On Monday’s The ReidOut show, MSNBC political analyst Peter Beinart declared that he hopes President Donald Trump is tried for war crimes at The Hague in response to the President recommending that Gaza’s population be relocated to neighboring Arab countries. He went on to label the suggestion “monstrous,” “depraved,” and “racist.”
Host Joy Reid began the segment by showing images of Palestinians walking back to their homes in northern Gaza in the aftermath of the war, and set up an audio clip of Trump pushing for Egypt and Jordan to take in the Palestinians from Gaza. After bringing aboard Beinart as her guest and touting his new book on Gaza, Reid began by fretting: “I was stunned by the Associated Press reporting of the quote that we just heard Donald Trump saying in sound. And they did not use the word ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Associated Press report, but what he described is ethnic cleansing, right?”
Beinart was quick to muse about the possibility of a kangaroo court in The Hague putting Trump on trial as the left-wing critic of Israel responded:
Absolutely. I’m glad it’s on tape so that, you know, hopefully, one day Donald Trump is before the Hague on some kind of international criminal tribunal, this can be played. This is going to be one of the great acts of — one of the great war crimes — one of the great human rights abuses of our time. And the logic is so insane and depraved, right? Gaza has been destroyed with American weapons, right?
He pushed for the U.S. to stop supplying weapons to Israel and even seemed to endorse the “Right of Return” demanded by Palestinian Arabs that would allow millions to move into Israel where their parents and grandparents fled from in 1948:
And rather than say that maybe we should stop sending those weapons — that we should rebuild Gaza — that we should look at the basic reality that Palestinians lack human freedom or instead of saying that maybe Palestinians, if they have to leave Gaza, should be able to go back to the places they’re from because most of their families were expelled from Israel; his solution after the United States has helped Israel lay waste to Gaza, is that those people should be forced to leave and never allowed to return.
Even though Egypt is about 45 times as large as Israel, Israel is the country where Beinart thinks Palestinian Arabs should be allowed to resettle where they would no doubt continue to destabilize the only free country in the Middle East.
As Reid followed up, she read quotes from a couple of prominent right-wing Israelis who voiced support for President Trump’s suggestion, and then commented: “So the two people who the ICC views as potentially war criminals or at least supporting it — they love this idea.”
Beinart further tore into Republicans as he responded: “This is utterly monstrous, utterly depraved, and just a sign of how profoundly racist and dehumanizing the American public discourse, especially in the Republican party, is about Palestinians, as if they’re not human beings who are deserving of equal dignity to all of the rest of them.”
He ended up discussing his recent article, “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do,” by pushing for Israel to be “re-imagined” to include the Palestinians in Gaza and presumably those in the West Bank as well:
So if states fail radically at protecting human life, then states should be reformed — re-imagined to do a better job, right? That’s what happened to Apartheid South Africa. That’s what many of us would like to happen with Iran. There are many, many states that we would like to be re-imagined so they treat their people better. So when people always say Israel has a right to exist, what they’re not — what they’re essentially saying is its right to exist trumps the right to exist of all of the people under its control, half of whom are Palestinians, that inverts actually the way Jewish tradition thinks about what fundamentally matters.
Transcript follows:
MSNBC’s The ReidOut
January 27, 2025
7:54 p.m. Eastern
JOY REID: As the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas enters its second week, new video shows the remarkable scenes in Gaza today as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians begin returning home to what’s left of northern Gaza for the first time in 15 months, but it comes as, over the weekend, Donald Trump suggested moving more than a million Palestinians out of Gaza and into neighboring countries to, quote, “clean out” the Gaza Strip.
AUDIO OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people. I mean, you’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing.
REID: Joining me now is Peter Beinart, editor at large of Jewish Currents, MSNBC political analyst, and author of the new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: Reckoning, which comes out tomorrow. And I look forward to reading your book, Peter. I was stunned by the Associated Press reporting of the quote that we just heard Donald Trump saying in sound. And they did not use the word “ethnic cleansing” in the Associated Press report, but what he described is ethnic cleansing, right?
PETER BEINART, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR: Absolutely. I’m glad it’s on tape so that, you know, hopefully, one day Donald Trump is before the Hague on some kind of international criminal tribunal, this can be played. This is going to be one of the great acts of one of the great war crimes — one of the great human rights abuses of our time. And the logic is so insane and depraved, right? Gaza has been destroyed with American weapons, right? And rather than say that maybe we should stop sending those weapons — that we should rebuild Gaza — that we should look at the basic reality that Palestinians lack human freedom or instead of saying that maybe Palestinians, if they have to leave Gaza, should be able to go back to the places they’re from because most of their families were expelled from Israel; his solution after the United States has helped Israel lay waste to Gaza, is that those people should be forced to leave and never allowed to return.
REID: Yeah. And this is as his son-in-law last year in 2024 talked about Gaza being great beachfront property, and he’s also holding two billion dollars worth of Saudi money if he wanted to become a real estate developer. Let me quote — I will note, to your point that you just made, Peter, Donald Trump — the other thing that he did is he lifted the pause on 2,000-pound bombs. Biden only let them get the 1,700 -pound bombs. He had lifted — he had banned the 2,000-pound ones. He also ordered a halt to virtually all foreign aid except Israel and Egypt. So that’s for those who voted for Trump as the preferable candidate for Palestinian freedom.
Here is the reaction of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir: (reading from an NBCNews.com article) “While the Israeli prime minister’s office has yet to respond to NBC News’ request for comment regarding Trump’s remarks, the President’s sentiments were welcomed by ultranationalist Palestinians, including” the aforementioned Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.”
“Smotrich called the idea of finding new homes for Gaza residents ‘wonderful’, telling Israeli broadcaster Channel 12 on Sunday that ‘only out-of-the-box thinking and new solutions will bring peace and security.’ Ben-Gvir also congratulated Trump on the initiative in a post on X.”
So the two people who the ICC views as potentially war criminals or at least supporting it — they love this idea.
BEINART: Right, and there was actually reporting from early — not long after October 7 — that Benjamin Netanyahu himself was trying to get Egypt to open the border so that there would be a mass forcing of Palestinians out of Gaza, and they would not be allowed to return. I mean, Israel has never allowed Palestinian refugees who were expelled to return. So there’s no reason to believe they would allow them to now, right? This is utterly monstrous, utterly depraved, and just a sign of how profoundly racist and dehumanizing the American public discourse, especially in the Republican party, is about Palestinians, as if they’re not human beings who are deserving of equal dignity to all of the rest of them.
REID: Yeah. You wrote a piece — I want to change courses just a little bit — you wrote a piece, and I actually watched the video of you discussing it on your Substack. And it’s a controversial title because it gets to a thing that people always talk about, and you wrote: “States Don’t Have a Right to Exist. People Do.” Because a question that people will come right back to if anyone criticizes the Israeli government — no matter what they do — is, “Does Israel have a right to exist?” And you say that states do not. Please explain.
BEINART: In Jewish tradition, we believe that only human beings are created in the image of God and have infinite value. States are merely an instrument. They are mechanisms for the protection of human life. So if states fail radically at protecting human life, then states should be reformed — re-imagined to do a better job, right? That’s what happened to Apartheid South Africa. That’s what many of us would like to happen with Iran. There are many, many states that we would like to be re-imagined so they treat their people better. So when people always say Israel has a right to exist, what they’re not — what they’re essentially saying is its right to exist trumps the right to exist of all of the people under its control, half of whom are Palestinians, that inverts actually the way Jewish tradition thinks about what fundamentally matters.
