that the US is leaving and recognize that this is an opportunity. The Trump administration is, in many ways, an opportunity because this is the first time the US isn’t pretending to be an honest peace broker. So this means that the international community at large—and I’m not just talking about the Western powers, I’m not talking about Europe; I’m talking about the global South, I’m talking about coalitions like the Hague group—this is the time for them to come together and wield their significant diplomatic and economic leverage. If done in unison, to address the fact that there is no honest peace broker and try to fill that void now that the US Isn’t even pretending to be one. So, I think a lot of what happens and a lot of the day-after conversation is going to be dependent on how this international community and how the Arab region reacts, and whether they’re willing to actually use their leverage in a productive way.

MR: I think that any faith in the ability of the Arab governments, individually or collectively, to rise to the occasion is entirely misplaced. These are being explicitly drafted as alternatives to Trump’s proposal in order to mollify Washington and to take into account their main requirements: No more role for Hamas in the Gaza Strip and so on, rather than saying Israel has no business in any of the occupied territories and what will replace it is something for the Palestinians to decide. And my concern is that by adopting this agenda of inter-Palestinian polarization, of adopting this agenda of “We need to get rid of the group that Israel hasn’t been able to defeat militarily, and we’re going to replace it with a Palestinian Authority” (that is so discredited it would probably garner more votes in an Israeli Likud primary than a Palestinian popular election), it threatens to increase and amplify Palestinian polarization and fragmentation rather than facilitate Palestinian unification, which is the essential precondition for any progress.

AK: Last question. Tariq, let me start with you: The Egyptian proposal for the day after and Trump’s comments on ethnic cleansing come amid, as I mentioned in the intro, the ceasefire phase one expiring and what seems to me like a fork in the road, and one in which Israel seems determined to break the ceasefire and perhaps go back to warfare in Gaza. Do you think Trump’s comments, even if they’re not a serious proposal in the sense of tomorrow, we’re going to see American troops forcing Palestinians in Gaza out into Egypt and Jordan--even if that’s not the case, do Trump’s comments serve as a signal to Israel as they potentially renew their bombardment? Do Trump’s comments mean, potentially, an even more vicious Israeli campaign? We’ve already seen Israel say that they’re shutting off all humanitarian aid into the enclave. An escalation of, obviously, a longstanding policy. But there was some aid getting in, and now Israel is saying no aid will get in. So, do you see a relationship between Trump’s comments and potential renewal of Israeli bombardment and ground campaign in Gaza?

TKS: I think there’s no doubt that Trump’s unapologetic embrace of the far-right approach in Israel is and has already very much emboldened the Israelis. And it’s not just emboldening the far-right government; it’s emboldening everyday Israelis, most of whom feel unsatisfied with the level of carnage and destruction they’ve already caused in Gaza, and they’re demanding that their government resume the slaughter. But I more think of it as something that was going to happen anyway. I think there was little interest in Israel for a continuation of the ceasefire past the first phase, and I think it was always a matter of finding pretext and a strategy in how to then resume the campaign, whether to resume at the same level of intensity or not and how to do it with the specific end goal of thinning out the population, and maximum land, minimum Palestinians in mind.

TKS: And I think it’s critical to recognize that what has come first isn’t necessarily a mass bombing campaign as this first phase of the ceasefire has run out but an announcement that Israel is going to be cutting off food and water and aid entry—which amounts to an undeniable act of collective punishment, which is really directed at the entire population of Gaza. And it’s directed at the entire population because it’s designed to ethnically-cleanse the population and make the entire population of Gaza feel like there is no other option but to leave if given a chance. So, I think that what I’m very concerned about over the coming months is that Israel will resume its full-on blockade; it’ll resume its starvation tactics that are collective punishment and directed against the entire population. And that the focus of the Trump administration and the Israeli government is going to be on figuring out how to facilitate a mass exodus, or a gradual exodus, of the Palestinian population in order to achieve the goal of thinning out the population. What I’m concerned about is the fact that undoubtedly, there are many Palestinians in Gaza who will leave if given an opportunity because Israel has made it so that they have nothing to return to. And then, Israel can paint that whole process as voluntary immigration, even though we all know what it is, and it’s ethnic cleansing.

MR: The proposal and the ceasefire agreement are fundamentally incompatible. They’re irreconcilable. How can you have an agreement for a durable ceasefire and reconstruction on the one hand, and combine it with a proposal to forcibly expel everyone on the other? There’s a fundamental contradiction here. And yes, of course, Netanyahu and Israel feel emboldened, but at the end of the day, the future of the ceasefire agreement will be decided in Washington and not in Israel. If Washington, for whatever reason—because it’s finding out that resolving Ukraine is more difficult than it anticipated, or it’s feeling persuasive pressure from its Arab allies, or for whatever other reason—decides that it is in the US interest to continue with the ceasefire agreement, Israel will continue implementing the ceasefire agreement, no matter how much it dislikes doing so. If, on the other hand, the Trump administration subcontracts the decision about the future of this agreement to the Israeli government, then it will be derailed. But it will be derailed because Washington has essentially authorized Israel to do so. So, let’s be clear: Israeli policy is ultimately made in Washington.

AK: Thank you so much, Mouin and Tariq, for coming on the show. I really thought that this provided some much-needed context and analysis of Trump’s Gaza proposal. And that is our show today. Thanks again to our guests and our producer, Jesse Brennaman. Please rate and review our show on your podcast apps and go to JewishCurrents.org to read all of our work. We will see you next time.