By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“We’ll own it,” President Donald Trump announced at a news conference this week, speaking about Gaza, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House.

Trump’s stunning declaration, that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” was not off the cuff, but read from prepared notes. Palestinians who live there would have to leave, Trump said, seemingly unconcerned that he was proposing ethnic cleansing on a massive scale, in clear violation of international law.

“Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land,” he continued. “I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so–this could be so magnificent.”

Trump’s son-in-law and former White House advisor Jared Kushner, also a real estate developer, made similar comments a year ago, at a Harvard panel on the Middle East. Kushner said, “Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable.”

President Trump foreshadowed this week’s proposal while speaking to the press aboard Air Force One on January 25th: “I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people. You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, we just clean out that whole thing.”

While hard-right Israelis are thrilled with Trump’s proposed ethnic cleansing, Arab governments were quick to reject it. Saudi Arabia released a statement saying it “will continue its relentless efforts to establish an independent Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as its capital, and will not establish diplomatic relations with Israel without that.” Egypt and Jordan also flatly rejected the plan, at least for now. Trump has invited King Abdullah of Jordan to visit Washington in the next few weeks, and just this week the Pentagon has approved a $300 million weapons sale to Egypt.

Perhaps most adamant are the Palestinians in Gaza themselves. More than 75 years after the Nakba, when many Palestinians were driven from their homes into Gaza, and for more than a half-century, since 1967, of direct Israeli occupation, siege and its repeated assaults, Palestinians in Gaza still demand control of their land. Standing before a mountain of rubble in Khan Younis, a young Palestinian named Yasser Safi said,

“We got out of wreckage, destruction and a war of attrition, a genocide, in which we don’t know when death will come to us from all directions. But we stayed, held on and remained until the last breath. This president Donald Trump comes to us with a new method to displace us from our country where we are rooted. This is our land. We will not get out of it… Here, we set up a tent on the rubble.”

It is unclear if Trump really means to perpetrate this crime, or is simply deploying the “madman theory.” That was a negotiating tactic used by President Richard Nixon during the Vietnam war, in an attempt to convince the North Vietnamese that he might in fact be so crazy as to use nuclear weapons, thus forcing them to a peace settlement. It didn’t work for Nixon, and it has scant chance of working for Trump.

But many who worked in Trump’s first administration have warned, we should take Trump at his word. He might very well try to drive two million Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Desert, or to Jordan, to “clean out” Gaza to build the “magnificent” “Riviera” he imagines (and that he, no doubt, would personally profit from as well).

Trump’s zealous lawbreaking is now on full display domestically, in his unprecedented assault on the very structures of the U.S. government, ordering mass retaliatory firings, shutdowns of entire departments, orchestrating an abhorrent attack on trans people, and more.

Another president who had profoundly more experience with and insight into the Israel-Palestine conflict than Trump was Jimmy Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, establishing peace between Israel and Egypt. In his 2006 book, “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid,” Carter wrote, of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians,

“Utilizing their political and military dominance, they are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories. The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa— not racism, but the acquisition of land.”

President Carter, who died at 100 on December 29th, took enormous heat in 2006 for using the word “apartheid” in reference to Israel, but never backed down. Twenty years later, Israel is widely condemned as an apartheid state.

With Trump in the White House, Israel no doubt sees a rare opportunity to grab the entire Gaza Strip. It will take a mass movement, global in scale, to stop this crime before it happens.