Glenn reacts to Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse and take over Gaza in a special episode of System Update, originally livestreamed on Wednesday afternoon. ------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Good evening, everybody. | |
| This is Glenn Greenwald. | |
| Welcome to a special episode of System Update that is live. | |
| And the reason we wanted to do this is because we talked last night on our show about how President Trump had proposed a rather remarkable, extraordinary, stunning plan, to put that mildly, | |
| for And we'll get to that number, which is very strange in just a moment. | |
| Cleaned it all up. | |
| Rebuild it into something beautiful and then basically allow some of them back in but have it be for the region. | |
| And we talked about the reasons why that kind of population transfer, forcible population transfer, the people of Gaza have made extremely clear they have no intention of leaving. | |
| They don't trust the United States or Israel that just destroyed their society. | |
| To say, oh, just leave for a couple of years and you'll be allowed back. | |
| Obviously, they were expelled from... | |
| But it was really only after that press conference with That press briefing with Prime Minister Netanyahu, did President Trump give another press conference in which he revealed the most significant part of this plan. | |
| And he didn't just speak off the cuff. | |
| He was reading from a prepared statement, which meant that it was actually a policy that people in the White House had concocted and created, which was not for Israel to go in and govern Gaza, as many Israelis, including Netanyahu's government, want to do, but that the United States... | |
| Would go in and, as he put it, would own Gaza, would rebuild Gaza, would turn it into whatever he envisions it having, a bunch of beachfront casinos and hotels and golf courses and who knows what else. | |
| And when he was asked, well, the people of Gaza are saying that they refuse to leave and the Arab countries in the region are saying they will absolutely never accept such a solution. | |
| He basically said, well, I think they will leave because who would want to stay there? | |
| And if they don't, they're going to have to, meaning we're going to go make them. | |
| And he very clearly alluded to the fact that the United States government is going to go there. | |
| We're going to clear out the rubble. | |
| We're going to disarm the ordinances, the ordinance that is there. | |
| We're going to get rid of the buildings that are precarious because Israel has destroyed it all with the United States and the Biden administration funding and arming it. | |
| And so obviously if... | |
| The Gazans aren't going to voluntarily leave, which they're not. | |
| Then the question is going to become, well, who's going to make them? | |
| How are they going to leave? | |
| Who's going to force them to leave? | |
| And President Trump was making very clearly that he would. | |
| He would do what's necessary to make them leave. | |
| So the plan is essentially, two weeks into the Trump administration, not to focus on Ohio or Michigan or jobs and inflation. | |
| Although, obviously, there are things being done about that. | |
| But now, somehow, the United States government, the Trump administration, is going to assume responsibility for Gaza, wants to clear the entire population out of Gaza, to ethnically cleanse Gaza of the Arabs, and remove, forcibly transfer the population of Gaza out of Gaza, Gaza so that we can then go in, clean it all up, rid it of the rubble, and rebuild a society there because it used to be there, but it has now been destroyed over the past 15 months. | |
| That is quite a remarkable deviation from the America first foreign policy ideology that President Trump has long advocated on which he ran in his campaign. | |
| It is certainly a deviation from the idea that we have to remove ourselves from entanglements in the Middle East. | |
| He specifically heaped scorn on the idea of Regime change or nation building, which is exactly what he was describing last night. | |
| And you already see a lot of Republicans like Mike Johnson, who, for religious reasons, is a stark and stalwart supporter of not just Israel, but a greater Israel, as they call it, which is not just the internationally recognized borders of Israel, but having the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel, as well as members of Congress like Nancy Mace, who is trying to prove that she is the most loyal Trump supporter, saying things like, We're ready for a Mar-a-Lago in Gaza. | |
| So I want to analyze these events because of how obviously significant they are, without capitulating to hysteria or melodrama, but at the same time underscoring the seriousness, not only of the plan itself, which, as we've seen with Trump, may not happen because he often offers plans that are part of a negotiating strategy, but even the discussion of this. | |
| Can have a lot of serious implications. | |
| And the whole idea of the Trump negotiating strategy is when you say things you're going to do or threaten things when you're going to do as a negotiating strategy, if you don't get what you want, then of course you have to follow through and do them because if you don't, that negotiating strategy will never have any credibility anymore. | |
| If you say, either you give us X, Y, and Z, or we're going to do A, B, and C, and you don't get X, Y, and Z, and you don't do A, B, and C, no one's going to trust your... | |
