Who will show Trump and Netanyahu that they're not above the law? It has to be Europe | Steve Crawshaw

Donald Trump’s proposal to evict 2 million Palestinians from Gaza is an unashamed declaration of support for ethnic cleansing. As so often, he seems ready to ignore moral and legal codes alike. “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” is listed in the Rome statute of the international criminal court as a crime against humanity. And yet a US president has put that idea on the table. Trump insists this would be in everybody’s interest. According to him, Palestinians would not want to return to their homes. “I have heard that Gaza has been very unlucky for them,” he recently said. The population is, in Trump’s words, “living in hell”, with “death and destruction and rubble and demolished buildings falling all over”. He made no mention of Israel’s responsibility for that death and destruction and rubble.

More than 30 years ago, during the early months of the bloody Bosnian war that I had been reporting on as the eastern Europe editor of the Independent, the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić, explained to me that the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population that was then under way was, in fact, doing the Bosnians a favour. “We let them go,” Karadžić explained with a smile, “with their luggage and everything.” Like Karadžić, Trump does not hide the fact that Palestinians who are forced to abandon their homes would have no choice in the matter. Sitting next to Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump suggested: “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”

In 2019, Israeli election posters boasted of Netanyahu’s friendship with Trump, showing pictures of the two smiling men together. The Israeli prime minister praised the US president for “the kind of thinking that will reshape the Middle East and bring peace”. Netanyahu’s own perspectives on peace are questionable. Only two months ago, a panel of judges at the international criminal court unanimously confirmed a request made six months before that by the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, for the issue of an arrest warrant for Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity, in connection with murder, starvation and intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population. (Khan also requested indictments against Hamas leaders, for the brutal and lawless attacks of 7 October.)

Trump is not alone in rolling out the red carpet for someone wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes. Trump’s old friend Kim Jong-un last year defied the court by proudly welcoming Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang. But Trump takes his loathing of justice to another level. The US president wants to impose sanctions on the ICC in order to prevent it from doing its job in “balancing the scales” of justice; his ultimate goal appears to be to weaken or destroy the court itself.

Trump talked of Gaza as a “Riviera of the Middle East”, thus building on his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s earlier musings about the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property”. A Baedeker travel guide published in 1943 on the Nazi-occupied territories of eastern Europe boasted that some of the most attractive towns and cities in the region were now judenfrei, “Jew-free”. The “very valuable” Gaza real estate that gets Trump and his son-in-law so excited (and for which architectural sketches have even been prepared) – would presumably be “Palestinian-free”.

The sanest voices in Israel decry such madness – most obviously on behalf of the Palestinians, but also on behalf of Israel’s own future peace and stability. As Yasmin Levy summarised in Haaretz: “Trump’s Gaza fantasy sends Israeli rightwing pundits into rapturous delirium.” Trump’s proposals are obviously unreal, not least since he has no workable suggestion for where 2 million Palestinians should be transferred. And yet, even the discussion of such inhuman and lawless ideas only piles on the instability in the region.

Netanyahu is the problem, not the solution, even if Trump refuses to acknowledge this. But it is not just Trump who has reacted with indignation on Netanyahu’s behalf. European governments, despite being co-founders of the ICC, have been reluctant to accept their obligation to arrest Netanyahu if he sets foot on European soil. European governments seem more eager to placate the dangerous bully than to confront him. It shouldn’t be left to smaller parties such as Britain’s opposition Liberal Democrats to describe the proposals as dangerous. While the latest statements by Trump are deranged, they can’t be ignored. Fudged language becomes impossible if a leading ally proposes, endorses or commits serious crimes.

• Steve Crawshaw is author of Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice

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