Soumaya Ghannoushi – Middle East Eye Feb 3, 2025
“People are moving north to get back to their homes and see what happened, and turn around and leave … there is no water and no electricity.”
Steve Witkoff, billionaire real estate developer and US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, spoke these words to Axios as if he were describing an unfortunate inconvenience. But look closer, and you’ll see the blueprint.
This is the outcome Trump wants, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already set it in motion. Gaza was never meant to be rebuilt. It was meant to be emptied, flattened, erased.
Property developers are already looking at plans to redevelop Gaza. Click to enlarge
And who better to oversee this clearing-out than real estate tycoons? To Trump and Witkoff, Gaza is not a people’s homeland; it is a development opportunity, a prime stretch of Mediterranean coastline waiting to be “repurposed” once its inhabitants have been removed.
Trump has made no secret of how he views Gaza as prime real estate, marvelling at its “phenomenal location” on the sea and its “best weather”, as though he were surveying land for a luxury resort.
He does not see Gaza as part of Palestine. He does not see it as a homeland belonging to its people. He sees it as an untapped opportunity for the wealthy, a playground for investors, a future resort for tourists and foreigners – everyone except the Palestinians of Gaza.
But Gaza is not real estate for sale. It is not a development project. It is not a resort for outsiders. Gaza is part of Palestine.
‘They will do it’
The US did not spend billions of dollars, deploy thousands of tons of bombs, and oversee the obliteration of 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings so that the territory could be reconstructed.
The bombs were never meant to make way for rebuilding. They were meant to ensure there was nothing left. The idea that Gaza’s surviving population, those who the bombs did not manage to kill, would be allowed to reclaim their land, was never part of the plan.
And Trump has made it clear: there is no alternative. During a recent news conference, a journalist challenged him on his suggestion that Palestinians from Gaza could be sent to Jordan or Egypt, noting that both states had refused, and asking whether pressure such as tariffs may be used to force their hand.
Trump’s response, dripping with arrogance, was chilling in its certainty: “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it.”
It was not a suggestion or a negotiation, but a declaration – an assumption that power, pressure and sheer force of will can move nations, like pieces on a chessboard. That people can be transferred, displaced, erased – all because he says so.
Trump has built his entire political legacy on combatting migration, sealing borders, building walls, banning refugees, and treating migration as an existential threat to the US. He speaks of asylum seekers in his country as an invasion of criminals who must be stopped and deported.
Yet, when it comes to Palestinians, he is the architect of forced migration.
This is not just hypocrisy; it is also a reversal of Trump’s own “deal of the century”. That plan, despite being overwhelmingly skewed in Israel’s favour, nominally included the establishment of a Palestinian state. It recognised Gaza as part of that future state – a weak, fragmented entity designed to exist under Israel’s thumb.
Even this illusion of statehood was too much for Trump to uphold. By endorsing the forced removal of Gaza’s population, he is not just modifying his plan; he is abandoning it altogether.
The two-state solution, weak and illusory as it was under his vision, has now been erased entirely, in favour of the doctrine advocated by Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: permanent displacement and ethnic cleansing.
Religious justification
Plans for Israeli settler homes in Gaza. Click to enlarge
Back in January 2024, at a far-right conference attended by Israeli government ministers, the future of Gaza was discussed in the most explicit of terms: not reconstruction, not occupation, but removal.
The mass transfer of Palestinians from the territory was framed as a divine mandate, with the Book of Numbers invoked: “But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that ye let remain of them be as thorns in your eyes, and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein ye dwell.”
This is not a political strategy; it is biblical warfare. It is a declaration that Palestinians in Gaza must not merely be controlled, contained or occupied, but rather expelled – a continuation of the same ideology that drove the Nakba, and the logic that justified decades of colonisation, dispossession and massacres.
In addition to meeting Israeli officials during his recent visit, Witkoff met Israeli hostages and their families, offering sympathy and solidarity. No such meetings were held with Palestinian families – not even for show. He offered no gestures of concern for the families of thousands of civilians who died in Israel’s relentless bombardments, nor for those being starved, displaced and systematically wiped out.
