[News] The liberal establishment is finally criticizing ethnic cleansing in Gaza now that they can blame Trump

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/02/the-liberal-establishment-is-finally-criticizing-ethnic-cleansing-in-gaza-now-that-they-can-blame-trump/?ml_recipient=146678661287774118&ml_link=146678615898064581&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-02-18&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
The liberal establishment is finally criticizing ethnic cleansing in Gaza
now that they can blame Trump
Sana Saeed
February 17, 2025
------------------------------
[image: Screenshot-2025-02-17-at-2.29.24 PM-1024x515.png]
Late Night host Seth Meyers criticizes Donald Trump for threatening ethnic
cleansing in Gaza during his show on February 5, 2025. Meyers had no
similar critique of the Biden administration.

A week after the long-awaited ceasefire between Hamas and Israel brought a
rare moment of quiet skies for Palestinians, President Donald Trump
announced his plan to “clean out
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-says-wants-clean-gaza-move-palestinians-jordan-egypt-rcna189317>”
Gaza, proposing to relocate its remaining population to neighboring
countries like Jordan and Egypt. He has since reiterated this stance,
claiming that the U.S. aims to “take over” Gaza, in order to rebuild and
develop the area into a “riviera of the Middle East”. Is it, one may ask,
truly a Trump presidency without the permanent furrowing of one’s brow?

Palestinians were quick to react to Trump: while some do have fears about
the uncertainty of their safety and future in the shadow of 15 months of
non-stop bombardment that left the strip decimated of both human life and
infrastructure, many others expressed
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/05/palestinians-react-to-trump-plan-for-gaza>
their steadfast resolve to remain.

“We will remain here – staying above the rubble, stones and iron. We will
remain in our homeland, in Gaza”, said
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdfiQBg_UJM> Manar Hamo of the Bureij camp.

But some of the most fervent pushback to Trump’s plan to takeover Gaza has
come from the very same people, institutions, and newsrooms that spent
fifteen months either remaining quiet on the extermination of Palestinians
or supporting and building the case for it to continue. What we find is
that there is a manufacturing of a moral hysteria around Trump’s proposal
that seeks to – either intentionally or by way of liberal anti-Trump muscle
memory – erase the direct culpability of the Biden-Harris administration
and the Democrats in the genocide of Palestinians.

And so we have been ambushed by their discovery of the words “war
crime”, “ethnic
cleansing
<https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/02/12/trumps-gaza-bombshell-is-founded-on-ethnic-cleansing-editorial/>”,
“dastardly deed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZcQ4EV-kU0>” and “morally
indefensible
<https://www.axios.com/2025/02/13/democrats-trump-gaza-israel-netanyahu>”.
Even *The New York Times*’ made the very novel discovery of what international
law
<https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/world/middleeast/international-law-trump-gaza.html>
may have to say about forced displacement. What we are seeing, again and
again, is the introduction of language that not only offers the criminality
of a Trump administration policy that has yet to be put in place but also
explicitly moralizes about violence against Palestinians, a moralizing
<https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/>
that was markedly absent <https://x.com/ajplus/status/1766139565192999139>
as U.S-funded and made bombs were ripping apart Palestinian families for
fifteen months straight.

CNN’s senior reporter Stephen Collinson, who covers the White House, called
<https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/politics/trump-gaza-takeover-analysis/index.html>
Trump’s “outlandish” and “mind-boggling” plan “the most stunning U.S.
intervention in the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Compare Collinson’s opening paragraphs from this recent analysis to the
opening paragraphs from his September 2024 analysis of the Biden
administration’s failure to secure a ceasefire:

Both analyses are critical of the administrations but the tone, urgency,
and moralizing language are starkly different. And so also are the targets
of the critique. The September 2024 critique is rooted in concern for the
administration itself and its credibility for chasing what Collinson calls
the “hopeless goal” of a ceasefire. In just a few paragraphs, the Biden
administration is both criticized for its “failure” to secure a ceasefire
but also absolved of responsibility with the onus put on Benjamin Netanyahu
and the “mirage” of a ceasefire. The February 2025 critique puts the blame
squarely on Trump, “utterly unconstrained by the law”, for not only
empowering Netanyahu but for a “geopolitical transformation of the Middle
East”. The Biden administration, which spent fifteen months purposely
violating
<https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken>
international and administrative laws, is left being simply weak and having
over-promised.

This urgency, this moralizing – the lack of hesitation to push back – isn’t
unique to news coverage. Late Night host Seth Meyers, who offered a tepid
critique <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLUnL8Dbxno> of Biden’s refusal
to push for a ceasefire in April 2024, has dedicated several
<https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seth+meyers+gaza+> “Closer
Look” segments of his show over the last ten days to the Trump
administration and Gaza. Meyers not only called
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIG1D-Ndz8> Trump’s proposal “abhorrent
and unhinged” but also explicitly stated that it would be a “massive human
rights violation that constitutes ethnic cleansing and violates
international law” and would “cause outrage around the world and entangle
the US in exactly the kind of foreign quagmire [Trump] promised to keep us
out of.”