| Negotiating strategy any longer because you've proven essentially that it's a bluff. | |
| So setting up this plan where we're saying that we would go do this, we would take over responsibility and ownership of God so we would clean it all out, we would forcibly remove the people who are there, all of them, so we can rebuild it and make it nice for us. | |
| He calls it the people in the region. | |
| Just the plan itself is already causing reverberations in the Muslim world. | |
| So let's talk about a few parts of this. | |
| First of all, I... The Trump negotiating strategy is something that we do have to start with because we have seen in the past that he says things all the time and then doesn't follow through on them precisely because they're only intended as negotiating leverage. | |
| He talked about imposing a 25% tariff on both. | |
| Canada and Mexico didn't just talk about it but implemented it. | |
| People went ballistic. | |
| And now it turns out that he ended up not doing it in part because He got some concessions. | |
| You can question how many concessions he really got, whether those are actual concessions or not. | |
| Excuse me for one second. | |
| I'm just going to-- But that is clearly part of the Trump negotiating strategy that makes the live a little bit real, is to say that he's going to do things. | |
| So the fact that he's saying he wants to go into Gaza, own Gaza, clear it all out, rebuild it. | |
| Forcibly remove the population doesn't in fact mean that's going to happen. | |
| So I do want to concede that point. | |
| Nonetheless, the whole purpose when a politician floats an idea of this kind is to allow people to respond. | |
| And if you think it's a terrible idea, and I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons I've let out last night, but even a worse idea that I know the details of this plan. | |
| And when I say a bad idea, I mean strategically, pragmatically, ethically. | |
| Morally, legally, to try and go into the Middle East and turn it all over. | |
| After all the failures we've had with our Middle East engagements, with our attempts at nation building, the whole point is that when a politician says something like this, this is the time to speak up, not when they're already going to do it, but now, so that the administration understands that there's a lot of people who are opposed to it. | |
| Seeing a lot of really disturbing things from Trump supporters along the lines of, look, if he says something, you just trust him to know best. | |
| He clearly has some kind of 10-dimensional chess plan going on. | |
| No, that's not the way democracy works. | |
| The president's not a father figure. | |
| He's not a deity figure. | |
| You don't trust in him that he knows best. | |
| You make yourself heard. | |
| Especially when what is being proposed is such a radical deviation from what was promised. | |
| Now, the entire plan depends upon somebody going in and paying for the renovations and for the rejuvenation of Gaza, even if he can get those people out. | |
| And he's clearly thinking that the people who are supposed to do this are the very wealthy people in that region. | |
| He even said, Lord knows there's a ton of major money in the Middle East, which there is because of oil. | |
| And it's in the hands primarily of the Gulf state tyrants, the dictators who are our allies because we have those dictators there to prevent popular will from being expressed. | |
| Those countries being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Jordan and Qatar. | |
| That's where all that money is that Trump is very enamored of. | |
| He loves the Saudis. | |
| He loves the Emiratis. | |
| His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has done a lot of deals. | |
| In those regions because there's so much money there. | |
| And Trump obviously is thinking that it's their responsibility to come in and pay for the rebuilding of Gaza. | |
| The problem is, is that the entire Trump plan rests on the assumption that the people of Gaza don't care about that land. | |
| That it's sort of like, oh, you know, if you live in Ohio or Wisconsin and you look around and you say, you know what, it's too cold here. | |
| I'm getting older. | |
| I don't really like the conditions here any longer. | |
| It's not conducive to my quality of life. | |
| I'm just going to move to Florida and Arizona. | |
| Look, they have great developments there. | |
| They have new golf courses, nice homes. | |
| I'm like, I'm just going to move there. | |
| What's the difference? | |
| I don't care about Ohio or Wisconsin. | |
| I don't have roots there. | |
| I'm happy to live in... | |
| That's not the way people who are Palestinians think, nor is it the way that Israeli Jews think. | |
| The reason the conflict has been so intractable for 70 years now... | |
| And a lot longer before that, but really 70 years since the formation of the State of Israel, is because the Israeli Jews have become convinced that they have a sacred religious right to the land, and the Palestinians believe the same thing. | |
| This land is holy in both Judaism and Islam, as well as in Christianity. | |
| The Palestinians have endured so much, years and years, decades of bombing campaigns and starvation efforts, and There's blockades and occupations with the backing of the most powerful country in the planet, and they've never left. | |
