Donald Trump’s press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu was monstrous in an original way. He spoke solicitously of Palestinians in Gaza and the need to remove them permanently from the strip because it had been flattened and is a dangerous place to live in, filled as it is with precarious ruins and unexploded munitions. All the while, the man who had ordered the genocidal bombing that razed Gaza and killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians stood next to him grinning under his comb-over, marvelling at his luck with US presidents. First, a senile simp who gave Israel its license to kill and then this callous orange troll who, even as Netanyahu watched, sketched out for him a blueprint for US-certified ethnic cleansing.
Trump’s manner, his blend of baby-talk and cruelty, is unique. It’s what American voters like about him, this genius for simple, artless bigotry. He knows that most Americans don’t know where Gaza is and the ones that do don’t like the ‘Moslems’ who live there. There is no political cost to saying the hitherto unsayable — purge Palestinians from Gaza — because the electoral majority that put him in office likely approves of ethnic cleansing. Think about the issues that stoke his base: the DEI programme, Black Lives Matter, ‘wokeness’ and illegal migration. The people who voted for Trump don’t care that his cabinet is crammed with plutocratic billionaires; they think that he’ll make America great again because he’s a regular guy who eats burgers and shares their prejudices.
Trump isn’t important in himself; he’s significant because in this moment of American anxiety when China looms and hegemony doesn’t come as easily as before, he forces outsiders to reckon with the political instincts of American voters. Americans vote for Trump partly because he is robustly racist and sexist, because he knows, like they do, that geopolitics and trade are zero-sum games, because they enjoy the way he bullies countries to make them abase themselves before America. These things make American voters feel good about themselves. Trump is an authentic vessel for American resentment and bigotry.
Surely this is too sweeping; what of the Americans who voted for Kamala Harris? It’s worth reminding ourselves that Trump won the popular vote against Harris. It’s also useful to remember that the razing of Gaza, the indiscriminate killing of civilians and women and children, the destruction of nearly every university, school, hospital, mosque and church in Gaza, was done on the watch of a Democratic president with American weapons. The job of rendering Gaza unfit for human habitation was a joint venture that Joe Biden bankrolled. We know that his party’s nominee for the presidency, Harris, was so terrified of alienating sections of the Democratic base that she refused to allow a Palestinian-American delegate to address the Democratic National Convention.
Social media is full of liberal Democrats arguing that Harris would never have suggested the permanent relocation of Palestinians. Never say never. We know that Biden and Antony Blinken asked Egypt to house Gaza’s Palestinians in camps in the Sinai ‘temporarily’ so that Israel could hunt down Hamas without worrying about civilians. Respectable liberal papers like The Economist actively canvassed the relocation dreamt up by the Israeli government, knowing that Palestinians displaced over the decades had never been allowed to return to their homes.
Progressive politicians and intellectuals in every democracy have to give their voters the benefit of the doubt. They must try to find extenuating reasons for electorates that vote cruel leaders and parties to power. Invariably they look for economic explanations because inflation and unemployment are seen as rational material grievances and bigoted authoritarians like Trump can be blamed for distorting them into culture wars. It’s hard to accept that a dispositive majority of Americans love Trump and revel in his bigotry. To say that would amount to saying that the ground out of which American democracy grows is poisoned.
But for the outsider, for the non-Western spectator who has no reason to find alibis for a rich country filled with relatively comfortable, well-fed people, it is impossible, after Gaza, not to acknowledge that there is something the matter with America. In the first twenty-five years of this century, the United States of America has helped inflict indescribable violence on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza. The crusading, self-righteous zeal with which American elites and the American people visit violence on distant places and the way in which they justify this mayhem to themselves are singular and strange. When Western pundits argue that the liberal international order, aka the rules-based order, has kept the peace, all they really mean is that western Europe and the US haven’t had to fight wars in their homelands. For the rules-based order, wars elsewhere are noises off.
Watching America’s Western allies respond to Trump’s proclaimed intention to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, make Canada the fifty-first state and take over Gaza and turn it into the Riviera has been an education. The abject way in which rich, seemingly sovereign, nations tiptoed around Trump’s provocations suggests that the liberal international order is principally a patron-client system where America is the hegemon and other Western nations choose to be luxury protectorates. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and MAGA America’s insistence that it be compensated for the protection it extends have reduced these countries to kowtowing petitioners in Trump’s court.
The contrast between the undeferential response of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum to Trump’s threats and provocations and the timid, propitiatory pussyfooting of Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen and Britain’s Keir Starmer has been a revelation. A country that shares a border with the US and is so intertwined with America’s economy that a trade war would do it real damage found the resolve to make Trump back off. Europe’s leaders, on the other hand, held their breath for fear that Trump might hear them breathing.
This is something of an inflection point. If the West is merely America’s baggage train and if a bully like Trump can make the rich countries of the G-7 cringe and shrink into their own shadows, what are Britain and France doing in the United Nations Security Council? Also, how far will these erstwhile champions of the rules-based order go to stay on the right side of their benefactor?
In the aftermath of Trump’s press conference, we have heard Britain and Germany reiterate their commitment to a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine and their opposition to forced displacement. We should brace ourselves for opinion pieces in The Wall Street Journal and The Economist arguing that Gaza’s homeless population is actually desperate to leave, that it’s being forced to stay in place because of the perverse opposition of politically correct ideologues.
The Israel Defense Forces has already been instructed to ‘facilitate’ the departure of Palestinians who want to leave Gaza. Trump has declared that Israel will empty the strip and hand it over to America. If Trump stays the course on Gaza, it’s a matter of time before Starmer begins to argue in his lawyerly way that a ‘voluntary’ exodus from Gaza would not, in fact, be in breach of the Geneva Convention nor amount to ethnic cleansing. Given that he and other European leaders moved in lockstep with Biden to oppose a ceasefire in Gaza so that Israel could complete its genocidal campaign, they are unlikely to baulk at reframing ethnic cleansing as voluntary relocation.
If there are lessons to be learnt from the Trump-Netanyahu stand-up act on Gaza, they are these: on the matter of Palestine, America’s lower depths have lower depths, its appetite for atrocity in the Middle East is boundless, and where America leads, its European clients will wring their hands and follow.
mukulkesavan@hotmail.com
