Summary
Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to take over Gaza and resettle its Palestinian population was widely condemned by allies and adversaries alike.
Arab nations, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, firmly rejected the plan, reaffirming support for Palestinian sovereignty. U.S. allies like Australia and New Zealand reiterated their backing of a two-state solution.
Critics, including Palestinian leaders and Hamas, denounced the move as illegal and destabilizing.
U.S. lawmakers also opposed it, with some calling it “dangerous” and “ethnic cleansing.”
That is the correct phrase here. Start there and keep going.
There’s no such thing as ethnic cleansing. It’s just a weasel word for genocide. It’s all it ever has been. When “ethnic cleansing” was going on in the Balkans in the 90s, it was just a genocide that nobody was intervening to stop. Same for Myanmar in the mid 2010s And for Karabakh in 2020.
Well, but there is a pretty significant difference. For example, when the Nazis were planning to send all the German Jews to Madagascar, they were attempting an ethnic cleansing, meaning ‘just’ their removal - They didn’t care when Jews died, but it wasn’t their actual plan to slaughter them all. However, when the Madagascar Plan didn’t seem possible anymore, they switched to genocide in stead, meaning their extermination.
There is a incredibly huge difference between these two things. And please don’t get me wrong, they are both absolutely, unequivocally horrific. Unacceptable, period. But still this difference is important, especially for the victims. In hindsight, I’m sure many people would have wished the Nazis had been successful in their ethnic cleansing. Many more people would have survived.
What Israel has been doing is not ethnic cleansing. They’ve been systematically killing people for no other reason than “because we want to and we can.” I’d call that a genocide. What Trump is describing, however, is ethnic cleansing.
And just to reiterate, I’m not saying it’s not bad. It’s sickeningly bad. But quite different.
Ethnic cleansing exists for when you are destroying a culture through means other than mass murder. It is absolutely a thing and it is not the same as genocide. Gaza is a genocide.
Genocide is a wider term. It covers killing people based on religion, country of origin, color of skin, size of nose, etc etc.
Ethnic cleansing is genocide but specifically done towards people of a specific ethnicity.
I mean a lot of terminology you can argue about but forcefully removing an certain ethnic group from their home region so another group can take over, that’s pretty much the textbook definition.