| They've never been driven out. | |
| This was a plan by Joe Biden as well. | |
| This is not something Donald Trump invented. | |
| Joe Biden tried to pressure the Egyptians into accepting quote-unquote refugees temporarily from Gaza to give them a safe quarter to leave Gaza, and the Egyptians understood very well what that plan was really about, which was taking the land away from the Palestinians, and they knew that No one in Gaza was going to voluntarily leave their homes. | |
| And especially if the plan is not just go there for until the bombing ends, but go there for two or five or seven years, which is what they're saying is the timeframe to clear out the rubble, to detonate the unstable and unstructurally compromised buildings. | |
| Nobody in Gaza, not nobody, but virtually nobody is going to give up that land to Donald Trump, knowing that he has Miri Madelson and Bill Ackman and Jared Kushner. | |
| People who are in bed with the Israelis, who, in the case of Mary Maddelson, isn't Israeli. | |
| It's basically turning over the land to Israel. | |
| If the Gazans were willing to do that, they would have done that a long time ago. | |
| They're never going to do that. | |
| The only way this plan would work is if somebody's willing to go in and wage a war against Hamas, against Gaza. | |
| We just watched the idea for 15 months with zero terms of engagement, with zero limits, trying to destroy the population and drive them out, and it failed. | |
| They all marched back to their homes triumphantly the minute that ceasefire was announced. | |
| You'd think that it's going to be easy to go in and drive out 1.8 million people? | |
| And if you're an American, is that a war that you're willing to send yourself or your children or your family members to go fight? | |
| You want to go fight a war in the Middle East for Israel again? | |
| This time to secure their biggest dream of removing ethnically cleansing Gaza and or the West Bank of all Arabs so that Israel can then have the Laban's realm at once? | |
| Or that Trump can turn it into some kind of Dubai 2.0? | |
| It's never going to happen. | |
| You're talking about a major war. | |
| There's no possibility that that could happen without, and that's what Trump is proposing. | |
| Now, Trump is saying that the only way this plan can work, obviously, is if the gods have some place to go. | |
| And the place he wants them to go is Egypt and Jordan. | |
| The problem is that the Egyptian and Jordanian governments are dictatorships. | |
| Who care a lot about their unstable population. | |
| We just saw an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak, get overthrown in 2011 by a very restive population. | |
| That can obviously happen to General Sisi as well. | |
| And King Abdullah in Jordan has a major population of Palestinians already in his country. | |
| And the population is not going to tolerate watching, with their cooperation, the United States and Israel ethnically cleansing Gaza. | |
| So they're saying we're not going to take any refugees, but Trump's point is we give Egypt a ton of money. | |
| We give Jordan a ton of money. | |
| Without that money that we give them, those regimes would collapse. | |
| We give them that money to keep the peace with Israel. | |
| And I think he thinks he has leverage to force the Egyptians and Jordanians to accept the Gazans. | |
| But again, even if they do and they're adamant that they won't, how do you get the Gazans to voluntarily leave, even if their society has been reduced to rubble? | |
| And then you have the issue of these other countries. | |
| Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and Bahrain and Qatar and Jordan. | |
| Trump's vision for normalization and stability in the Middle East, the one that he pursued in his first term and wants to expand in his second, is to facilitate normalization between all those countries in Israel. | |
| Isolate Iran, eventually do a deal with Iran so they don't get nuclear weapons. | |
| He talked about that today. | |
| And then have a stable, peaceful Middle East. | |
| That's part of what his legacy is. | |
| He wants in his mind that he wants it to be. | |
| The problem is, is that the governments that I just named have been vehement, adamant from the beginning. | |
| Not that they're willing to negotiate, but that they absolutely will not consider any attempt to normalize relations with Israel, which Donald Trump says is in the interest of United States, unless the Palestinians first have a fair outcome, their own state, basically. | |
| And it's not because these... | |
| Dictators and tyrants love the Palestinians or care about the Palestinians. | |
| Maybe some do, but it's not that. | |
| Even tyrants have to worry about their own populations, no matter how repressive they are. | |
| We've seen some of the most repressive tyrants in history be overthrown when the population gets too angry, feel like they're being too disregarded. | |
| If the population of Saudi Arabia or Jordan or even Lebanon watch these countries cooperate with the forced ethnic cleansing... | |
| And population transfer of Gazas out of Gaza so that Israel and the United States could work together to own it and take it over or even hand it over to the Saudis to run like Saudi Arabia. | |
| As part of normalization, the populations of that country would never tolerate that there would be a conflagration and uprising throughout the Middle East, which is why even Trump's mere mention of a plan like this, even if he doesn't intend to follow through on it. | |
