Israeli tanks are rolling into Gaza City, the last portion of Gaza left undemolished, imploding buildings one by one and forcibly expelling the starving population at gunpoint.

Gaza’s government media office reported that Israeli forces had detonated more than 80 explosive robots inside buildings in Gaza City as they advanced, in what it described as a “scorched-earth policy.” The onslaught is taking place in the midst of a man-made famine that has already starved hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children to death.

The conquest of Gaza City will place the entire Gaza Strip under Israeli military occupation, creating the conditions for what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called the “concluding moves” in Gaza: the ghettoization of the Palestinian population in concentration camps and their expulsion from their ancestral homeland.

When US President Donald Trump announced in February that the United States would “take” and “own” Gaza, expelling the Palestinians to “other countries,” his statements were dismissed in the US and international media as “unrealistic,” “unworkable” and “unserious.”

Seven months later, it has become clear that Trump’s plan is not only deadly serious but is the concrete strategy guiding the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post published a strategy document, under active deliberation at the White House and fully consistent with Trump and Netanyahu’s stated plans for Gaza—with the active collusion of the other imperialist powers.

The document was developed by leading figures in the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which has used the distribution of starvation rations to the Palestinian population as a means to carry out deliberate massacres of aid seekers, with Israeli troops given explicit instructions to shoot into unarmed crowds. It was created in consultation with employees of the Boston Consulting Group, a major corporate consultancy and think tank that includes staff of the Tony Blair Foundation.

The plan, according to the Washington Post, “envisions at least a temporary relocation of all of Gaza’s more than 2 million population, either through what it calls ‘voluntary’ departures to another country or into restricted, secured zones inside the enclave during reconstruction.”

The 38-page slide deck translates the concepts of forcible ethnic cleansing from the language of fascist mythology into the jargon of the corporate boardroom. It is stuffed with terms like “ROI” (return on investment), “PPP” (public-private partnership), “CAPEX” (capital expenditure) and AI (artificial intelligence).

Within this framework, the plan places a dollar sign on acts of ethnic cleansing, both individual and collective. The existence of every Palestinian person is valued as a net negative for the US-Israeli occupiers of Palestine and their billionaire investor partners. Every Palestinian that is compelled to leave Gaza saves the occupiers $23,000.

According to the plan, those who leave Gaza would be given $5,000 cash and the equivalent of two years’ rent. But if a Palestinian were to no longer exist in Gaza without receiving these payments, the economic benefit to the occupiers of Palestine would be even greater than the $23,000 “saved” with every Palestinian forced from Gaza. That is, a dead Palestinian is much more valuable than a live one, in the worldview of the report’s authors.

The publication of the plan was followed just days later by the publication of a resolution, adopted overwhelmingly by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, declaring that “the government of Israel has engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.”

This ethnic cleansing plan is not presented merely as a massively lucrative speculative venture, aiming to profit on ethnic cleansing and genocide, but a critical component of the drive by the United States to dominate the Middle East.

The first benefits to the United States of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be, according to the document, 1) “Massive $ gains” and 2) it will “accelerate IMEC… strengthen hold in the East Mediterranean, and secure US-industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf.”

The “IMEC,” short for India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, is the strategic framework guiding the US-Israeli effort to create a “new Middle East” under direct imperialist domination.

On September 9, 2023, the Biden White House published a Memorandum of Understanding announcing the establishment of an “India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor” (IMEC), which would serve as a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Less than two weeks later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech at the United Nations, referenced this “visionary corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel.” Netanyahu then held up a map showing the state of Israel stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River—encompassing both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The “blessing” of this economic corridor would conquer the “curse” of Iran and its allies in the Middle East, including resistance by the Palestinian population.

Two weeks after Netanyahu held up his map of the “new Middle East” at the United Nations, Israel launched the Gaza genocide, using the events of October 7 as a pretext.

The plan outlined in the 38-page document published by the Washington Post uses this “corridor” as a framework, placing the ethnic cleansing and annexation of the Gaza Strip within the framework of “the broader IMEC initiative.” It declares that “Gaza is an Iranian outpost... that will threaten IMEC / Abrahamic architecture.”

In other words, the document makes clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is a vital component of the US effort to dominate the Middle East, as part of a strategy of global domination targeting not only Iran but ultimately Russia and China.

The Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin wrote in his seminal 1917 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “finance capital strives for domination, not freedom.” It is “a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world.”

In the document now being discussed by the Trump administration, we see the truest, deepest expression of capitalism in its imperialist form. Shakespeare, in the words of his Timon, said gold would set “foul fair, wrong right, base noble.” Capitalism, in its form of global imperialism, sets dollar signs on every child driven from their home or buried under the rubble on the Levantine coast.

The vast crimes being committed by US and international imperialism in Gaza are a warning of the horrors capitalism has in store. If American imperialism is prepared to exterminate millions in the opening skirmish of its plans for war with China, how many billions will it be prepared to kill in the event of full-scale war? The workers of the world cannot afford to find out.

The monumental crime unfolding in Gaza is the political responsibility of all the imperialist powers and every political party of the ruling class. For nearly two years, they have armed, financed and justified this genocide. The same capitalist ruling class that is exterminating Palestinians abroad is erecting dictatorship at home, dismantling social programs, slashing wages and workplace protections, and moving to crush any opposition through violence and repression.

The struggle against genocide cannot be separated from the fight against the capitalist system itself. Workers must take industrial action to stop the Gaza genocide as part of a unified mass movement of the international working class that defends jobs, wages, healthcare and democratic rights, while waging an uncompromising struggle against imperialist war. The fight to stop the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is inseparable from the fight to end the global dictatorship of finance capital.