This is because in Trump’s world, some lives matter, and others are disposable. When Witkoff sat down with Israeli officials, one thing stood out: his meeting with Smotrich, the far-right minister who had been boycotted by the previous US administration for his openly racist, eliminationist views.
Following Trump’s announcement that he was asking Egypt and Jordan to take Palestinians from Gaza, Smotrich issued a statement praising “out of the box” solutions. Smotrich used the same phrase after meeting Witkoff.
In other words, prepare for ethnic cleansing. Trump’s team are no longer just tolerating the Israeli far right; they are actively aligning with it. The idea of depopulating Gaza – of making life so unbearable that its people have no choice but to leave – has been embedded in Israeli policy for decades.
Echoes of history
After 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza, then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol – leader of the so-called left-wing moderates – spoke of “emptying out Gaza” and working “quietly, calmly and secretly” to achieve this goal.
Eshkol was not alone in this thinking. Former Defence Minister Moshe Dayan suggested that only a quarter of Gaza’s population should remain, while the rest “must be removed from there under any arrangement that’s made”. He was blunt about his ambitions: “If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem.”
Eshkol took this even further, believing that deliberate suffering would push Palestinians to leave. He laid out his plan in chillingly practical terms: “It’s possible that if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have any choice, because the orchards will turn yellow and wither.”
Other ministers at the time, such as Yosef Sapir, were even more explicit about their intentions. He proposed: “We should take them to the East Bank [of Jordan] by the scruff of their necks and throw them there, and I don’t know who will accept them, especially the Gaza refugees.”
Another minister, Yigal Allon, was equally blunt about the need for mass displacement: “We have to handle [overseas migration] as seriously as possible.” He went on to argue that Sinai could absorb Gaza’s entire population: “The entire area of Sinai, and not only El Arish, allows for the settlement of all the Gaza refugees, and in my opinion we shouldn’t wait. We have to begin to settle them.”
These words, spoken in 1967, are now being echoed – almost word for word – by Israel’s far-right politicians, Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the latter of whom has called to promote the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza; forced transfer repackaged as a humanitarian solution.
The language has changed. The goal remains the same.
Push them into the sea, into the desert – anywhere but here. In 1948, 1967 or today, the policy remains the same: eliminate, displace, erase.
Returning home
And yet, despite everything – the bombs, the starvation, the devastation – the people of Gaza are returning.
Hundreds of thousands have marched northwards, across the Netzarim axis, asserting their right of return to the ruins of their homes. They march not towards shelter, but to craters of dust; not towards safety, but to the graves of their loved ones, still buried beneath the wreckage. They march into what was designed to be their graveyard.
And yet, they march – because history does not belong to the occupier. As Nizar Noman, a Palestinian returning to what remains of his home, declared: “As I belong to my homeland, my homeland belongs to me. I didn’t want to waste a moment away from my home again … President Trump is delusional to think that the people of Gaza can leave, even if it is a mess as he described.”
Just as Eshkol’s attempt to force Palestinians out collapsed under the weight of reality, so too will Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan. Half a century ago, when Eshkol devised his scheme, Gaza’s population stood at 400,000. He failed. Today, it is more than two million – and Trump will fail too.
In 1971, after the killing of Palestinian resistance leader Ziad al-Husseini, poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “Gaza is no longer a city. It is a burning battlefield in which the adversary’s victories, hopes and values are tested… The illusory facts on the ground he is trying to create, thinking that time is on his side, will be mocked by that very same time, as well as by the trail of crushing defeats past invaders suffered in the alleyways of Gaza at the hands of its sons and daughters.”
Indeed, Husseini’s death was not the end of Gaza’s liberation struggle. Its resistance did not die; it only grew.
Trump may repeat it 100 times: “Take the people. Take the people. Take the people.”
But the people of Gaza have answered, with their bodies, with their voices, with their march through the ruins, with their refusal to flee the land that is theirs: “We are not leaving.”
