Trump advisers talk Palestinian expulsions, annexation
Kushner and ex-envoy push pro-Israel tone
Even as Palestinian-rights organizers focus their ire on President Biden, the advisers who shaped Donald Trump’s Middle East policies when he was president have amplified calls for the expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the annexation of the West Bank by Israel.
Those policy prescriptions, voiced by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggest a right-wing approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exceeding even the Trump administration’s lopsidedly pro-Israeli proposals for a two-state solution. Trump was contradictory on the policies he would pursue in an interview with a conservative Israeli publication. But he did say he would be meeting with Friedman to discuss the former ambassador’s plan for Israeli annexation of the West Bank.
Yet rather than raising alarm bells, some Palestinian organizers still maintain that Biden is the true threat and that rhetoric from his Republican challenger cannot compare to policies that they say have already led to the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“The fear of a second Trump term no longer resonates,” said Abed Ayoub, the national executive director of the AmericanArab Anti-Discrimination Committee, who has been organizing Arab American and progressive voters in Michigan.
Ayoub suggested that if Trump was reelected because activists shun Biden, the Democratic Party could be forced to reconsider its position on Israel.
The ideas given voice by Friedman and Kushner have raised eyebrows. At a forum at Harvard University that first drew widespread attention last week, Kushner, a developer who has actively pursued real estate deals abroad off contacts made when he was setting policy in the White House, said that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” He also suggested Palestinians be “moved out” of the territory.
Palestinian civilians, he said, could be moved into the Negev desert in Israel’s arid south.
Friedman appeared to echo Kushner’s call for expulsions over the weekend when he criticized Vice President Kamala Harris on social media for saying that as many as 1.5 million Palestinians who have sought shelter in the southern Gaza city of Rafah had nowhere else to go if Israel attacked.
Friedman suggested that Gaza’s Palestinians could always emigrate.
“She ‘studied the maps’ and concluded that the people in Rafah have no place to go,”
Friedman wrote. “It must have been an awfully small map — obviously left out Egypt and other Arab countries.”
Later, responding to denunciations by Palestinian rights activists, Friedman wrote that he was “advocating getting civilians temporarily out of harm’s way during a war.”
Meanwhile, Friedman has been pushing a Future of Judea & Samaria plan, using the biblical terminology for the West Bank to assert what he says is Israel’s right to annex the territory, which under longstanding US policy is supposed to constitute the lion’s share of an eventual sovereign Palestinian state. The West Bank has been under military occupation since 1967.
Presenting his plan last month at the conference of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, Friedman called Biden’s fresh push for a two-state solution — Israel and a Palestinian state existing side by side — a “dead letter.”
Both the Biden campaign and the White House responded cautiously on the sensitive issues of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza and what might follow. White House aides reiterated that the president had rejected any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, the reconstitution of Israeli settlements in the territory, and the “shrinkage” of Gaza’s borders. And they said he would continue to press for Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza.