"We'll Own Gaza" -- Thoughts from Michael Spath & Jeff Halper To Friends of ICAHD-USA Amplifying a critical Israeli voice in the US, opposing US government support of Israeli apartheid, supporting the One Democratic State Campaign. February 5, 2025 TRUMP'S BRAZEN GAZA PLAN ICAHD-USA co-chair Michael Spath I’m shocked. But the biggest reason I’m shocked is that people are shocked at President Trump’s plan to “own Gaza,” to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” I’m shocked not at its brazenness, but that we’re shocked he has said out loud what Zionists – Jewish, Christian, and others – have been saying for 76 years, and shouting out loud in the last 15 months. I’m shocked that so many people are shocked. In March 2024, Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, said the following during a Harvard University interview: “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods. … It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Recently, during a Senate confirmation hearing, Elise Stefanik, Trump’s choice for UN ambassador, offered that Israel “has “biblical rights to the entire West Bank.” Trump’s choice for Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has commented in the past that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. There’s not. You have Arabs and Persians, And there’s such complexity in that. But there’s really no such thing [as a Palestinian]. That’s been a political tool to try and force land away from Israel.” Huckabee continued that he thought a Palestinian state should be created out of land in neighboring Egypt, Syria or Jordan. Read South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Criminal Court and the scores of comments by high-ranking Israeli officials talking openly about eliminating, killing, ethnically cleansing the people of Gaza. Let’s finally remember that when Trump referred to the Gazan’s “miserable existence there,” that it’s a “demolition site, virtually every building is down, under fallen concrete, very dangerous, very precarious,” that transferring the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza to other countries would end “the death and destruction and frankly bad luck” – we must not forget that the reason for “the death and destruction and frankly bad luck” is 76 years of an Israeli Zionist settler colonial agenda and bipartisan US support, and especially in the last 15 months under Joe Biden’s criminally complicit arming with tens of billions of dollars in additional weapons (and UN cover) for Israel’s genocide against the people of Palestine. This includes Biden’s request for aid for Palestinians who are “forcibly removed” outside of Palestine. We mock and scorn Trump’s buffoonery and act shocked. He is merely saying aloud what Palestinians have known – and experienced – for 76 years, and what we in the activist community all around the world have known, too. It is nothing new. This is not only a Trump plan. It’s a 76-year-long Zionist Israel-American plan, with Trump saying out loud what Biden empowered and enabled, and what countless Republicans and Democrats have supported. So, my friends, this is not to be dismissed. This is very serious, we are on the brink. Our friends in Palestine certainly think this is the case. Ask the people in Jenin right now. Ask the tens and tens of thousands dead in Gaza and the couple hundred thousand injured, and the two million whose homes have been bombed. No, this is not simply “Trump being Trump.” Enough already with, paraphrasing Bonhoeffer, “cheap solidarity”; instead, now’s the time for “costly solidarity.” We must be re-double, triple, quadruple our efforts, our financial and other support, our solidarity, our unity with our friends in Palestine. TRUMP & NORMALIZATION Jeff Halper There was little that was actually shocking about Trump and Netanyahu's press conference. Nothing new was said. What is shocking is only how the ideas and policies fed into Trump's simplistic and narcissistic mind by more sophisticated advisors come out so starkly honest and straightforward. Biden said much of the same, but couched in obfuscating diplo-speech that Trump could never master. Stepping back from Trump's crude and stupid remarks, they reflect the thrust of Israeli/American policy that has been clear for years, but is now reaching its culmination in the "normalization" process. -- Saudi Arabia, the Jewel in the Crown for completing the Abraham Accords, has conditioned normalization with Israel on a vague, never-to-be-implemented commitment to a "pathway" to a Palestinian state at some indeterminate future date. No details or conditions necessary; for example, would the Palestinian state be territorially contiguous, genuinely sovereign and economically viable? Why spend the political capital to get into controversial details over an eventuality that "everyone knows" (to quote Leonard Cohen) will never materialize? The other Arab states that have already normalized with Israel - Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco - haven't even made that symbolic demand. -- Arab government collusion with Netanyahu and Trump (& Biden, this is not just a Republican plan) empowers Israel to define less what the Palestinian