—
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer and expert in Middle East politics. Her journalistic work has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, Corriere della Sera, aljazeera.net and Al Quds. A selection of her writings may be found at: soumayaghannoushi.com and she tweets @SMGhannoushi.
Israel’s plans open and bare and in your face and it’s been no secret.
The big question…
Is this world going to let them get away with it?
If yes, the world be condemned.
do you remember when those doormats with tony blairs face on were all the rage ?
i hear they are doing them again with starmers face on
where can i get one
Recently at auction a wartime toilet roll with churchills face on fetched thousands
https://christiansfortruth.com/flashback-britains-1947-kristalnacht/
Mar-A-Gaza
BS. As Nico X has revealed the Palestinians & Israelis came to a secret conspiratorial agreement/arrangement sometime before the IDF-Mossad Oct 7 psyop– to transfer Gaza to Israel in return for a new life in the West–provided with free homes/food/money/cars for life.
So much for all those various cia-kgb idiots on here, TTS pushes on us, Ritter/Wilkerson/Johnson etc claiming ‘Israel is defeated’. But don’t worry, they’ll be back peddling their clickbait disinfo for the morons to read/watch.
Fascinating what $100m buys you these days in America…
For a second rodeo it’s Miriam A d e l s o n’s Goy Again…
Some MAGA it is turning out to be…
Waste Whitey II
Nazi Victory = No State of Israel
Allied Victory = State of Israel
Now you know who the good guys were.
“The root of all evil isn’t money, but mongrels (Jews).” –Nico X
Pres. Trump, the 2000 lb. bombs you are sending to the psychopathic IDF tend to create a “MESS” when they go off on a building or on a grouping of Palestinian tents. If you want to stop the “MESS” tell the IDF to exit the occupied territories and take their tents with them as they leave. By aiding and abetting the genocide of the Palestinian People and their children you are also endangering your own grand children and children all over the world when your lack of compassion allows the genocide to continue. The spectacle of War Criminal satanyahu sitting next to you at the White House was not a good optic, it was a nightmare…
Two jewes..
Three opinions..
The Forces of Evil: Medieval Anti-Judaism and Conspiracy Theories
Appealing to the forces of evil, almost always personified by the marginalized of society—especially the Jews—was easier than facing the disorientation produced by the overwhelming immensity of the real world.
Conspiracies have always existed. History offers countless examples of them: from the assassination of Julius Caesar to Watergate. Believing that conspiracies have existed throughout history does not make you a conspiracy theorist. Embracing a conspiracy theory is not the same as having a theory about a conspiracy , it is something much more ambitious, it is a vision of the world; it is believing, basically, that behind every historical event, behind every political action, behind every social phenomenon, there is a hidden hand, an indeterminate group of people pulling the strings.
This group can be given various names that, at times, are considered different avatars of the same enemy: they are the Templars, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati , the Freemasons, the Bilderberg Club, George Soros or Bill Gates; but they are almost always the Jews.
Long before the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published at the beginning of the 20th century, accusing the Jews of having hatched a secret plan to destroy Christian society and take over the world; long before Simonini accused them of being behind Freemasonry and the Revolution, the Jews had personified the forces of Evil in Christian Europe. Ever since the competition between the Church and the Synagogue began in the late Roman Empire, Christians accused the Jews of wanting to destroy them, using one weapon in particular: conspiracy. Had they not already conspired to put Jesus of Nazareth on the cross, thus committing the worst crime imaginable? (Mt. 26:3-5; Mk. 14:1-2; Lk. 22:1-6; Jn. 11:47-57). Had they not done so to persecute the apostles? (Acts 6:9-12).
In fact, was not the Bible full of examples of Jewish wickedness?
Had they not repeatedly deserved divine punishment for their disbelief, their infidelity, their “stiff-neckedness” (Ex. 32; Dt. 9:6, 9:13; Jdg. 2:11-12, etc.)? Were they not a people “inclined to evil” (Ex. 32:22)? Had not Jesus called them “a perverse and adulterous generation” and children of the Devil (Mt. 12:39; Jn. 8:44)? And had not God punished them with the destruction of the Temple and exile?