In the same segment, Meyers offers another tepid critique of Biden – saying
it should have never gotten to this point and that Biden should have pushed
for a ceasefire. Absent is the moralizing language of condemnation and the
indictment of violating international law and plunging the Middle East into
a complete U.S.-led crisis. Biden, once again, is presented as simply
insufficient and disappointing versus a President who was fully and actively
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJDhnwc-YVQ> overseeing the extermination
of an entire nation.

Then there is the performative anguish of the Democrats. Last week, 145
House Democrats signed a letter
<https://www.axios.com/2025/02/13/democrats-trump-gaza-israel-netanyahu>
urging that President Trump retract his “dangerous” comments about Gaza and
that they “are alarmed that an American president would advocate for the
forcible removal and permanent displacement of two million people”

Forced removal and permanent displacement are inarguably bad. But where
were these words of moral outrage, anguish, cries of “ethnic cleansing” and
war crimes when Palestinians were being forced from one corner of Gaza to
the other by the Israelis, only to continue having bombs rain on them hour
after hour for fifteen months straight? Where was all this screaming and
pearl clutching when North Gaza was cleansed of its inhabitants and put
under a devastating siege
<https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2025/1/13/100-days-of-siege-in-north-gaza>
for months? When Palestinian babies were left to die and decompose
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/abandoned-babies-found-decomposing-gaza-hospital-evacuated-rcna127533>
in their hospital beds? When children were shredded into bags of meat?
Where was the outrage when hospitals were eradicated one by one? When
journalists, healthcare workers, professors were killed one by one? Kidnapped
and tortured
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/24/dying-in-hell-palestinian-medics-jailed-by-israel>,
one by one?

Nowhere.

The Democrats—and liberals at large—need us to forget about what was
happening in Gaza before Donald Trump came into office. They need us to
believe that the physical displacement of Palestinians is worse than the
eradication of over 1,000 bloodlines, worse than the decimation of all
life-sustaining infrastructure that rendered Gaza inhabitable; worse than
upwards of 200,000 killed by bombs, starvation, and disease.

The Democrats—and liberals at large—need us to forget about what was
happening in Gaza before Donald Trump came into office.

The current manufactured fervor plays a singular function, however
expressed: it positions the current President as directly culpable for a
crime that has yet to be committed by him while erasing the direct
culpability of the previous President in every single crime he and his
administration did commit against the Palestinians.

The notion of “resistance”, a performance without material consequences
that exploits legitimate fears, is a politically expedient tool for this
country’s liberal class. By framing their dissent as a moral stand against
the current administration, they distract from their own previous support
for similar and worse policies of genocide, thus reinforcing their
insistence that they are the righteous opposition, that they provide the
antithesis to Trump’s brand of fascism.

And the media plays a key role in this narrative.

On October 11, days after the U.S-led Israeli genocide of the Palestinians
began, it was reported that the Biden administration was seeking to set up
a “humanitarian corridor
<https://www.reuters.com/world/egypt-discussing-plans-provide-aid-gaza-under-limited-ceasefire-security-sources-2023-10-11/>”
between Gaza and Egypt, which would allow Palestinians to ‘seek refuge’ in
the Sinai desert. The problem, of course, was that this would allow Israel
to force a mass exodus of Palestinians out of Gaza, without the right of
return, and depopulate the region.

Shortly after, a ten-page Israeli document dated October 13 was leaked. It
showed
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/text-translation-the-israeli-plan-for-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-gaza/>
that the Israeli Intelligence Ministry had set forth a recommendation to
depopulate Gaza through a series of stages, beginning with forcibly
displacing Palestinians to the south while the north was cleared out of
people and infrastructure. The goal, very clearly stated, was to push
Palestinians into the Egyptian Sinai.

By November 4, 2023, almost one million Palestinians had been pushed
<https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/displacement-israel-war-on-gaza-no-safe-place/>
into Rafah – told they were in “safe zones”, that the bombs would not find
them there. Their displacement wasn’t called “ethnic cleansing” or even
displacement, instead it was referred to as ‘evacuations
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UA5COsmo-U>’ – a term used by the
Israelis and adopted by American newsrooms and lawmakers alike.

Trump is threatening what the Biden administration already tried and what
the Israelis had always intended.

In other words: Trump is threatening what the Biden administration already
tried
<https://reason.com/2025/01/27/trump-revives-bidens-failed-proposal-to-remove-palestinians-from-gaza/>
and what the Israelis had always intended. Any and all reporting that
refuses to place Trump’s plan as contiguous of Biden’s policies is not only
propaganda to exonerate the Biden administration but is also genocide
denialism.

Whatever President Donald Trump plans for the Palestinians—for Gaza, the
West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria—cannot happen without the bloody and
devastating realities that were wrought by President Joe Biden, his
administration, and his party. The consequences of their own electoral and
political failures
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-shows>,
alongside their moral failures <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HAedspO8hM>,
have left the liberal and media classes in this country with little to
offer in the face of anything and everything the Trump administration has
planned.

Except, perhaps, a pathetic and transparent politics of outrage.
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