Well, I guess members of the Isareli government have repeated their intentions to permanently occupy and ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians enough times that even American corporate media has to care; the Guardian however is doing a much better job of honestly acknowledging what Israel's latest plan for Gaza ultimately means.

On the heels of the Netanyahu government's plan to displace the population of Gaza and consolidate territorial control over the occupied region, Finance Minister Smotrich said the quiet part out loud - Gaza will be completely destroyed, and Palestinians will (be forced to, presumably) "leave in great numbers for other countries" - essentially as refugees from a genocide the colonizer world refuses to acknowledge; but we can't expect Smotrich to admit that part too.

Israel's finance minister Bezalel Smotrich

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/06/hamas-israel-hunger-war-in-gaza

Gaza will be entirely destroyed, Israeli minister says

"An Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”, raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory.

The declaration on Tuesday by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came a day after Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan for Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which an Israeli official said would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”.

The Israeli threats to seize control of the territory permanently has stirred global outrage.

“We strongly oppose the expansion of Israel’s operations,” the UK’s Middle East minister, Hamish Falconer, said. “Any attempt to annex land in Gaza would be unacceptable.”

The disturbing part here is that Smotrich's horrifying, genocidal statement is really only "news" because Pig Empire media is objectively pro-genocide and has caught a case of intentional amnesia about Israel's now-nineteen month long campaign to wipe out the Palestinian people in Gaza. Israeli ministers have been talking about emptying Gaza of Palestinians for months, the goddamn President of the United States has openly mused about turning the entire area into beachfront condos built by American companies, and as we speak Israel is actively engineering a famine in Gaza by blockading food and medical supplies into the occupied region.

Ethnic cleansing is just a more polite term for genocide, and even if you're too ignorant to understand that, International Courts have already ruled that Israel is plausibly committing a genocide in Gaza, and warrants have been issued for the arrest of Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Taken as a whole, the actions and statements of the Israeli government, both before and after it broke the ceasefire, have always indicated that their plan was to permanently occupy and "ethnically cleanse" Gaza; it is only through willfully complicit ignorance that clearly pro-genocide mainstream media outlets have refused to properly contextualize news from Gaza through the lens of Israel's obvious and openly articulated intentions to complete the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

Unfortunately for the cowards, collaborators, and profiteers in our mainstream establishment however, the combination of Israel's announced Operation Gideon’s Chariots offensive, and Smotrich's crude, gleeful bluntness, have made it more or less impossible to pretend we don't know what the Netanyahu government is doing; even if that same mainstream establishment is still struggling to admit there can't be any good reasons to conduct "ethnic cleansing" regardless of their political alliances and personal racisms.

So given that everything else about the Trump regime's plot to traffic over 250 migrants to a forever torture prison in El Salvador without due process under the guise of fighting an "invasion" by a "narco-terrorist" gang turned out to be a lie, illegal, or straight up fascist fuckery, would it surprise you at all to learn that US intelligence agencies do *not* think Tren de Aragua is working with the government of Venezuela to invade the United States? Yeah, me neither; but the fact that the Trump regime knowingly just made up the so-called "invasion" fundamentally undercuts their entire argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which in turn means they have no legal basis whatsoever for all the fascist repression and unconstitutional criminality they've engaged in here.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-venezuelan-gangs

'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador

"A memo released Monday by the Trump administration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with President Donald Trump's claim in March that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua—an assertion that was used to justify sending hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

The document said that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."

As in several previous cases it's important to understand that the regime's lies and illegal manipulations of US law are being exposed by their own internal memos; this isn't a political attack or about motivated reasoning because the Trump administration itself wrote down that they knew Trump was lying, or at least that US intelligence didn't agree with his assessment of Tren de Aragua as an arm of the Venezuelan government. The regime tries to cover that up with vague nonsense about FBI intelligence but one of these groups is paid to monitor the activities of foreign governments the US is actively sanctioning, and one of them gets paid to convince unstable people they're secretly in ISIS to justify an ongoing counterterrorism program that's worth billions of dollars in funding; so I'll let you decide for yourself which of these two groups is more likely to know what they're talking about here. In other words, folks arguing that Trump was governing by fascist conspiracy theory and the regime literally made up a fake war to do white nationalist mass deportations, were completely, and totally correct; full stop.

"So you mean kidnapping folks off the streets and sending them to a foreign gulag was not justified by our own intelligence?" said the Arkansas Justice Project. "They just made shit up to dog whistle their base. The AEA argument was never legitimate and they knew it all along."

Frankly I do understand the temptation to scoff "so, what; we already knew that" in response to this news. But I need folks to realize that while it may have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the regime literally made up a whole invasion to justify their fascist mass deportation theater operation, the entire US establishment has more or less been pretending that it's somehow *possible* Trump is right about Tren de Aragua working for Venezuela to undermine American national security. As the article notes, until very recently not one judge has questioned the underlying logic of Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act or its debunked claims that Tren de Argua is an arm of the Venezuelan government. While the regime has received a modicum more pushback in the media, without direct confirmation that Trump is definitely (instead of just obviously) lying, news outlets have been reluctant to push back when the regime claims they're fighting a narco-terrorist invasion to justify their fascist repression and criminality. Will that change now that we've caught the regime lying through their own memos? Who knows, but it probably won't hurt.

The big picture analysis here is that Trump hacked the imperial presidency and an American war machine already in largely bipartisan agreement that Venezuela represents an "enemy" of the United States, to do his fascist mass depuration schemes. The machine couldn't, or didn't want to see that Trump was obviously lying, because lying about Venezuela and portraying Nicolás Maduro as a international supervillain is already such a normalized part of American foreign policy that pushing back on Trump would undermine the American imperial project. With the declassification of this memo however, the fig leaf has been shredded and the US establishment is going to have choose between imperialism and preventing a fascist takeover in America.