By Denko Maleski
With the mindset of a real estate dealer, U.S. President Donald Trump has called on Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to relocate to neighboring Egypt or Jordan because, according to him, they have no future on their land. There will always be war and killing here, he declared, sitting in the Oval Office alongside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been convicted of genocide by The Hague Tribunal.
And it would all make sense—if people were “trees without roots” that could simply be uprooted and moved to newly built settlements far from their homeland. But Trump’s simplistic entrepreneurial logic does not think in terms of history, tradition, emotion, identity—and fails to grasp that Palestinians want to return to the ruins of their homes and rebuild their lives where they were born, where their ancestors have lived for centuries. He does not understand that sunlit new settlements in a foreign land, where they would supposedly live in peace, cannot replace their homeland.
On top of everything, Trump’s proposal is unacceptable to the surrounding Arab countries, which convened a meeting just to make that clear. But for Israel, it is entirely acceptable.
Never before has a U.S. president so openly supported a policy of ethnic cleansing, but when it comes to Israel, anything seems possible. The strange alliance between these two states even challenges the principle I often repeat—that nations act in their own interests—because, from a purely strategic perspective, the U.S. has far greater interests in the broader Arab world than in the small Jewish state. Yet, research shows that the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington plays a decisive role in shaping U.S. foreign policy, which explains the unwavering support.
Netanyahu’s satisfaction at yesterday’s press conference in the White House was impossible to hide. The far-right extremists in his already extreme government—those who claim the land of Palestine based on texts written a thousand years before Christ rather than on present-day realities—must be thrilled. America has now endorsed their brutal policy of mass killing of Palestinians to “cleanse” the land for new Jewish settlers.
If Trump’s formula for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was unclear until now, it has become crystal clear: support for a policy of ethnic cleansing. But such a policy seems unfeasible. The Israeli government wants to kill or expel around six million Palestinians in the name of the Greater Israel idea, which envisions six million Jews expanding into that territory. That is the kind of plan that has received backing from the new U.S. president—not the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as endorsed by the UN and most of the world.
The term ethnic cleansing—which sounds so disturbingly sanitary—is in reality a horrific, bloody policy of murdering people from one ethnic group to seize their land. It entered common usage during the wars in Yugoslavia. The U.S. and its European allies intervened to put an end to such policies. In some ways, they succeeded; in others, they did not. They failed to prevent the creation of a homogeneous Serbian territory in Bosnia, but they did stop further fragmentation by blocking its annexation to Serbia.
So what will happen in the Balkans after Trump’s decision to support Netanyahu’s policy? Some will rightly say that even after 35 years of efforts to build trust among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, old hatreds have not disappeared—and that there are no European solutions to Balkan problems.
If Trump ever turns his attention to the Balkans and presents us with a bill for all the money “wasted” on an unattainable goal—then woe to us. Woe to us if he declares: Balkan solutions for Balkan problems!
Think twice, Trump supporters.