Bantustan-"state" would look like (who cares?) and more the expanded Israel they would be normalizing. The parameters are clear: they were set out in detailed maps back in 2020 (see below). "Israel" is defined as the state of Israel in its 1967 borders PLUS its settlements. Israel thus expands to 85% of historic Palestine while the Palestinian "state" is reduced to three enclaves in the West Bank and an uninhabitable Gaza. For "security" reasons Israel also controls the borders (Palestine will not have a border with an Arab country), the airspace and even internal movement between the enclaves. No territorial contiguity, no sovereignty, no economic viability, and no capacity to bring the refugees home. A Palestinian Bantustan within an all-encompassing Israeli apartheid regime. The fact that the normalization process is nearing its completion explains Israel's push to ethnically cleanse Area C, the 62% of the West Bank where its settlements are located, and which is planned to be annexed. The most violent Israeli settler youth have been unleashed on Palestinian communities; indeed, they have been recruited into a special IDF unit called Desert Frontier where they join other army units in driving Palestinian farmers and shepherds from their villages and lands. More than 50 rural communities have been abandoned since October 7th; more than 40 new settlement "outposts" established to replace them. All to establish the "facts on the ground" that will then be normalized. Whether a couple million Gazans are relocated semi-voluntarily or by force, or whether they just rot there under some puppet Palestinian or Arab authority makes no difference. Israel has no strategic interest in Gaza and, a few settlers aside, no interest in integrating it into a Greater Israel. It is marginal and expendable. Israel’s main interest is removing 2.3 million Palestinians from its direct rule, then placing the remaining three million of its West Bank Bantustan under some Palestinian Authority-type subcontractor. Thus, a Greater Israel with a Jewish majority of 70-80% covering all of historic Palestine. -- The only actual condition imposed on Israel by the US and Saudi Arabia for the normalization process to go ahead is industrial quiet, quietizing the Palestinian issue so that it simply drops out of sight. Thus, Israel's intense campaign of pacification, beginning with eliminating Hamas in Gaza, the last bastion of effective resistance, but now spilling over into the West Bank where Israel is "Gaza-fying" the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nablus refugee camps as well as other pockets of resistance. (With, sickeningly, the active support of its collaborationist Palestinian Authority, desperate to "prove" to Israel that it is capable of taking control of Gaza.) -- Then, with all this in place, normalization. A "Greater" Israel is recognized by Saudi Arabia, much of the Arab and Muslim world and the United States, the Palestinians regulated to "a problem" that demands little more than periodic lip-service. To be sure, this will be sold as the “two-state solution” the international community has long supported, but let’s call it by its real name: two-state apartheid. In my view, normalization represents the greatest threat to the Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. For normalization means closure. Once an expanded Israel and its apartheid regime is recognized by the international community - if not formally by much of Europe, the BRICS Bloc and the Global South, then certainly de facto, which for Israel is good enough - there is little political space for the Palestinians to continue pushing their cause. Settler colonialism ends not with victory but by being normalized. Opposing a normalization process that does not restore to the Palestinians their rights should be the priority of all of us. Unfortunately, a key political piece to effective campaigning is lacking. Human rights organizations and some governments (such as those supporting South Africa's ICJ case against genocide in Gaza) are engaged in strategic activities. The BDS movement is leading an effective campaign of economic boycotts of Israel. Both are exposing Israeli crimes, gross violations of international law. But the third crucial piece in the struggle is lacking. While pro-Israel proponents are organized into professional, coordinated, strategic and well-financed lobby and public campaign groups, there is little political organization, no broad coalition of organizations, engaged in effective political campaigning for Palestinian rights. We have known for years where Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia are going. Where is the campaign against normalizing apartheid? Or against two-state apartheid? Or for a single democratic state between the River and the Sea, the only genuine and just resolution? Until there is greater coordination, and joint campaigning on a political level, including stronger partnerships between organizations and activists in Palestine/Israel and their colleagues abroad, we will continue to be outraged, we will continue to expose and analyze, but we will not be players at the political table. 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