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

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” 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?

(Article by Sana Seed republished from MondoWeiss.net)

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 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 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”, “dastardly deed” and “morally indefensible”. Even The New York Times’ made the very novel discovery of what international law 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 that was markedly absent 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 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 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 of Biden’s refusal to push for a ceasefire in April 2024, has dedicated several “Closer Look” segments of his show over the last ten days to the Trump administration and Gaza. Meyers not only called 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 overseeing the extermination of an entire nation.

Then there is the performative anguish of the Democrats. Last week, 145 House Democrats signed a letter 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 for months? When Palestinian babies were left to die and decompose 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, 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” 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 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 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’ – 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 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, alongside their moral failures, 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.

Read more at: MondoWeiss.net