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apartheid
Smotrich Proposes Annexing Gaza and Carrying Out Trump Ethnic Cleansing Plan
The far-right Israeli finance minister's remarks follow comments last week in which he said: "Whoever doesn't evacuate, don't let them. No water, no electricity; they can die of hunger or surrender."
Aug 28, 2025
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday proposed the systematic annexation of Gaza over the coming months if Hamas keeps fighting, as well as the implementation of US President Donald Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian enclave.
Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, announced his plan to "win in Gaza by the end of the year" during a press conference in Jerusalem.
Israel "must completely hold control of the entire strip, forever," he said.
The minister explained that "an ultimatum will be presented to Hamas between two options," surrendering, disarming, and returning all hostages kidnapped during the October 7, 2023 attack, or "gradual annexation of areas of the Gaza Strip and reduction of the enemy's territory, and implementation of the Trump plan for voluntary emigration of the strip's residents."
"Voluntary emigration" is widely viewed as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given most Palestinians' unwillingness to voluntarily abandon their homeland. Most Gazans are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
Smotrich also called for a tightening of the siege on Gaza—which has caused the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians—in order to "starve and dehydrate Hamas fighters to death."
The minister's remarks followed comments last week in which he said that "whoever doesn't evacuate, don't let them. No water, no electricity; they can die of hunger or surrender. This is what we want."
Earlier this year, Smotrich said: "We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed. On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
Last month, the Israeli Knesset hosted an annexation conference at which Smotrich declared that "we will occupy Gaza and make it an inseparable part of Israel."
Smotrich's annexation plan comes as the Israel Defense Forces carries out Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer and occupy Gaza and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians. Trump said earlier this year that he wants to transform Gaza into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
Some critics, including the Israeli jurist Itay Epshtain, said Smotrich's comments will surely be noticed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)—which is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel—and International Criminal Court (ICC), which last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder and forced starvation.
The ICC has also reportedly prepared arrest warrants for Smotrich and Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for the crime of apartheid related to their Trump-backed plans to expand illegal settler colonies in the West Bank and annex the occupied territory.
Last year, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion that Israel's occupation of Palestine is an illegal form of apartheid that must end as soon as possible.
Over the past 693 days, Israeli forces have killed at least 63,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. However, experts say the actual death toll is likely much higher. More than 158,600 Palestinians have been wounded, and thousands more are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. A growing famine engineered by Israel has claimed at least hundreds of lives and is threatening hundreds of thousands more.
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Microsoft Workers Arrested After Occupying C-Suite to Protest Israel's Use of Azure in Gaza
"Brad Smith is the face of human rights at Microsoft," said one No Azure for Apartheid protester. "And yet Microsoft every day continues to abet this genocide."
Aug 27, 2025
Seven current and former Microsoft workers were arrested Tuesday after occupying the office of president Brad Smith to protest the company's complicity in "the first AI-powered genocide" as Israel kills and ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
The protesters gathered at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington and declared a "Liberated Zone" inside Building 34, which they renamed the Mai Ubeid building in honor of a Palestinian software engineer killed by Israel in Gaza in 2023. Demonstrators sounded noisemakers, draped banners, and delivered a "People's Court Summons" to Smith. They chanted, "Microsoft, Microsoft, you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!"
Seven protesters who locked themselves inside Smith's office were arrested by Redmond police. Other current and former Microsoft workers joined community members at a rally outside the building.
"Microsoft continues to militarize its campus to harass, brutally attack, and violently arrest its workers and community members," No Azure for Apartheid organizer and former Microsoft worker Abdo Mohamed told the Seattle Times.
The arrests came on the same day that Bloomberg revealed that Microsoft asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation for intelligence on pro-Palestinian protesters targeting the company, worked with local law enforcement in a bid to thwart demonstrations, and deleted internal emails containing protest details and words like "Gaza."
Tuesday's action followed a protest last week at which around 20 No Azure for Apartheid activists were arrested after setting up an encampment on the grounds of Microsoft headquarters. Earlier this month, protesters staged a demonstration at a Microsoft data center in the Netherlands that is reportedly being used by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to plan airstrikes on Gaza.
