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On February 9, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his army would advance into Rafah, the last remaining city in Gaza not occupied by the Israelis. Most of the 2.3 million Palestinians who live in Gaza had fled to its southern border with Egypt after being told by the Israelis on October 13, 2023, that the north had to be abandoned and that the south would be a “safe zone.”

As the Palestinians from the north, particularly from Gaza City, began their march south – often on foot – they were attacked by Israeli forces, who gave them no safe passage. The Israelis said that anything south of Wadi Gaza, which divides the narrow strip, would be safe, but then as the Palestinians moved into Deir-al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, they found the Israeli jets following them and the Israeli troops coming after them.

Now, Netanyahu has said his forces will enter Rafah to combat Hamas. On February 11, Netanyahu told NBC News that Israel would provide “safe passage for the civilian population” and that there would be no “catastrophe.”

Catastrophe

The use of the word “catastrophe” is significant. This is the accepted English translation of the Arabic nakba, used since 1948 to describe the forced removal that year of half of the Palestinian population from their homes.

Netanyahu’s use of the term comes after high officials of the Israeli government have already spoken of a “Gaza Nakba” or a “Second Nakba.” These phrases formed part of South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on December 29, 2023, alleging that they are part of the “expressions of genocidal intent against the Palestinian people by Israeli state officials.”

A month later, the ICJ said there was “plausible” evidence of genocide being conducted in Gaza, highlighting the words of the Israelis officials. One official, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, said, “I have released all restraints” (quoted both by the South African complaint and in the ICJ’s order).

Netanyahu saying there would be no “catastrophe” after more than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and after 2 million of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced is puzzling.

Since the ICJ’s order, the Israeli army has killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians. The Israeli army has already begun to assault Rafah, a city with a population density now at 22,000 people per square kilometer.

In response to the Israeli announcement that it would enter Rafah city, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), one of the few groups operating in the southern part of Gaza, said such an invasion “could collapse the humanitarian response.”

The NRC assessed nine of the shelters in Rafah, which are housing 27,400 civilians, and found that the residents have no drinking water. Because the shelters are operating at 150% capacity, hundreds of Palestinians are living on the street.

In each of the areas that the NRC studied, they found the Palestinian refugees in the grip of hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, diarrhea, smallpox, lice and influenza. Because of the collapse of this humanitarian response from the NRC, and from the United Nations – whose agency UNRWA has lost its funding and is under attack by the Israelis – the situation will deteriorate further.

Safe passage

Netanyahu says his government will provide “safe passage” to the Palestinians. These words have been heard by the Palestinians since mid-October when they were told to keep going south to prevent being killed by the Israeli bombing. Nobody believes anything that Netanyahu says.

A Palestinian health worker, Saleem, told me that he cannot imagine any place of safety within Gaza. He came to Rafah’s al-Zohour neighborhood from Khan Younis, walking with his family, desperate to get out of the range of the Israeli guns.

“Where do we go now?” he asks me. “We cannot enter Egypt. The border is closed. So we cannot go south. We cannot go into Israel, because that is impossible. Are we to go north, back to Khan Younis and Gaza City?”

Saleem remembers that when he arrived in al-Zohour, the Israelis targeted the home of Dr Omar Mohammed Harb, killing 22 Palestinians (among them five children). The house was flattened.

The name of Dr Omar Mohammed Harb stayed with me because I recalled that two years ago his daughter Abeer was to be married to Ismail Abdel-Hameed Dweik. An Israeli air strike on the Shouhada refugee camp killed Ismail. Abeer was killed in the strike on her father’s house, which had been a refuge for those fleeing from the north. Saleem moved into that area of Rafah. Now he is unsettled. “Where to go?” he asks.

Domicide

On January 29, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Dr Balakrishnan Rajagopal, wrote a strong essay in The New York Times called “Domicide: the Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity.” Accompanying his article was a photo essay by Yaqeen Baker, whose house was destroyed in Jabalia (northern Gaza) by Israeli bombardment.

“The destruction of homes in Gaza,” Baker wrote, “has become commonplace, and so has the sentiment, ‘The important thing is that you’re safe – everything else can be replaced.’”

