Call It By Its Names: Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide

Pulling Punches Only Allows the Trump Team to Distort Reality in Their Favor

My latest sketch of the demagogue in chief.

The New York Times has an analysis of President Donald Trump’s ethnic-cleansing plan on its site today by “diplomatic correspondent” Steven Erlanger that amounts to journalistic malpractice.

The piece treats Trump’s proposal to clear Gaza of Palestinians and rebuild the strip as some sort of resort area as if it is a serious piece of states craft, as a possible way out of a century of violence and insecurity in the region. It treats Palestinians as an afterthought, and in doing so makes clear that the concern is not peace but purely on safety for Israel.

Erlanger is not endorsing the plan. Far from it. But his objections are framed around pragmatic and not moral terms. The plans is “outlandish and unworkable,” he writes as qualifier to a comment from Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser, who describes the “proposal” as “no less than an historic resetting of decades of received diplomatic wisdom,” one that may be “unrealistic,” but that “may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings.”

Later in the analysis — after Hamas is introduced as opposing it (in paragraph 11) — he introduces another “Israeli analyst,” who makes clear that the other regional states will not be on board.

Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said that in discussions with Jordanian, Egyptian, Gulf Arab and Palestinian colleagues, “no one even wants to discuss this deal, because there will be no readiness of Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I cannot find one Arab country or leader willing to accept the Palestinians.”

It may be useful to hear these pragmatic concerns, but not at the expense of the moral argument. Even if nations like Jordan and Egypt were willing to accept 2.3 million forcibly displaced Palestinians on a permanent basis, this fails the moral test. This would be a final ethnic cleansing, one built on the foundation of a genocidal war by Israel on Gaza.

Yes, Erlanger quotes Hamas as making “it clear it is going nowhere, and presumably it would fight American troops as it fought Israeli ones.” But its placement and the fact that the only Palestinian voice is that of Hamas minimizes its usefulness. This comes in the 11th paragraph, nearly half way through the analysis. By this point in the story, the reader is conditioned to view the proposal through a pragmatic lens and not though a moral one. The use of Hamas as the stand-in for all Palestinians plays to American readers’ biases. Hamas has been designated by the State Department as a terrorist group and is referred to in that way, or as extremists, in most American coverage. To simply equate Hamas and Palestinians is to reinforce the racist notion that Palestinians are terrorists and have no claim on the land.

It is important to point out that there has been a considerable amount of reporting in the Times and other publications showing that average Palestinians view this as a further attack on their humanity, but recognizing that would allow the moral question to intrude on what is meant to be a story about diplomacy that takes the proposal seriously.

And, as a Haaretz editorial makes clear, had this plan “not come from the president of the United States,” the idea of the United States taking “control of the Gaza Strip, expel(ing) its Palestinian residents, relocat(ing) them to Egypt, Jordan and other countries, and build(ing) a so-called Riviera there would have been entirely and justly disregarded.”

We can’t do that, Haaretz says, because “Trump is the U.S. president.” But taking him seriously because of his position does not mean we treat this as a legitimate plan. Rather, as Haaretz argues, “it reflects Trump's lack of understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its roots and its evolution over the years.” And, “The audacity of presenting such a solution – one that echoes terms like transfer, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes – is an insult to both Palestinians and Israelis.”

I’m quoting at length from the Haaretz editorial, because it gets at the nut of the issue: That this would violate international law and that, to quote United Arab List leader Mansour Abbas in the Israeli Knesset, "One can't carry out a transfer without committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

The Times has attempted to tread carefully, but there are limits to this kind of objectivity, especially in analysis reporting, which is the Times’ bread and butter. It avoids words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in its reporting, unless someone else uses them. In normal times, this might be the right approach, but these are not normal times. The speed and scope of Trump’s attack on democracy here and abroad demand more from journalists than he-said, she-said reporting. This approach now amounts to pulling punches and grants the president and his acolytes a lot of room to lie, by treating Trump and his cronies’ pronouncements as equivalent to those being offered by the reality-based community. Receding into a false objectivity is dangerous when dealing with an overt lier and conman, who has shown over and over that he has no moral compass, that everything is transactional. We have to call a lie a lie, and describe reality as it is, rather than how he wants us to see it.

When Trump talks of clearing Gaza, there are only two terms we can use if truth is our goal — ethnic cleansing and genocide. To avoid using them out of a false sense of fairness or objectivity is to abdicate our responsibilities to our readers.