More than 100 organizations in the U.S. have condemned President Donald Trump over his plan to take control of war-torn Gaza and permanently expel Palestinians who have called the territory home for generations.
The diverse array of organizations signed on to a letter released Monday by A New Policy and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, accusing the Trump administration of promoting what the international community qualifies as ethnic cleansing. The signatories range from faith-based groups, to foreign policy and national security organizations, and political advocacy groups.
“Forcible displacement, when carried out with an intent to permanently remove a people from a land on the basis of their identity is ethnic cleansing,” the letter stated, citing Article 49(1) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which the U.S. and Israel are both parties to.
Since taking office last month, Trump has regularly commented on what Gaza’s future should look like now that Israel and Hamas have agreed to a ceasefire ― a fragile deal that comes after the Israeli military spent 15 months destroying Gaza and its people, in what human rights groups, United Nations experts and even a U.S. federal judge have found to have met the qualifications of genocide.
“Palestine is not just an idea – it is a place. It is a homeland to the Palestinian people,” the letter read, including concern over Israel’s ongoing attacks in the occupied West Bank. “To participate in, facilitate, or endorse their removal from it would violate every precept of international law, devastate the rules-based international order that protects us all, do irreversible harm to America’s global influence, and be an act of unconscionable immorality.”
Ahead of the letter’s release, HuffPost spoke exclusively with leaders of the two groups that authored it.
The president has repeatedly said that Palestinians should be removed from Gaza because the territory is currently uninhabitable, declining to acknowledge that the reason for its current state is because the U.S. supported Israel financially and diplomatically in its military campaign.
“We have to recognize, first of all, the massive hypocrisy in saying that Gaza is unlivable, and therefore the Palestinians cannot live there, when it is U.S. weapons and Israel’s actions that made it unlivable in the first place ― in the case of Israel’s actions, at least, with an intent of doing so,” said Josh Paul, co-founder of A New Policy who resigned from the Biden administration over its Gaza policy.
Last week, Trump said that the U.S. should take ownership of Gaza and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” In a startling interview to air Monday with Fox News host Bret Baier, the president admitted that Palestinians would not have a right to return to their homeland under his plan.
“The right to return is a fundamental human right enshrined in international law. No president, no foreign leader, no occupying force has the legal authority to strip Palestinians from their right to exist in their own land. We all have to reject this vision and demand justice for the Palestinian people,” said Tariq Habash, A New Policy’s co-founder who was the first Palestinian American to resign from the Biden administration over its Gaza policy.
Despite Trump having the support of his far-right allies, including in Israel, the letter’s authors are holding on to hope that he may listen to those within his circle and among his voters who oppose his plan to permanently remove Palestinians from Gaza.
“If he decides to move forward on this path, notwithstanding those voices, I think that there will certainly be opportunities for litigation and for public protests and for congressional action and all these sort of things,” Paul said.
The letter also expressed support with several Arab countries that released their own joint statement opposing Trump’s proposed plan, which included making countries like Jordan and Egypt take in the Palestinians he’s forcibly exiled. The president’s comments on the right to return came one day before the White House hosts Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
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“The suffering of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the U.S.’s unconditional support for Israel throughout is harmful ― not only to millions of Palestinians, but also to Americans, to Israelis, to Arabs throughout the region, to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike,” said FCNL’s Odeliya Matter.
The several signatories representing different faiths point “toward this kind of unity as those who sanctify human life, that this proposal made by Trump is absolutely unacceptable and in defiance of our faiths as American citizens,” she continued. “And I think we’ve all agreed that the notion of a holy land cannot be abused on the backs of millions of innocent people.”