Resisting Trump’s Riviera of the Middle East

by Kathy Kelly
Pax Christi USA 1998 Teacher of Peace

A version of this article first appeared on the website of the Progressive magazine.

“There is something sick and rotten about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.” –Pankaj Mishra, January 30, 2025

At a February 4 press conference, President Donald Trump stood alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the UN-backed International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant. Trump stated his intent to turn the Gaza Strip into what he called “The Riviera of the Middle East.”  

“We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal,” Trump said as he announced that the US would “take over” the Gaza Strip. Reading from prepared notes, Trump stated, “We’ll own it.” He claimed that under this plan, Palestinians in Gaza would be relocated to other countries, and dismissed the notion that they would ever want to return. The president went on to say that he would make a decision about a potential plan to allow Israeli annexation of the West Bank within the next month. 

According to international law, forcibly transferring people from their land is a crime against humanity. In addition, annexation would violate Palestinians’ right to self-determination, a fundamental principle of international law. 

Nations around the world harshly condemned Trump’s total disregard for international law. But every member state of the United Nations General Assembly must now act to fulfill its duty under international law by abstaining from any actions enabling the Israeli military to continue its illegal occupation of Palestine.

This means every state must stop shipments of weapons to Israel. The United States, for instance, is required to halt the shipment of the billion dollars’ worth of bombs, rifles, ammunition, and Caterpillar bulldozers that Trump has readied to send Israel.    

Over the past year and a half, Congressional Democrats allowed President Biden to provision Israel with massive arms sales, including an $18 billion arms sale in June 2024, enabling Israel’s 16-month-long killing spree against Palestinians.

Pankaj Mishra, an Indian essayist and novelist,  describes the bleak reality of international weapon peddling in his new book, The World After Gaza. “There is something sick and rotten,” Mishra writes, “about states and societies that not only support and enable mass killings but also make money off of them.”

Throughout the world, grassroots groups are campaigning to uphold international laws and to resist governments that support the wholesale Israeli slaughter and destruction of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestine Territory.

Since 2003, Irish activists have protested the use of Shannon Airport for military purposes, since Ireland is a neutral country. Beginning in the summer of 2024, protesters held weekly demonstrations insisting that the government of Ireland not allow use of Shannon Airport for the  transport of weapons or equipment to Israel’s military. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which organized a protest at Shannon Airport on February 9, is demanding the Irish government stop “the use of Irish airspace to deliver arms, tech and logistical support to the genocidal, apartheid state of Israel.” 

The International Federation for Human Rights has pointed out that the European Union is Israel’s biggest trade partner, accounting in 2022 for 29 percent of trade in goods. Israel is also among the European Union’s main trading partners in the Mediterranean region. 

A coalition of over 160 human rights organizations, trade unions, and civil society groups called on the European Commission to immediately ban all trade and business with Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. The coalition’s demand follows the landmark advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in July 2024, which stated that, “Pending an end to Israel’s occupation, third states must immediately stop all forms of aid or assistance that help maintain the unlawful occupation, including halting arms transfers to Israel and ceasing all trade with illegal settlements.”

Robert Jereski, an attorney in NYC, works with Code Pink and a coalition of activists campaigning for UN member states to suspend Israel from the United Nations due to its murder and dispossession of Palestinians. Jereski says via email that, despite the January ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, Israel’s renewed offensives in the West Bank mark a shift in its genocidal tactics rather than an actual ceasefire. 

Israel’s bombing of Jenin has led to the forced displacement of 26,000 Palestinians. The Israeli military has escalated widespread arrests and restrictions while settlement expansion continues at an unprecedented pace, with frequent approvals for new outposts and housing. 

President Trump’s most recent statements, coupled with his withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, underscore the urgent need for the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to hold an emergency meeting. The UNGA should judge whether the United States has failed as an impartial arbiter and is, instead, party to the genocide in Gaza. Further, the UNGA can decide whether to suspend the US’s veto power in the UN Security Council on matters pertaining to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

As Pankaj Mishra has observed, there is something sick and rotten in the act of enabling and profiting from mass killings. The UN member states must fulfill their obligations under international law and live up to the UN’s founding mission: to eradicate the scourge of war for future generations.

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Kathy Kelly (Kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is board president of World BEYOND War and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal.

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