President Trump’s outrageous suggestion that the United States annex Gaza and remove the Palestinian people from the territory would be blatantly illegal, constituting a crime against humanity.

President Trump yesterday proposed seizing Gaza, leveling its remaining buildings, clearing debris, and removing its entire population in order to make way for the development of a “Riviera of the Middle East.” He is advocating territorial imperialism, mass deportation, and ethnic cleansing.

Trump is channeling his admiration for President Andrew Jackson’s removal of Amerindians during the early nineteenth century and his love of real estate development into a criminal foreign policy for the twenty-first century. However, an enormous body of international law has developed over the past century and a half that challenges his criminal enterprise.

Trump’s proposed actions would clearly violate international law in multiple ways.

The New York Times reports that “President Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza, transfer its population to Egypt and Jordan and redevelop it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ would unquestionably be a severe violation of international law, experts say.”

“Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity. The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime.”

“The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists forcible population transfers as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. And if the displacement is focused on a particular group based on their ethnic, religious or national identity, then it is also persecution — an additional crime. (Because Palestine is a party to the International Criminal Court, the court has jurisdiction over those crimes if they take place within Gaza, even if they are committed by citizens of the United States, which is not a member of the court.) …

“Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, said in a statement that forcing Gazans to leave would be a crime: ‘The scale of such an undertaking, the level of coercion and force required, hence the gravity, make this a straightforward crime against humanity.’

“It would be a further, severe violation for the United States to permanently take over the territory of Gaza. …”

I teach courses on HIST 384 War in History since 1500, HIST 399 Civil Wars, and HIST 610 Religious Violence in Global Perspective at Northern Illinois University. Each of these courses considers cases of massacre, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. Ethnic identities, racial ideologies, religious politics, and nationalist programs can all fuel mass violence.

Historians arguably need to work more closely with international lawyers on the problem of violence in order to address issues of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Historical examples from pre-modern periods may be useful in considering forms of mass violence and criminality that are not analogous to the twentieth-century examples that tend to dominate case studies in international law.

There is a massive body of historical and legal literature on ethnic cleansing, mass deportation, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. I have long bibliographies to support each of my undergraduate courses and graduate seminars. I will just signal two collective volumes as starting points on these issues:

Schabas, William A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to International Criminal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Heller, Kevin Jon, et al, eds. The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides definitions of the elements of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The New York Times reports on the illegality of President Trump’s proposed Gaza annexation and removal of Palestinians. Peter Baker assesses reactions to the proposed annexation at The New York Times. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports on U.S. allies’ rejections of Trump’s outrageous proposal.