That is an assessment shared across Gaza among those who are still alive. But as Rajagopal says, the scale of the destruction of housing in Gaza should not be taken for granted. It is a form of “domicide,” a crime against humanity.

The Israeli attack on Gaza, Rajagopal writes, is “far worse than what we saw in Dresden and Rotterdam during World War II, where about 25,000 homes were destroyed in each city.”

In Gaza, he says, more than 70,000 housing units have been totally destroyed, and 290,000 partially damaged. In these three months of Israeli fire, he notes, “a shocking 60-70% of structures in Gaza, and up to 84% of structures in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed.”

Because of this domicide, there is no place for the Palestinians in Rafah to go if they head north. Their homes have been destroyed.

“This crushing of Gaza as a place,” reflects Rajagopal, “erases the past, present, and future of many Palestinians.” This statement by Rajagopal is a recognition of the unfolding genocide in Gaza.

As I speak with Saleem, the sound of the Israeli advance can be heard in the distance. “I don’t know when we can speak next,” he says. “I don’t know where I will be.”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, which provided this article to Asia Times. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

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Someone has to talk Donald Trump down off the ledge. 

In a February 12 Fox News interview, the once and maybe future president was asked if he really wanted to slap a 60% tariff on imports from China. “No, I would say maybe it’s going to be more than that,” Trump answered.

Of course, it won’t happen. The US can’t put a 60% tariff on imports from China, any more than Trump can fly off the Trump Tower roof. The consequences of trying either stunt, though, would be similar.

When Ronald Reagan was president, imports of capital goods came to about one-tenth of total US spending on business equipment. By 2023, imports had risen to a jaw-dropping 63% of all US spending on business equipment. The US imports more capital goods than consumer goods.

China is no longer America’s biggest source of imports. Mexico is now in first place, mainly because it imports Chinese components, assembles them, and ships them to the US. But the US imports vast amounts of capital goods from China: the circuit boards that run everything from tow trucks to toasters, electric generating and switching equipment for utilities, industrial turbines and, of course, raw materials hard to source elsewhere, like rare earth metals – you name it. 

Trump wants the US to shrink its trade deficit, which has widened steadily for the past thirty years. Eventually, it will have to; the US sells its assets to foreigners to make up the difference in what it earns and pays in commerce, and it has run up a net foreign investment position of nearly $20 trillion.

But the shock treatment he proposes would push American businesses off a cliff. A huge tariff on Chinese goods wouldn’t prompt American businesses to invest and produce the same goods at home. Before American firms could produce anything, they would have to buy capital goods, which mainly come from imports, especially from China. Other countries could make up some of the difference, but China accounts for a third of the world’s manufacturing production, and there aren’t enough resources outside China to compensate.

Not only civilian business, but the US defense industry would crater as well. As the Financial Times reported on June 19, 2023: Greg Hayes, chief executive of Raytheon, said the company had “several thousand suppliers in China and decoupling … is impossible.”

“We can de-risk but not decouple,” Hayes told the Financial Times in an interview, adding that he believed this to be the case “for everybody.”

“Think about the $500bn of trade that goes from China to the US every year. More than 95 percent of rare earth materials or metals come from or are processed in China. There is no alternative,” said Hayes. “If we had to pull out of China, it would take us many, many years to re-establish that capability either domestically or in other friendly countries.”

After the 2000-2001 recession, American business discovered “capital light” investing. We made expensive software while Asia made the low-margin hardware – first Japan, then South Korea and Taiwan and then China. 

Our capital stock of manufacturing equipment hasn’t grown since 2001, according to Federal Reserve estimates. We’re about $1 trillion short in capital equipment investment at current prices compared with the long-term trend. That’s five years’ worth of total investment in capital equipment at current rates.

Rebuilding American manufacturing would take years with the strongest encouragement by the US government. It couldn’t be done without imports, because the US capital goods industry is hollowed out and American manufacturers depend on imports. That’s a matter of arithmetic. Trump is right to say that the US economy is sick, but his cure would kill the patient.

Restoring American manufacturing, as I wrote in a short book published by the Claremont Institute, requires big changes in the tax code, environmental regulation, worker training and federal support for high-tech R&D. It requires selective subsidies. With an all-in effort, the US could make a big dent in its import dependency in five years. It can be done, but not the way Trump proposes to do it.

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