<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-top-anchor"></div>
<div id="gmail-toolbar" class="gmail-toolbar-container">
</div><div class="gmail-container" lang="en-US" dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element">
<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="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">mondoweiss.net</a>
<div class="gmail-domain-border"></div>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The liberal establishment is finally criticizing ethnic cleansing in Gaza now that they can blame Trump</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Sana Saeed</div>
<div class="gmail-meta-data">
<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time">February 17, 2025</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<img src="cid:ii_m7an19010" alt="Screenshot-2025-02-17-at-2.29.24 PM-1024x515.png" width="394" height="198"><br>
<font size="1">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.
</font><br><p>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 “<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/trump-says-wants-clean-gaza-move-palestinians-jordan-egypt-rcna189317">clean out</a>”
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?</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/05/palestinians-react-to-trump-plan-for-gaza">expressed</a> their steadfast resolve to remain.</p>
<p>“We will remain here – staying above the rubble, stones and iron. We will remain in our homeland, in Gaza”, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdfiQBg_UJM">said</a> Manar Hamo of the Bureij camp.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>And so we have been ambushed by their discovery of the words “war crime”, “<a href="https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2025/02/12/trumps-gaza-bombshell-is-founded-on-ethnic-cleansing-editorial/">ethnic cleansing</a>”, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZcQ4EV-kU0">dastardly deed</a>” and “<a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/02/13/democrats-trump-gaza-israel-netanyahu">morally indefensible</a>”. Even <em>The New York Times</em>’ made the very novel discovery of what <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/11/world/middleeast/international-law-trump-gaza.html">international law</a>
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 href="https://theintercept.com/2024/01/09/newspapers-israel-palestine-bias-new-york-times/">a moralizing</a> that was <a href="https://x.com/ajplus/status/1766139565192999139">markedly absent</a> as U.S-funded and made bombs were ripping apart Palestinian families for fifteen months straight.</p>
<p>CNN’s senior reporter Stephen Collinson, who covers the White House, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/05/politics/trump-gaza-takeover-analysis/index.html">called</a>
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:</p>
<p><img width="394" height="193" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXexald9wbZ2A-_AV0ZczCCQ-BbypilyiTk9B_WWXVnOZVvNYzsg_eUPYJmdSm5ht-3xy0PnosqHX7ZXQpLBx9u0XMG5W2iL0rgMZfyVrEGGsliqv0zKd4O05qwg1DJMsEDDyzKgNw?key=37Yek5XIYwavR3sPY3XkZ1ni" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/gaza-palestine-israel-blocked-humanitarian-aid-blinken">purposely violating</a> international and administrative laws, is left being simply weak and having over-promised.</p>
<p>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 href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLUnL8Dbxno">a tepid critique</a> of Biden’s refusal to push for a ceasefire in April 2024, has dedicated <a href="https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=seth+meyers+gaza+">several</a> “Closer Look” segments of his show over the last ten days to the Trump administration and Gaza. Meyers not only <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIG1D-Ndz8">called</a>
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.” </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJDhnwc-YVQ">fully and actively</a> overseeing the extermination of an entire nation.</p>
<p>Then there is the performative anguish of the Democrats. Last week, 145 House Democrats <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/02/13/democrats-trump-gaza-israel-netanyahu">signed a letter</a>
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” </p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2025/1/13/100-days-of-siege-in-north-gaza">devastating siege</a> for months? When Palestinian babies were left to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/abandoned-babies-found-decomposing-gaza-hospital-evacuated-rcna127533">die and decompose</a>
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? <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/24/dying-in-hell-palestinian-medics-jailed-by-israel">Kidnapped and tortured</a>, one by one?</p>
<p>Nowhere. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Democrats—and liberals at large—need us to forget about what was happening in Gaza before Donald Trump came into office. </p></blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>And the media plays a key role in this narrative.</p>
<p>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 “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/egypt-discussing-plans-provide-aid-gaza-under-limited-ceasefire-security-sources-2023-10-11/">humanitarian corridor</a>”
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.</p>
<p>Shortly after, a ten-page Israeli document dated October 13 was leaked. It <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/text-translation-the-israeli-plan-for-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-gaza/">showed</a>
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. </p>
<p>By November 4, 2023, almost one million Palestinians <a href="https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/displacement-israel-war-on-gaza-no-safe-place/">had been pushed</a>
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 ‘<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UA5COsmo-U">evacuations</a>’ – a term used by the Israelis and adopted by American newsrooms and lawmakers alike. </p>
<blockquote><p>Trump is threatening what the Biden administration already tried and what the Israelis had always intended. </p></blockquote>
<p>In other words: Trump is threatening what the Biden administration <a href="https://reason.com/2025/01/27/trump-revives-bidens-failed-proposal-to-remove-palestinians-from-gaza/">already tried</a>
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.</p>
<p>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<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-shows"> electoral and political failures</a>, alongside their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HAedspO8hM">moral failures</a>,
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.</p>
<p>Except, perhaps, a pathetic and transparent politics of outrage.</p>
</div></div></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
<br></div>