The second phase of the Gaza genocide is about to begin

It looks like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be getting the reward he expected, after his efforts to stall a ceasefire and hostage negotiations until after the U.S. presidential election. The Criminal—our criminal, that is, not the Israeli leader who now stands accused of crimes against humanity in addition to his previous, more petty indictments—has now endorsed a large-scale removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

This is, for the record, what Netanyahu's farthest-right coalition partners have demanded all along.

“They have no alternative right now” but to leave, Mr. Trump said of Gazans. “I mean, they’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now.” He added: “I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. It’s a pure demolition site.”

Mr. Trump seemed to indicate that he wanted to find a permanent new homeland for the Palestinians rather than reconstruct Gaza. “If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land, and build them some really nice places with plenty of money in the area, that’s for sure,” he said. “I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza.”

Setting aside the usual dementia-laced embellishments, this is the final solution to the Palestinian "problem" proposed by far-right Israeli officials like Itamar Ben-Gvir. Ben-Gvir, an advocate for the often ruthlessly violent and now explicitly genocidal Israeli "settler" movement, has insisted that the Gaza war can only end with "complete occupation of Gaza with full Israeli control." And he is not alone.

Communication Minister Shlomo Karhi, of Netanyahu's Likud party, said: "In order to preserve the security achievements that our soldiers lost their lives for, we must resettle Gaza with security forces and settlers that will embrace the land with love." He added that "this is the only true way, to make the Hamas Nazis pay a price and to defend our nation and country."

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir also spoke at the march, and said that what the protesters are calling for is the "true solution."

"First," he said, "we must return to Gaza now! We are coming home! To the holy land! And second," he continued, "we must encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary emigration of the residents of Gaza. It is moral!"

Despite many months of protests in Israel over Netayahu's bungling of hostage talks and campaign of maximal violence against Gaza civilians, it looks like the second phase of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza's Palestinian population is now ready to begin. The first phase used indiscriminate targeting of civilian targets to reduce much of Gaza to rubble, killing far more civilians than militants and driving civilians into refugee camps. The second will be the "voluntary" dispersal of those Gazans, most of whom have no homes to go back to.

Trump has already taken two steps to help enforce that outcome. The illegal shuttering of USAID eliminates one of the few sources of food aid to displaced Gazans—and that may have indeed been the most urgent rationale for Trump's white nationalist and white supremacist aides to sabotage the agency.

Now Trump is endorsing the Ben-Gvir pushed, far-right theory of resettlement, declaring Gazans "have no alternative" but to leave for new homes in foreign lands. This will allow the "true solution" Israel's pro-genocide right demands: the seizure of Palestinian land in Gaza for Israeli settlers who will "embrace the land with love."

The Gaza genocide was a flash point during the presidential campaign, with President Biden clinging relentlessly and myopically to the special relationship between Israel and the United States even as Netanyahu, who remains indicted for crimes in his own country, sought to sabotage the U.S. president at every turn and unleashed organized operations to claim that it was American college students, not his own military, whose actions had gone beyond the pale. Biden may have felt hamstrung by the sabotage; if the United States tapered off weapons shipments even a little, Netanyahu would undoubtably prop Israeli military corpses in front of American cameras to claim that it was a lack of artillery, not Israel's broadening of the war into a multi-front campaign, that killed them.

We will likely have to wait decades for anything resembling a true picture of the U.S.-Israel government conflicts of the Biden years to emerge. Trump, however, appears to have already decided what rewards his fellow indicted leader should receive for Netanyahu's decades of attempted sabotage of any but the hardest-right American political leaders. Gazans are now cut off from U.S. famine relief, and will soon face a "voluntary" resettlement program endorsed by fascists in both countries.

And new terrorism, of course, will continue to blossom as Gazan children grow up in camps and without parents. That, too, is a given.