Trump's green light to Israel re: Gaza diminishment

The pattern extends itself

I’ve been pretty clear from the start that Israel’s strategy re: Hamas is less one of actually disabling the group and more one of diminishing Gaza as a threat vector — sort of a denying-the-player-the-playing-field approach.

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Now we’re in the supposed ceasefire time period (to include its mirror-image version involving Hezbollah in the north), where both sides (Hamas and Israel) are eager to signal continued dominance of the Strip. For Israel, the pause was mandated by Trump’s signaling of his impending return to the White House and his demand that Hamas needed to return all hostages or there’d be hell to pay.

As far as Trump is concerned, he’s got his immediate “win” and now all he needs do is wait on Hamas to commit the right nefarious act and Israel, once the hostages and/or remains are all turned over, can go back far more overtly to very aggressively executing its diminishment strategy’s new capabilities: security buffers, security corridors, layered sensoring, AI targeting systems — the full-up package designed to make Hamas almost scared to show its face in public across the Strip lest it invite immediate strikes.

So, basically, Gaza-the-open-prison becomes Gaza-the-free-targeting-zone.

Understand, this solution-set has been in the works within Israel for years — not unlike the incredible and years-long effort involved in that pager attack.

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TIME: Israel built an ‘AI factory’ for war. It unleashed it in Gaza. Years before the Gaza war, Israel transformed its intelligence unit into an AI testing ground, triggering a debate among top commanders about whether humans were sufficiently in the loop.

WIKIPEDIA: AI-assisted targeting in the Gaza Strip

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Yeah, it’s such a going concern that it already has its own Wikipedia page.

I would expect Israel to pursue this new show-of-force with immense vigor, eager to push Hamas into desperate retaliations that would justify ratcheting up the entire package to that much more indiscriminate pain — the ultimate goal being to render Gaza essentially unlivable.

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TIME: How Israel Uses AI in Gaza—And What It Might Mean for the Future of Warfare

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“During the period in which I served in the target room [between 2010 and 2015], you needed a team of around 20 intelligence officers to work for around 250 days to gather something between 200 to 250 targets,” Tal Mimran, a lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former legal adviser in the IDF, tells TIME. “Today, the AI will do that in a week.”

Experts on the laws of war, already alarmed by the emergence of AI in military settings, say they are concerned that its use in Gaza, as well as in Ukraine, may be establishing dangerous new norms that could become permanent if not challenged.

The partner package to that strategy is necessarily to encourage the further emptying out of Gaza and the dissuasion of returnees — the latter dynamic being accommodated for now, I imagine, primarily because there needs to unfold this period where returnees find the environment unbearable, complain and agitate along those lines, pushing Hamas into desperate action, which permits Israel’s further ratcheting up and so on and so forth.

The IDF makes little effort to hide the collateral damage inherent in this approach. From the TIME piece:

A program known as “The Gospel” generates suggestions for buildings and structures militants may be operating in. “Lavender” is programmed to identify suspected members of Hamas and other armed groups for assassination, from commanders all the way down to foot soldiers. “Where’s Daddy?” reportedly follows their movements by tracking their phones in order to target them—often to their homes, where their presence is regarded as confirmation of their identity. The air strike that follows might kill everyone in the target's family, if not everyone in the apartment building.

Pretty explicit, yes? “Where’s Daddy” invariably places him at home, with wife and kids. So, the signaling is undeniable: If you’re in Hamas in Gaza, you will put your entire family at risk of death because … eventually, our AI will get around to finding you.

The more Gaza is emptied in this coercive fashion, the thinner the targeting pool and thus more effective the AI-directed killing.

You have to believe that Israel has made all this plain and clear to Trump, who, with some logic, now signals that America is recognizing the hopelessness and pointlessness of there being any Palestinians in Gaza over time, ultimately signaling our acceptance of the Strip’s eradication.

The historical irony here will be extremely unpleasant — the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland in 1943 will ultimately be invoked. It won’t be historically accurate, because Israel just wants the Palestinians gone (ethnic cleansing, by definition, and NOT genocide), and yet, the outraged headlines will write themselves, as will the historical analogies.

But that’s what Hamas bought with the biggest massacre of Jews (7 October 2023) since the Holocaust: it triggered the reflexive “never again” justification for maximum response by Israel, and unleashed a ton of pent-up right-wing settler demand within its political system — a dynamic Netanyahu, whether he ultimately sought this or not, HAD to submit to in order to stay in office and avoid jail.

And you just know that Trump has respect for that uber-realist logic.

What Trump is doing now can be described as Netanyahu’s bidding: floating the cleaning-out scenario favored by the right-wing parties within Israel who see the only solution being an internal colonization of the Strip by Israeli’s settlers in the manner long pursued across the West Bank. For now, it is “outrageous” and receives all manner of astonished blowback from pretty much everyone in the region, but that’s predictable enough. But make no mistake, the green light has been given by the Trump Administration.

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WSJ: Trump’s ‘Clean Out’ Gaza Proposal Stuns All Sides, Scrambles Middle East Diplomacy

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Besides normalizing the concept over time, the threat provides a certain freedom of action within which deals can be cut across the board (if you do this, we’ll do that). Trump, if anything, is very Nixonian in seeking to wedge such US freedom of action into what have long been straight-jacketed situations (that was the whole point of going to China in 1972).

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WAPO: Trump says to ‘clean out’ Gaza, urges Arab countries to take more refugees; President Donald Trump said he wanted Jordan and Egypt to take in more Palestinians from Gaza so they could “maybe live in peace” there.

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So, yeah, two long-time allies have been put on notice regarding our continued aid flows, part of a larger signaling by Trump’s State Department freeze on all assistance globally — save Egypt and Israel, of course. As for Jordan, which gets more than a billion USD each year from State … well, signal received, one imagines, just like it was recently by Colombia’s president.

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NYT: Colombia Agrees to Accept Deportation Flights After Trump Threatens Tariffs; The country’s leader, Gustavo Petro, backed down after a clash with President Trump, which started when Mr. Petro turned back U.S. military planes carrying deportees.

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Nasty alright, but it would seem also highly effective — for now.

From an AP story, the signaling could not be more explicit:

“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, we just clean out that whole thing.”

Trump said he complimented Jordan for having successfully accepted Palestinian refugees and that he told the king, “I’d love for you to take on more, cause I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess. It’s a real mess.”

Such a drastic displacement of people would openly contradict Palestinian identity and deep connection to Gaza. Still, Trump said the part of the world that encompasses Gaza, has “had many, many conflicts” over centuries. He said resettling “could be temporary or long term.”

“Something has to happen,” Trump said. “But it’s literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything’s demolished, and people are dying there.” He added: “So, I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations, and build housing in a different location, where they can maybe live in peace for a change.”

Gaza the experiment has failed, Trump is saying, while insinuating that the indirectly forced relocation of Palestinians to both Jordan and Egypt is something Trump — the President in a hurry — deserves … if the two states want to keep receiving US aid.

So, it’s basically Trump playing Patton in that traffic jam scene from the movie.

Patton comes upon a total snafu (situation normal, all fucked up) and has no time for the bickering among subordinates, so he takes matters into his hands and starts telling everybody where they need to go to fix this mess.