With the logic of a real estate agent, US President Donald Trump has called on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to move to nearby Egypt or Jordan because they have no future in their own country. There will be constant war and killing here, he told Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was convicted of genocide by the Hague Tribunal, sitting next to him in the Oval Office. And it would all make sense if people were "rootless trees" so they could so easily move to newly built settlements far from their homeland. Trump's simple entrepreneurial logic does not think in terms of "history", "tradition", "emotion", "identity" and cannot understand that Palestinians want to return to the ruins and rebuild their lives where they were born and where their ancestors lived for centuries. And that newly built settlements bathed in sunlight, where they will live in peace in a foreign land, cannot replace their homeland.

Moreover, Trump's proposal is not acceptable to the surrounding Arab states that gathered in a meeting to make it clear. But it is acceptable to Israel.

It has never happened that an American president so easily supported a policy of "ethnic cleansing", but in the case of Israel, anything is possible. The strange alliance between the two countries refutes even the thesis that I often repeat, that states are guided by their own interests because, viewed in this way, the interest vis-à-vis the numerous countries of the Arab world is far greater than that towards the small Jewish state. However, research shows that the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington has a decisive influence on the formulation of American foreign policy, hence the strong support.

The satisfaction on Netanyahu's face at yesterday's (February 4) press conference at the White House could not be hidden. The far-right in his already extreme government, those who claim the land of Palestine from records dating back a thousand years before Christ, and not from actual relations on the ground, will be very pleased. America stood behind their brutal policy of mass killing of Palestinians in order to "clear" the land for new Jewish settlers.

If Trump's formula for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not known until now, it is now clear: support for the policy of "ethnic cleansing". But such a policy seems unworkable. The Israeli government wants to kill or expel about 6 million Palestinians in the name of the idea of ​​a Greater Israel, to which about 6 million Jews would expand. Well, they received approval for such a plan from the new American president, and not for a Palestinian state that would exist alongside the Jewish one, the determination of the UN and most of the world.

The term "ethnic cleansing" that sounds so "sanitary" is a hideous bloody policy of killing people from an ethnic community in order to conquer their territory. It came into mass use during the wars in Yugoslavia. The intervention of America and its European allies was to put an end to such a policy. They succeeded in some things, and in some things they did not. They failed in preventing the creation of a homogeneous Serbian territory in Bosnia, but they did not allow further fragmentation through its annexation to the Republic of Serbia. What will happen in the Balkans after this decision by Trump to support Netanyahu's policy? Some will rightly say that even after 35 years of attempts to build trust between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, the old hatreds have not disappeared and that there are no European solutions to Balkan problems. If Trump comes to the Balkans and makes us realize how much money has been wasted on an "unachievable" goal, woe to us. Woe to us if he says: Balkan solutions to Balkan problems! Finger to the head, supporters of Trump's policies.

Libertas

(The author is a professor and the first minister of foreign affairs)

THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH THEY ARE WRITTEN, AS WELL AS THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THE COLUMNS, DO NOT ALWAYS REFLECT THE EDITORIAL POLICY OF "FREE PRESS"