By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, USA |13 September 2025 (IDN) — Israel has announced its intention to forcibly drive from one to two million people from their homes in Gaza city to make room for Israeli settlements, military bases, or glitzy casinos, or whatever else comes to mind. Besides being inhumane, it amounts to insanity.
First, no such operation has been performed in the recent annals of warfare since the barbaric Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh of more than two million people in 1975. Stalingrad in WW II does not compare since the city lost half its population of 800,000 before the battle began. Second, it’s not so much warfare as persecution, because—if anybody has noticed—the affected people in Gaza are not warriors but unarmed civilians. On its face, the plan is mad.
Perhaps worst of all, this bald-faced notion that even the Nazis would have been ashamed to admit publicly is a blatant slap in the face of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. Genocide is the supreme international crime. Article 3 categorises Genocide as “Conspiracy,” “Incitement,” “Attempt to commit,” and “Complicity.”
It also says that the forcible transfer of children constitutes Genocide. And what does the White House and State Department of the world’s leading democracy say to condemn such plans? Nothing, which is tantamount to endorsement. It is undoubtedly a conspiracy and complicity, if not collusion.
President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have long supported an inchoate transfer plan in Gaza, now announced by the Israeli military to begin soon. Among the planners of this crazy idea is the infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, run by a coalition of Israelis and Americans.
Since March of this year, according to the UN and a host of NGOs, the GHF has shot and killed over 2,000 unarmed young men who were merely trying to get food for their families.
What kind of crazy world is this, when, for no discernible purpose after 23 months of devastating attacks, largely affecting civilian women and children of Gaza, such a population transfer plan is announced without a whimper of opposition from the White House in Washington? Instead, the US government supports it.
People in Gaza may be willing to move elsewhere if they have a reasonable hope for their future. If you know anything about the Palestinians as individuals and as a group, they want dignity most of all, even more than life. They would rather die than trust the tender mercies of the genocidal joint American-Israeli Plan for their future.
The idea that a few gentlemen half a world away, sitting in suits and ties around a table, should decide the fate of millions of unfortunate people living in tents and bombed-out ruins is repugnant to humane civilisational values.
That’s how the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, a century or more ago, got us into this mess. May God help the unfortunate, suffering Palestinians in Gaza. And may God help us all when world leaders who could rescue the perishing failure even to try to do so.
*James E. Jennings, PhD, is a former Professor of Middle East History and Founder of Conscience International. He is a longtime supporter of Palestinian human and political rights and the leader of the US Academics for Peace programs in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan and elsewhere. [IDN-InDepthNews]
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