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Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
U.S. President Donald Trump recently shared an AI-generated video that shows his horrific futuristic vision for Gaza, featuring Trump himself, Elon Musk and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reveling and enjoying themselves on the ruins of displaced Palestinians and basking in the glory of an ethnically cleansed Gaza.
The brazen footage, which Trump posted late Tuesday to Instagram and Truth Social, reimagines the devastated strip as a “Middle East Riviera” boasting of a luxury Trump hotel, glittering Western skyscrapers, beach resorts with bearded belly dancers and a colossal Trump golden statue hovering godlike over the besieged strip. A “Trump Gaza” shop offers golden merchandise of the U.S. president, where a child is carrying a helium-inflated golden balloon shaped like Trump’s head.
The video shows Trump waltzing with a belly dancer in a nightclub, Netanyahu enjoying poolside drinks at a luxury resort, and Musk eating a dip and showering locals with U.S. dollar bills. The dehumanizing footage is set to an up-tempo dance track featuring patronizing and personality cult-infused lyrics: “Donald Trump will set you free, bringing the light for all to see, no more tunnels, no more fear, Trump Gaza is finally here. Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light.”
“Trump Gaza” celebrates ethnic cleansing — nothing says Indigenous erasure like renaming.
This unhinged celebration of war crimes and crimes against humanity almost has no precedent in human history. It shows total contempt for basic principles of international justice and human rights, and makes mockery of the more than 61,000 Palestinian victims, including 17,000 children, who have been massacred by Israel in Gaza over the past 15 months, with U.S. funds and arms.
The video, which appeared to take inspiration from the genocidal imaginations of some Zionist social media accounts, has since gone viral. It has sparked outrage among anti-genocide activists and Palestinians, who understood the dystopian horror lurking beneath the outlandish AI-generated scenes, evoking long-held colonial fantasies of civilizing missions and “the white man’s burden.” Ghassan Abu Sitta sums it up quite eloquently: “The delusions of godlike divinity that shapes the colonial mindset of White supremacy. Both in the need for violence to be performative and in their belief of the benevolent nature of their crimes.”
Over the past weeks, Trump has repeated his proposal to ethnically cleanse Gaza with shocking persistence. “We just clean out that whole thing,” the newly inaugurated president told reporters on Air Force One in the early days of his presidency. He further described Gaza as a “demolition site,” with “phenomenal location, on the sea” and “the best weather.” Calling for the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza, Trump has further suggested that Egypt and Jordan should accept Palestinian refugees from Gaza as part of a plan to “clean out” the territory. Another alleged Trump administration proposal suggested forcibly relocating Palestinians from Gaza to Indonesia, reviving decadeslong Israeli campaigns to depopulate and ethnically cleanse Gaza.
Trump’s ethnic cleansing proposals clearly echo Jared Kushner’s comments, made in a March 2024 interview with Harvard, that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” Those aren’t the only comments Kushner has made that suggest he sees the broader Middle East as empty land ready to be morphed by him and his allies. In a long social media post after Israel bombed a Beirut suburb to kill former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, the president’s son-in-law openly touted his imperialist visions as a historic opportunity, reflecting one of the more terrifying foreign policy ideas pouring out of Trump’s inner circle: “Moments like this come once in a generation, if they even come at all. The Middle East is too often a solid where little changes. Today, it is a liquid and the ability to reshape is unlimited. Do not squander this moment.”
“Trump Gaza” celebrates ethnic cleansing — nothing says Indigenous erasure like renaming.
We are entering a perilous stage in which Trump’s pro-Israel megadonors, led by figures such as Miriam Adelson, and cheered on by genocide-mongers like Kushner and Marco Rubio, are openly pushing for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This represents a dangerous phase in U.S. genocidal complicity in Gaza, especially since policies that enable ethnic cleansing seem to enjoy bipartisan support. As Rep. Rashida Tlaib bluntly put it after Trump first elucidated his plans to take over the Strip: Trump “can only spew this fanatical bullshit because of bipartisan support in Congress for funding genocide.”
