Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

US President Donald Trump’s declaration to remove the Palestinians from Gaza reveals the two truths. First, history repeats itself, but in doing so, it does in farcical ways. Second, whatever shred of rules-based order that was imposed by the United States on international politics is effectively dead.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Karl Marx elegantly opens by stating” “Hegel remarked somewhere that all great world historic facts in person just appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” In the case of Trump’s desire to expel the Palestinians from Gaza, his declaration is the culmination of a nearly eighty-year assault on the Palestinians.

Israel was forged out of the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. In 1947 the United Nations partitioned Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas. Israel was formed out of the Jewish territory. But between the partition and the 1948 war, around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from their homes. Over........

© CounterPunch