| Can be so destabilizing and so dangerous. | |
| But the fact that we are now so quickly at the point where you see Republican lawmakers willing to endorse a plan that very easily could entail a new war in the Middle East, either fought by the United States, fought by Israel, fought by Arab allies of the United States and Israel, meaning we would pay for that, we would arm it again. | |
| And Republicans are right on board is extremely alarming to this whole notion that Republicans are also on board with the idea that we don't need any more foreign entanglements, we shouldn't be involved in nation building. | |
| As always, there's a gigantic Israel exception to so many right-wing conservative principles, including free speech, as we've gone over many times. | |
| Obviously not for all conservatives or everyone on the right, but certainly for a disturbingly large number of people that we're seeing yet again play out here. | |
| Collective punishment. | |
| Population transfers, ethnic cleansing, these are all horrific war crimes that are barred by basic morality, by ethics, and if you care about it, by international law. | |
| And there's no question that's what Trump is promising. | |
| The other bizarre aspect of what we're seeing is that for 15 months under the Biden administration, reporters would question the State Department, question the White House, and would say, We're providing arms, all the arms, and we're paying for the Israelis to engage in a war of indiscriminate destruction against Gaza. | |
| They're destroying everything. | |
| They're carpet bombing it. | |
| They're flattening Gaza. | |
| And the U.S. government was saying, no, they're not. | |
| They're being very, very discriminating. | |
| They're being very targeted. | |
| They're only bombing where Hamas is. | |
| This isn't carpet bombing. | |
| This isn't the complete destruction of Gaza. | |
| They're being humanitarian about it. | |
| This is the world's most moral army. | |
| Now that the ceasefire is in effect, and Trump deserves a lot of credit for that ceasefire, given him credit for that ceasefire, he also deserves credit for seemingly pressuring that nyahut to maintain it and to move to the second stage, which is part of Trump's overall plan. | |
| Now we're hearing the U.S. government say the opposite. | |
| Oh, look, the reason we need to transfer the Gazans out of Gaza is because Israel has completely destroyed the entire society. | |
| It's apocalyptic. | |
| Everything is rubble. | |
| There's no civilian infrastructure left. | |
| There's no sewage. | |
| There's no water. | |
| There's disease. | |
| Nobody can live like this. | |
| This is what the world was saying for the 15 months that Joe Biden was overseeing this war when the State Department and the Biden administration was denying this was happening, as were the Israelis. | |
| Now suddenly the ceasefire has taken place and the Trump administration wants to justify the forcible transfer of all the people out of Gaza. | |
| Suddenly now the truth is being acknowledged that Israel flattened all of Gaza and made it uninhabitable, which was always the plan. | |
| To drive those people out so that Israel can take over Gaza. | |
| Is any of this that Trump is talking about in the interest of the people who voted for him, of the American worker, of the American economy, of all the things that we were told was going to be the focus of Trump's presidency if he won? | |
| Of course not. | |
| This is serving Miriam Edelson and Bill Ackman and all the neocons who are celebrating. | |
| Because this is Israel's wet dream, along with getting the United States to bomb Iran. | |
| This is Israel's wet dream, having the United States remove all the Arabs and ethnically cleanse Gaza. | |
| The Israelis tried it and failed. | |
| And out of frustration, reduced all of Gaza to rubble. | |
| The other thing that I want to note, and this is something that has happened several times now, so it's worth noting it's not just a mistake off the cuff. | |
| Pre-October 7, the population of Gaza was... | |
| Universally estimated to be 2.1, 2.2, or 2.3 million people. | |
| Definitely in excess of 2 million people. | |
| Every time Trump talks about the population of Gaza, he now talks about it as being 1.8 million. | |
| He says we need to move all of those people out of Gaza, all 1.8 million. | |
| And he said it several times, that figure. | |
| Clearly that's the figure he was given. | |
| We're talking about a difference there of 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 people between the pre-war population of Gaza and the number that Donald Trump is giving of the number of Arabs who now live inside Gaza. | |
| Remember, these are Muslims and Christians. | |
| So I think that deserves a lot of explanation as well. | |
| I have no doubt that the official death numbers... | |
| That we've been given for Gaza are vastly lower than the reality. | |
| There are huge numbers of people buried under the rubble that have never been discovered. | |
| There are people who are missing. | |
| There are people who died as a result of this war because of food deprivations or medication deprivations, to say nothing of the people who were just blown up and shot and killed who never were accounted for. | |
| So you have this big discrepancy in terms of the numbers that were given for the pre-war Gazan population and also the current population. | |