U.S. complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians does not stop in Gaza. In recent weeks, anticipating Trump’s official recognition of Israel’s illegal annexation of the West Bank, Israel has forcibly expelled the residents of three refugee camps in the occupied West Bank — Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams — as it gears up to escalate its military operations in the area. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz declared the camps “empty” and ready to be occupied by the Israeli military, which has deployed a tank division to the area, while vowing that Israel will not allow displaced Palestinians to return to the cleared camps. The operation has resulted in the forced displacement of 40,000 Palestinians. This is ethnic cleansing in broad daylight, funded and abetted by Western democracies. To cite Jeremy Corybn, “For the first time in over 20 years, Israel has deployed tanks in the West Bank, after expelling 40,000 Palestinians from refugee camps. This is a prelude to full annexation, and makes a mockery of the ceasefire agreement that Israel continues to violate. We are witnessing ethnic cleansing — and our government’s ongoing failure to defend international law is utterly, utterly shameful.”
The U.S. and Israel share a history of ethnic cleansing. Trump’s plans for Gaza echoes the forced displacement of Native Americans, via the Indian Removal Act, which is widely described by historians as ethnic cleansing, or genocide. U.S. founders and politicians invoked similar justifications for the genocide of Native Americans — always in the name of “civilization.” Thomas Jefferson declared that the “barbarities” of the Native Americans “justified extermination.” A century later, President Theodore Roosevelt said that “extermination was as ultimately beneficial [to Native Americans] as it was inevitable.” Following in U.S. footsteps, SS chief Heinrich Himmler, the principal overseer of Nazi Germany’s genocidal pogroms, declared: “It is the curse of greatness that it must step over dead bodies to create new life.”
Aware of this shared history, North American Indigenous scholars see a common struggle against settler colonialism. An October 2023 Gaza solidarity letter, signed by over 1,100 North American Indigenous scholars, workers, students and activists, demanded: “Stop the genocide. End the siege. End the occupation. Dismantle apartheid. Decolonize Palestine.” The letter added: “The … horrific violence in Gaza resulted from 75 years of Israeli settler colonial dispossession, 56 years of military occupation, and 16 years of an open-air prison for 2.2 million people, half of whom are children. The atrocities of the Israeli apartheid regime in Palestine are relentless, illegal under international law, and consistent with settler-colonial projects globally.”
We must understand Trump’s real estate imperialism, or what anti-colonial scholars term “violent dispossession,” within the framework of Israel’s resettlement plans in Gaza. To cite historian Patrick Wolfe, author of Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native: “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Or as Theodor Herzl, founding father of Zionism, put it: “If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct.” Israel’s razing of Gaza is inextricably linked to those settler-colonial ambitions envisioned by Zionist founders and now echoed by Trump’s depiction of Gaza as a “demolition site.” It’s hard to think of a worse case of premeditated ethnic cleansing.
Trump’s genocidal plan for Gaza is also inexorably linked to white supremacy. It has all the imprints of what anticolonial historians term the “White Man’s Burden syndrome.” In 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands,” which has ever since served as a hymn to U.S. imperialism. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become president, copied the poem with avid interest and sent it to his friend, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, commenting that it was “rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view.” The poem is a metaphor for the civilizing mission that portrays colonialism as a benevolent enterprise, bringing the “light” of “civilization” to “primitive” Indigenous people, and urging the U.S. to take up the “burden” of empire, following in the footsteps of Great Britain and other European nations. Here we can’t help but notice the overt meaning in the lyrics of Trump’s AI-generated video: “Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light.”
It’s hard to fathom Trump’s genocidal musings on Gaza without harking back to Kipling’s poem. While Trump’s poetic skills can be described as shaky at best, he seems to follow quite closely Kipling’s urge to “Take up the White Man’s burden — Send forth the best ye breed, Go send your sons to exile, To serve your captives’ need … To seek another’s profit, And work another’s gain … And reap his old reward.” And while Trump has probably never heard of (let alone read) Kipling, his dehumanizing view of Palestinians eerily evokes the writer’s depiction of Indigenous inhabitants as “half devil and half child,” where the “benevolent” Western colonizer, Trump — the self-declared emperor of our era — is urged to “wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild — Your new-caught, sullen peoples.”
We must resist ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism everywhere we can. As the Indigenous solidarity letter, referring to U.S. genocidal complicity in Palestine, concluded: “Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and occupation are only possible because of international support. The settler states that dispossess and occupy our lands support Israel in dispossessing and occupying Palestine. We see and feel the strength of Palestinian families in the face of the quotidian violence of the Israeli apartheid regime.”
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