The Fathers of the Church and the first Christian apologists had also condemned them on many occasions. Their works were full of accusations against them, of countless examples of their wickedness that supposedly demonstrated their diabolical character. Their wickedness had led them to condemn Jesus and led them to condemn and persecute Christians wherever they were. That is why they did not miss any opportunity to do as much harm to them as possible.
They were, like the devil – with whom they were intimately linked – mortal enemies of Christians.
Indeed, authors from the early centuries of the Church such as Evagrius, Prudentius, Commodius, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, John Chrysostom, Jerome of Stridon or Gregory the Great, repeated that the Jews were followers of the devil, who inspired all the evil that reigned within them. “Evil and association with the devil were understood, therefore, as inherent to the very character of the Jewish people”, as something intrinsic to the very condition of being Jewish, to the point that, it was thought, the Jews were not capable of acting in any other way than perversely.
Therefore it is not surprising that the hagiographic accounts of the lives of saints were filled with examples of their vile and criminal ways of proceeding ( González Salinero 2000: 137-161 ).
It is not surprising, then, that from very early on in the apocalyptic expectations of the early Christians, the Jews were given a central role in the events of the Last Days: when history was complete and Christ returned in all his glory to dispense justice, a part of the Jewish people would convert to Christianity and be saved; but another part, made up of the followers of the Antichrist, would perish with him.
Thus, the idea that the followers of the Antichrist would be Jews spread in the medieval Christian tradition. In fact, the belief that the Antichrist himself would be a Jew from the tribe of Dan became a central motif in medieval Christian apocalyptic texts ( Cohn 1981: 76-77 ).
But while all this was already enough to condemn the Jews as evil beings, there was still more. Had not more evidence of their evil character been found? Had it not been found that they were even capable of torturing and murdering Christian children in order to take revenge on Jesus? And was there not a real international Jewish conspiracy to organize these horrendous crimes?
At least, this was what Thomas of Monmouth (c. 1149-1172) had claimed in what was the first account of the mythical Jewish ritual murder.
According to him, a council of the most important Jews of Spain met once a year in Narbonne to determine where the next murder would take place.
The shedding of Christian blood was necessary, Monmouth told us, following the testimony that, according to him, had been transmitted to him by a Jewish convert to Christianity, so that the Jews could take revenge on Christ and thus free themselves and return to their homeland ( Monmouth 1896: 93-94 ).
Thus, in 1144, following the instructions of that sinister secret conclave, little William of Norwich was supposedly tortured and crucified in the image and likeness of Christ. This first accusation of murder was followed by many others: in Gloucester (1168), in Bury Saint Edmunds (1181), in Zaragoza (1250), in Lincoln (1255), in Womrath (1287), in Sepúlveda (1468), in Endingen (1470), in La Guardia (1490) and in many other places. The veracity of these accusations seemed beyond doubt; after all, had not King Alfonso X the Wise himself echoed them by inserting them in his Siete Partidas (Part VII, Title XXIV, Law II)?
And in the construction of an image of the enemy, there is no better weapon than the accusation of murdering defenseless children.
Can one be more perverse? It is a well-known rhetorical strategy that has been used extensively to this day in various conspiracy theories.
The Jews, therefore, murdered Christian children in revenge and in the hope that this would bring them back to their homeland. But, it was said, they also desecrated the consecrated host: they stole it from a church and, secretly, they inflicted all kinds of humiliations on it, finally stabbing it, thus, again and again, killing Jesus Christ.
They also appropriated crucifixes and all kinds of Christian symbols and imagery to spit on, insult, cover with excrement… Countless stories, spread throughout Europe, referred to this type of desecration.
And then there was the Talmud. Had it not been discovered that the Jews no longer followed the teachings of the Bible, but had replaced them with those of that “infamous book” which ordered them to do all possible harm to Christians? Indeed, thanks to the testimony of some Jewish converts to Christianity, the doctrines taught by that “secret book of the Jews” had been discovered. In Paris, in 1240, a public dispute had been organized to judge the content of the Talmud. There, a series of passages came to light which, it was believed, ordered the Jews to carry out actions against Christians: it ordered “to kill the best of Christians,” stipulated that “a Christian who observes the Sabbath or studies the Law deserves the death penalty,” that it was not a sin “to deceive a Christian in any way,” that “God gave to the Jews all the possessions of the Gentiles,” or that Christians are immoral and beasts ( Rosenthal 1956 ). It is not surprising that, faced with such accusations, Pope Gregory IX, in his letter of 1239 to the European princes ordering them to confiscate any copies of the Talmud they might find, stated:
“If what is said about the Jews of France and other lands is true, there would be no punishment sufficiently great or adequate for their crime” (cit. in Cohen 1982: 66 ).
Was any further proof needed to prove the diabolical wickedness that inspired the Jews? Was any further reason needed to hate them and to use all means necessary to protect oneself from their machinations? First of all, it was necessary to put an end to this demonic book. After this first papal order to confiscate the Talmud, others followed, which were periodically remitted until the 16th century. Between 1509 and 1510, a real campaign was launched in Germany to wipe out all rabbinical literature. The campaign, despite its virulence, was ultimately unsuccessful. But another similar campaign, launched a few years later in Italy, was successful.
Thus, in Rome in 1553, the Talmud ended up at the stake; and shortly afterwards, following orders from the Holy See, other Italian cities joined in the persecution ( Stow 1972 ).
But, although the ecclesiastical authorities tried to put a stop to the supposed machinations of the Jews, they continued to put into practice, time and again, those cursed Talmudic teachings. The chronicles, at least, were full of examples. Following Talmudic morality, the Jews had conspired tirelessly to do as much evil as possible to the Christians.
They had done so in order to try to destroy the kingdom of the Visigoths.
This was stated in 694 by King Egica before the XVII Council of Toledo. Thanks to the “confession” of some of those involved, a great conspiracy to wipe out the Christians had been discovered, hatched between the Hispanic Jews, who had been forced to convert in the previous years, and those who lived in “overseas regions.” Faced with such a plot in which, according to their accusers, the Jews “wanted to usurp the royal throne by means of a conspiracy,” “disturb the state of the Church” and “exterminate” the Christians, the Council promulgated a series of laws that condemned the Jews to slavery and to the loss of their children, who would be educated as Christians ( Collection of Canons 1861: II, 593 ).
Centuries later, in an attempt to explain the success and, above all, the speed of the Islamic conquests in the West, the chronicles pointed out for posterity some clear culprits: the Jews. According to some authors, many cities had fallen into the hands of the Muslims thanks to the fact that the Jews conspired to do so. Thus, for example, Bishop Lucas de Tuy, in his Chronicon mundi (13th century), stated that Toledo had fallen “because of the betrayal of the Jews.”
This story would be echoed in countless works, and the legend of the betrayal of the Jews during the Islamic conquest of the Peninsula would survive to this day ( Bravo López 2014 ).
But it was not only Toledo, in different places and at different times in history the Jews were accused of acting in a similar way ( Caro Baroja 2000: 34-37 ). And it is that, according to their accusers, the Jews had never missed an opportunity to ally themselves with the other enemies of Christianity and try to finish it off. Thus, the chronicles recounted, a Jew had prophesied the birth of Mohammed, and that he would be a great man, and later, to make the people believe that he was truly a messenger of God, he invented miracles.
From that same Jew, they said, Mohammed took “things that he put into that evil sect that he formed for the ruin of the souls of those who believe in it” ( Primera Crónica General 1906: 261-263 ).
