The Trump plan to send Gazans to Libya is as stupid as it is evil

Trump and Starmer must condemn Israel’s self-defeating campaign in Gaza, writes World Affairs Editor Sam Kiley

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Donald Trump’s latest reported scheme to end the horror that’s unfolding in Gaza is to somehow dump one million of the enclave’s 2.5 million people in Libya in return for unfreezing $30 billion in frozen assets. The idea is as stupid as it is evil.

It appears to be part of a White House campaign to normalise Israel’s campaign to use bombs, bullets, starvation, the mass destruction of homes, and the targeting of hospitals and medical professionals to make Gaza unliveable.

The United Nations and the International Criminal Court have said that what Israel’s Prime Minister and military are doing in Gaza is genocidal, a war crime, or crime against humanity. One does not need to parse over the legal definitions of what’s going on.

This is a campaign that Britain has been supporting with the export of weapons-parts to Israel, and with spy-plane flights over Gaza coordinated with Israel’s air force. In short, the UK is complicit in the commissions of atrocities against civilians by Israel. History will judge Keir Starmer, and his government, harshly for this. So will ordinary British people.

There is a double standard in righteously backing Ukraine against the murderous Vladimir Putin, and wrongly backing Netanyahu’s campaign against dark skinned Muslims. Many will accuse the UK of racism.

Israel was understandably enraged and hurt by the vile massacre of Israelis and others by Hamas and its supporters on October 7 2023. Hamas deliberately calibrated the atrocities to provoke an unequal reaction. And got it.

Israel’s far-right has now seized on the campaign in Gaza to make it clear that the long-term aim, as troops step up operations again, is to “conquer” the enclave. Netanyahu has said he wants to see the “voluntary” evacuation of its population.

Israeli ground forces will be in the Gaza Strip indefinitely. “They will not enter and come out,” he said.

This is bad ethically. It is also bad for Israel which has already lost the right to claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. It has selectively seized large areas of the occupied West Bank for Israeli-only colonies and imposed a structure of racial segregation and rights restrictions on ethnic Palestinians in the rest of the territory.

B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, said back in 2021: “The Israeli regime enacts in all the territory it controls (Israeli sovereign territory, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) an apartheid regime. One organizing principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians”.

The organization has accused its own government of “ethnic cleaning” in Gaza.

Ami Ayalon, is the former director of Israel’s internal security agency, Shin Bet. The agency spies on Palestinians. It contributes to kill lists of alleged “terrorists”. It sometimes kills them itself.

This is what he said of Israel’s war in Gaza: “Not only it is not a just war, this war will bring to the end of the state of Israel as a Jewish democracy. We are endangering our security if we shall not stop this war.”

It is not as if Starmer and his ministers can say they don’t know what’s happening. They need to say loud and clear, now, that it must stop and they must end every and any part the UK is playing.

Starmer has limited his criticism of the destruction of 80 per cent of Gaza’s structures and at least 52,000 lives (more than half are women and children), to saying that Israel’s latest aid blockage is “intolerable”.

Putin is, rightly, under international sanctions. His country cannot import anything that would contribute to his war in Ukraine from Europe, the UK, or America. Putin’s murderers have killed far fewer civilians (at least 12,500) than Israel’s defence forces.

There’s no talk of sanctions against Israel for what’s happening in Gaza from No 10. Tom Fletcher, a former British diplomat and now the UN’s human aid chief, last week asked the security council: “Will you act – decisively – to prevent genocide [in Gaza] and to ensure respect for international humanitarian law?"

Answer came there none from the UK. But Israel swung back, with Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador, saying Fletcher’s question was an “utterly inappropriate and deeply irresponsible statement that shattered any notion of neutrality”.

I happen to be writing this from Africa’s Great Lakes region where, 31 years ago, Rwanda was suffering the fastest and most devastating genocide in history since the Holocaust. People were slaughtered at a rate of about 10,000 a day in a deliberate attempt, by Hutu extremists, to wipe out the nation’s Tutsi minority.

The UK and US refused then to use the word genocide for what was happening because that would have, under international law, required action to stop the massacres. The outside world sat on its hands until a rebel Tutsi army stopped the killing in Rwanda.

The slaughter didn’t stop though. It spread into neighbouring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. A kill-or-be-killed fixation took hold in most corners of the vast nation. It sucked neighbouring countries into a war that killed some five million, and is still raging today. Stopping the 1994 genocide by intervening would have been relatively easy. Dealing with the horrors that have followed has been almost impossible.

The lesson of Gaza is that a failure to end the mass slaughter there will have catastrophic long-term and violent consequences.

Palestinians will never forget that Trump has already come up with the demented idea of Egypt or Jordan, or both, taking in Gaza’s war shattered people so he can turn the land they left behind into a coastal resort.

Now he’s suggesting, according to NBC News, that he could trade Gazans, like camels, with Libya. Bribing the embattled nation with a $30 billion influx of its own money to take on millions of dispossessed Palestinians.

The scheme is do demented it is hardly worth pointing out that Libya’s government won’t accept such a deal. Or that European nations would shoot it down as it moves millions of people to the jumping off point for illegal immigration to their nations. Or that intelligence agencies would freak out because it would send the bloodied mass of Israel’s victims straight into the hands of al Qaeda.

It serves the Netanyahu government, though, because it suggests that serious people, people in government, are asking “if not Egypt, if not Jordan, if not Libya, then where?”

Britain’s answer must be “nowhere but Gaza” and to loudly demand an end to the mass killing, forced removals, and illegal seizure of West Bank land. Doing so now would already be too late for too many Gazans, but it might in the long term help them and Israel too.

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