| But to me, the bigger question is, is the MAGA movement going to sacrifice every one of its values, every one of the agenda items it said it believed, every one of the changes to foreign policy it said it was going to implement, at the altar of yet again serving Israel? | |
| Of making sure Israel can expand. | |
| Trump just said in the press conference that Israel is too small. | |
| It's a very small country. | |
| When asked whether or not he would endorse its annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, this would be a policy strictly to serve Israel. | |
| On some level, it is also ironic because evangelicals in the United States who have even greater devotion to Israel than many Jewish Zionists Their religious belief is that Israel has to be united under the control of the Jews in order for the Messiah to return. | |
| Not that it gets divided and Gaza is controlled by Jared Kushner and Mary Madel sent in a bunch of hedge funds that turn it into casinos. | |
| This is supposed to be a holy land that unites under the Jews, and that's the precondition for the Messiah returning. | |
| And also that's what Israel wants, too. | |
| Israel wants to control these lands. | |
| It wants it to be greater Israel, not have Donald Trump and the United States own it, as Donald Trump put it. | |
| But I just find it quite disturbing that parts of the Trump movement seem to be willing to go along with anything, no matter how contradictory it is to the ideology and the policies that they had been led to believe they were going to support. | |
| They deserve credit. | |
| We saw in the case of the H-1B visa, which we covered, that the Trump administration stood up and said, no, we're not about expanding H-1B visas. | |
| We don't want to replace the American worker with foreigners. | |
| We want to do the opposite. | |
| And there was a... | |
| Huge debate and conflict within the model movement over that. | |
| This is exactly the same thing. | |
| I mean, Trump since 2015 has been rallying against the idiocy and dangers of involving ourselves in nation building and engagements in the Middle East overseas, how disastrous that has been, and now he turns around and proposes something like this, that not only has that dimension, but also this massively criminal dimension that would absolutely entail violence and the use of military force. | |
| There has been some walkback today of this by some Trump administration officials going to the press. | |
| But if you looked at the briefing by the White House press secretary, she was repeatedly asked, is Donald Trump proposing that military force be part of the plan if the Palestinians, as they've all said repeatedly, won't leave voluntarily and peacefully? | |
| And she said President Trump's not ruling out military. | |
| She said President Trump has not endorsed military force yet. | |
| Now, again, I get that's the negotiating strategy of Trump. | |
| He keeps every option on the table because it gives him more leverage, etc. | |
| But it's hard to know what he's even negotiating for here, because at the end of the day, even if he wants the Arab state dictators to go in and do this job and not have the United States do it, it's still going to require somebody to go in and forcibly remove the Gazans, which is central to Trump's plan. | |
| And there's no way that can be done short of war. | |
| And that is absolutely something Trump is proposing. | |
| That would be horrific in countless ways, exactly what the United States does not need, another war to serve this foreign country in Tel Aviv, this foreign government in Tel Aviv and their interests. | |
| And it would be a catastrophe of humanitarianism on an indescribable scale. | |
| So I think this doesn't deserve hysteria. | |
| I don't think this deserves the kind of falling apart and unraveling that so often Trump's statements do because they're not intended to necessarily... | |
| Predict what will happen. | |
| But it absolutely deserves a lot of opposition. | |
| So the Trump administration knows that nobody's going to tolerate more Middle East engagements, more wars, more nation building, not even for the United States' interests to be served, but for the state of Israel's to be served. | |
| And that is exactly what's happening here. | |
| All right. | |
| So we're going to have this commentary. | |
| I wanted to respond quickly. | |
| I watched that press briefing today. | |
| I've seen this unfold today. | |
| I thought it deserved a lot of commentary and analysis and reaction and dissection because it's really Trump's first. | |
| War that he's been overtly threatening. | |
| I mean, he alluded to military force in Panama, but not a plan this explicit. | |
| I think it's very important to make clear as much as possible that Americans don't want these kind of wars. | |
| They don't want to send their kids to these kind of wars. | |
| They don't want to pay for these kinds of wars and that we've done enough to serve the interests of Israel at the expense of the United States. | |
| And something like this would be in an entirely different universe that makes it utterly unacceptable. | |
| So that's going to be the... | |
| In lieu of the live show tonight, we decided to go live early with it just so that we could respond. | |
| And we appreciate your watching. | |
| We will see you back on the Rumble channel hopefully tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern live exclusively on Rumble at our regular time. |