Conspiring with the other enemies of Christianity seemed to be a constant in the behaviour of the Jews. Not only had they helped Mohammed and the Muslim troops in their conquests, but they also continued to plot with the other enemies of the Christians to destroy them. Thus, after the Mongol conquests became known in Western Europe, a Benedictine monk, Matthew Paris, claimed to have discovered a new international Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity, and all this without leaving his abbey of Saint Albans. According to his Chronica majora ( c . 1259), the Jews of the Continent, especially those of the Empire, had thought that these “Tatars and Cumans” were one of the mythical lost tribes of Israel that had remained locked in the Caucasus since the time of Alexander the Great.
To discuss this discovery, some of their most important representatives met in a secret place.
According to our monk, in that dark conclave, one of the most influential rabbis pronounced the following words:
«My brothers, seed of the illustrious Abraham, vineyard of the Lord of Sabaoth, whom our God Adonai has allowed to remain oppressed for so long under Christian dominion: now the time has come for our deliverance, that, by the judgment of God, they should now be the oppressed, that the remnant of Israel should be saved. For our brothers from the tribes of Israel, who were previously silent, have appeared to subjugate the whole world. And the greater and longer our suffering has been, the greater the glory that will be granted to us.
Let us, then, go to meet them with valuable gifts, and receive them with the greatest honors: they need grain, wine, and weapons.»
The whole assembly, Paris continued, listened to the rabbi’s speech with great pleasure, and afterward the attendants gathered all the weapons they could find and hid them in barrels. However, the Jews were eventually discovered, arrested, and brought to justice. Thus Christendom was saved from a new Jewish conspiracy.
But the danger did not cease. In 1321 a new conspiracy was uncovered: the local authorities of Mâcon (in eastern France) had found two letters supposedly sent by the kings of Granada and Tunis to the Jews of France, in which they gave them instructions about the plan they had hatched with them and the lepers to poison the wells and fountains of the country and thus wipe out the Christians and the king of France himself.
Once the plot was discovered, persecution, mass murder, forced conversion or expulsion of Jews began throughout France ( Barber 1981 ).
The accusation that Jews were poisoning wells and springs to kill off Christians was already an old one. In 1161, in Bohemia, 86 Jews were accused of plotting to poison the Christian population and were sentenced to death by burning at the stake ( Trachtenberg 2001: 97 ). Such accusations spread throughout Europe and ultimately gave rise to the belief that Jews were also responsible for epidemics such as the Black Death, which swept Europe from 1348 onwards, with tragic consequences for large numbers of European Jewish communities, who were massacred or expelled from many places ( ibid ., pp. 97–108).
Jews were also, according to many, responsible for the deaths by poisoning of several European kings. The Chronicon mundi itself accused Jews of having murdered Prince Ferdinand of Castile in 1211 ( Tuy 1926: 413-414 ); and, from the 15th century onwards, it was also believed that King Henry III of Castile and Leon had died at the hands of a Jewish doctor.
Jewish doctors had also been, according to legends collected by some chroniclers, responsible for the deaths of Kings Carloman, Hugh Capet and Charles the Bald ( Trachtenberg 2001: 97 ).
Normally, these anti-Jewish accusations were made in isolation; that is, at a particular moment, certain Jews were accused of having committed one of these evil acts. This was done with limited objectives: to explain specific facts or to harm specific people. However, on other occasions, it went much further: as we have done, accusation after accusation was accumulated, in an endless list of crimes that led the reader or listener to form a conspiracy theory in which all the pieces fit together; a theory according to which all Jews were equally involved in a secret plan to destroy Christian society.
In this way, a true vision of the world was constructed in which the forces of Evil, through the hand of the Jews, acted on Earth to destroy everything that Christians considered good and desirable.
This made it possible to explain great disasters and moments of crisis in a
in a simple way. It was a way of explaining what was, for many, inexplicable. Appealing to the forces of evil, almost always personified by the marginalized of society—especially the Jews—was easier than facing the disorientation produced by the overwhelming immensity of the real world.
@ Flor
What’s the name of the book you’re quoting?
therefore the jew leaders, primary Rothschilds aimed with
their freemason helpers to destroy all european kings + Kaisers
because their Kaisers + Kings protected their people when jews
made to much crime . the last british kings they made jewish .