The No Azure for Apartheid protesters are calling on Microsoft to "cut ties with Israel, call for an end to the genocide and forced starvation, pay reparations to the Palestinians, and end the discrimination against workers."
"We are here because Palestine must be free, the genocide must end, the apartheid must end, and everything that's happened to the Palestinian people over the past 75 years must end," declared one No Azure for Apartheid organizer in a video of Tuesday's occupation that was posted online. "It must end and this is how we must end it. We must occupy the people who are letting it happen."
"We are here today not because we want to be here, it's because we need to be here," he said. "Brad Smith is the face of human rights at Microsoft. And yet Microsoft every day continues to abet this genocide."
"Every Palestinian phone call in the last few years has been stored on Microsoft servers," he continued as the other protesters shouted, "Shame!"
"That is a disgrace! That is untenable! There is no way to justify that," the protester asaid. "Every time we have come with these problems... Microsoft has dragged their feet."
The activist also pointed to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the IDF's largest intelligence unit.
"Satya has dragged his feet. Brad has dragged his feet. Satya met with the head of Unit 8200 and that led to this plan to store Palestinian phone calls on Microsoft servers," he said.
A a joint investigation published earlier this month by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call revealed that Unit 8200 is storing 11,500 terabytes of data containing roughly 200 million hours of Palestinians' phone call recordings on the Azure servers in the Netherlands. According to the article, former Unit 8200 head Yossi Sariel traveled to Microsoft headquarters in 2021 to meet Nadella.
"What happens as a result is that every phone call is recorded, it is transcribed from Arabic, it is translated, and it is used for targeting," the protester said.
Earlier this year, an Associated Press investigation detailed how Israeli forces are using artificial intelligence and cloud computing systems sold by US tech giants including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Open AI—which makes the popular ChatGPT chatbot—for the mass surveillance and killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
In addition to US tech, the IDF uses its own AI system called Habsora to automatically select airstrike targets at an exponentially faster rate than ever before. A November 2023 investigation by +972 Magazine and Local Call cited an Israeli intelligence source who said that Habsora has transformed the IDF into a "mass assassination factory" in which the "emphasis is on quantity and not quality" of kills.
Following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, IDF officers were told they could order any number of strikes as they believed were legal, with no effective limits on civilian harm. This led to massacres in which dozens or more civilians were killed in single strikes, often using US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs.
Microsoft said earlier this month that it has launched an investigation into how Unit 8200 is using Azure. This, after the company said in May that an internal review "found no evidence to date that Microsoft's Azure and [artificial intelligence] technologies have been used to target or harm people in the conflict in Gaza."
Big Tech's profiteering from Israel's annihilation of Gaza and occupation, settler colonization, and apartheid in the West Bank has sparked numerous protests, including by employees of complicit companies. At least dozens of workers at companies including Google, Meta, and Microsoft have been fired for Palestine advocacy. Others have resigned in protest.
Hossam Nasr, a former Microsoft software engineer, was fired after organizing an October 2024 "No Azure for Apartheid" vigil. Microsoft engineer Ibtihal Aboussad and another worker, Vaniya Agrawal, were fired after interrupting speeches by company executives.
Responding to Tuesday's protest, Smith said, "Obviously, when seven folks do as they did today—storm a building, occupy an office, block other people out of the office... that's not okay."
"There are many things we can't do to change the world, but we will do what we can and what we should," Smith added. "That starts with ensuring that our human rights principles and contractual terms of service are upheld everywhere, by all of our customers around the world."
Tuesday's protest came as the IDF ramped up Operation Gideon's Chariots 2—the US-backed campaign to conquer and occupy Gaza and ethnically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians—and amid a worsening famine that has killed hundreds of people, many of them children.
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Vast Majority of 'Refugees' Accepted Under New Trump Plan Will Be White South Africans
"The Trump administration has sent a dangerous message," one refugee wrote, "that in a multiracial democracy, the loss of white dominance is equivalent to persecution."
Aug 15, 2025
The administration of US President Donald Trump is reportedly discussing a refugee program that would grant the majority of admissions to the white South African minority that ruled the country through apartheid for decades.
Reuters reported Friday that the administration was mulling a cap of 40,000 refugees entering the United States next year, down from the 100,000 allowed in by former President Joe Biden.
According to two officials, who spoke with Reuters anonymously, "30,000 of the 40,000 spaces would be devoted to Afrikaners, a largely Dutch-descended minority in South Africa that Trump has prioritized for resettlement."
At the end of 2024, the United Nations Refugee Agency reported that there were nearly 43 million people worldwide recognized as refugees, who are forced to flee their home countries due to violence, persecution, or human rights violations.
Among them are:
- Nearly 6 million Syrians forced to flee deprivation, violence, and persecution amid the country's decade of brutal civil war;
- 6 million Afghans facing persecution after the Taliban returned to power in 2021;
- Over 4 million Sudanese and South Sudanese people displaced by war and famine;
- 1.3 million refugees from Myanmar, including the Rohingya, who are fleeing what is recognized by the US as a genocide; and
- The million and growing Haitians fleeing the gang warfare that has overtaken their impoverished nation.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump emphatically slammed the door on all of these groups, indefinitely suspending the US Refugee Admissions Program and halting the process for about 600,000 refugees who were being considered for admission and thousands who'd been approved.
He also shut down CBP One, the application allowing asylum-seekers fleeing violence and poverty to apply for entry at the Southern border legally, and revoked the legal status of millions of people in the country under humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), many of whom now face deportation.
While turning away countless millions facing death and danger, Trump has welcomed Afrikaners, the minority group that implemented and enforced a racist and anti-democratic system of apartheid that deprived Black people of their rights in South Africa until 1994.
Trump is a proponent of the false theory that, since the end of apartheid, South Africa's democratically elected Black government has systematically oppressed and allowed for the murder of white farmers, referring to it as a "genocide."
That theory has been bolstered by Trump's billionaire ally Elon Musk, who is also a white South African. Earlier this year, the artificial intelligence chatbot on his social media platform X, known as "Grok," began to inexplicably discuss so-called "white genocide" in South Africa in response to unrelated prompts, which led many to speculate that Musk had programmed it to amplify the conspiracy theory.
However, as Joe Walsh, a white journalist from South Africa, noted in an article for Current Affairs last year, South Africa's Black population is killed at 10 times the rate of its white population.
In large part due to the legacy of apartheid, white South Africans also have 20 times the wealth of Black ones and hold the vast majority of land in the country despite being just over 7% of the population.
Meanwhile, white South African organizations like AfriForum have argued that efforts by the current government to more equitably distribute land constitute a form of racial discrimination and even genocide against whites.
"The myth's purpose," Walsh wrote, "is to make it seem dangerous to have Black people in control of the government."
But it's a myth with purchase in the White House. While virtually every other refugee group was left in limbo, Trump wrote on Truth Social in April that "Any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship. This process will begin immediately!"
In May, 59 Afrikaners arrived at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, where the Trump administration celebrated their arrival.
Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch's Refugee and Migrant Rights program, told PBS News, "There were refugees who had been identified, vetted, who had spent years as refugees, and their hopes for admission to the United States after years of suffering had been crushed."
"That now the one exception would be made for Afrikaners," he said, "just seems like a cruel twist to those refugees to whom the door was closed in their face."
Last month, Reuters reported that a senior official from the State Department told the government of South Africa that it was not allowed to process refugees of mixed-race descent who spoke the Afrikaans language for entry into the US. The official said that the resettlement program was only "intended for white people."
In The Hill, opinion contributor Lok Darjee—himself a Bhutanese refugee who fled war in 2011—has described the Trump administration's embrace of white South Africans over other refugees as emblematic of its "racist ideology."
"By admitting white South Africans as refugees and victims of racial persecution," Darjee said, "the Trump administration has sent a dangerous message that in a multiracial democracy, the loss of white dominance is equivalent to persecution."
"In this narrative, South Africa becomes a warning of what awaits the United States should Black and nonwhite Americans gain political power," he continued. "As America becomes a more diverse nation, those who equate whiteness with greatness see this shift not as progress, but as a threat."
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