Photo courtesy of NBC News
“I heard that Gaza has been very unlucky, for them … They live like they are living in hell. Gaza is not a place for people to be living, and the only reason they want to go back, and I believe this strongly, is because they have no alternative” (Donald Trump).
“Palestinians will be happy to return to Israel” (Riyad Mansour, Permanent Observer of Palestine at UN).
“Gaza is in our DNA” (A Palestinian returning to his destroyed home in Gaza).
To Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his circle of Zionists, not to mention the Christian evangelists in the US, US President Donald Trump’s announcement to acquire the Gaza Strip – a piece of Palestinian territory covering 365 km2 or just 2% of the country, which in 1948 became the largest refugee camp for those Palestinians who were allowed to return after the Nakba and has now been made uninhabitable for its 2.1 million residents after October 7, 2023 thanks to US weaponry and military machines supplied to Israel – must have been music to their ears. On hearing this Netanyahu has even instructed his soldiers rather prematurely to open roads for Palestinians to evacuate their land voluntarily.
By his announcement President Trump once again had demonstrated his open contempt to all post-World War II international rules and conventions that were put in place to protect the inalienable rights and freedom of all nationalities and people and to the institutions that were set up to monitor and guard those rights and freedom. President Trump wants to “own” that rectangular strip of land and rebuild another Riviera after evicting all its hereditary owners and settling them in neighbouring Arab countries. Once they are settled, he elaborated, they would not be allowed to set foot in Gaza again. What he left unsaid but discernible to anyone with some knowledge about the Palestine issue is that Gaza would be taken over by President Trump not to build another Riviera on the corpses of American soldiers killed by Palestinian resistance forces but to hand it back to Israel. Even then how would he get rid of the Palestinians from Gaza?
In the meantime, having pulverized Gaza into a heap of rubble and having temporarily depopulated that piece of land by killing and forced evictions, Israel is turning its attention to repeat the same experiment in the West Bank with a population of 3.3 million. In fact, as Mehran Kamrava has detailed, the policy of every Israeli government since 1948 had been to do everything possible to transform Palestine into an unliveable territory for Palestinians (The Impossibility of Palestine, Yale University Press, 2016). In the West Bank, the settlers are now officially encouraged to acquire as much land as possible either with cash or through force. In the end, if the Israeli military succeed in turning the West Bank also into a heap of rubble will President Trump acquire that too?
However, the puzzling question is whether President Trump could achieve what he wishes without the cooperation of Arab countries. For the moment though and to keep the Arab world calm all Arab leaders have flatly rejected and condemned Trump’s agenda. There is also news that President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt has a counterproposal to rebuild Gaza without chasing out its current occupants. Even King Abdullah II of Jordan in his meeting with President Trump at the White House had referred to President Sisi’s counterproposal after announcing that his country would accept 2,000 sick child victims of Gaza war. One would therefore expect all Arab countries to rally behind President Sisi to reject President Trump’s Riviera proposal. However, given the Arab leaders’ desire to normalise relations with Israel, how strong is that rejection is yet to be tested. In other words is this rejection based on a solid plan to get Israel withdraw totally from Gaza and the West Bank or simply a tactical response until President Trump offers the right price for Arab collusion?
Modern Arab history is replete with instances of double dealings and treachery by Arab rulers not in the interest of Palestine and Palestinians but to protect and strengthen their own power and position under the cover of promoting national interest. As Azmi Bishara’s study on Palestine reveals, “The regional valence of the Palestinian issue has qualitatively shifted in recent years, particularly for Arab regimes, which today either have peace agreements with Israel or are devising ways to normalise bilateral relations with it … At the same time, Israel has completely failed to make any inroads among Arab peoples; for them, it remains illegitimate and alien. Palestine is still invoked as a political symbol of suffering and open colonial wounds, and an example of Western states’ double standards on human rights” (Azmi Bishara, Palestine: Matters of Truth and Justice, London, 2022, p. 289). Even the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh singled out for criticism the Arab regimes who had signed normalization deals with Israel. But there is an ocean of difference in the attitude towards Israel and Palestine between the Arab rulers and their subjects. In fact as Bishara discovered, it was former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak regime’s collusion with Israel in its war on Gaza that motivated Egyptian activists to organise politically against that regime in 2010-11. To go further back in history, one cannot forget that it was the Jordanian King Abdullah I who in 1948 played a double game between his commitment to join forces with the Arab League to save Palestinians while at the same time privately negotiating with Zionist leadership with the hope of annexing the West Bank with Jordan.
There is another Arab regime, Saudi Arabia, whose consent to the Trump Plan would certainly make it possible. Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) the so-called moderniser and Westerniser of the Saudi kingdom is doing everything possible to make sure that he becomes the next king with absolute powers. Towards that goal he has been ruthless in imposing his so-called reforms of modernisation either by murdering his critics like the courageous journalist Jamal Khashoggi or putting in solitary confinement and incarceration without trial intellectuals and scholars like Safar bin Abdulrahman al-Hawali. Above all, the fact that Saudi Arabia is the land of the Prophet of Islam and that it is the centre of the annual holy pilgrimage of world Muslims gives that kingdom a special place and prestige in the world of Islam. President Trump wants Saudi Arabia to become a signatory to the 2020 Abraham Accord and normalise relations with Israel. But MBS has not forgotten the 1979 Mecca insurrection that had to be putdown with bloodshed by French mercenaries. Although MBS thinks that his modernisation programme would carry the support of the young Saudis there is no guarantee that support would translate into backing normalisation of relations with Israel. This means MBS would demand a heavy price from President Trump such as an absolute guarantee to protect his regime for betraying Palestinians. In the Arab part of the world there is a huge democracy deficit. Without a loyal military force and police and without the backing of Western powers, none of those regimes could survive. If President Trump could offer that guarantee as the price there is a good chance that MBS would support the Trump plan.
One basic truth about the Middle East is that whether it is Jordan, Egypt, SaudiArabia or any other Arab country, to all of them Palestine has become a pain on the neck and after the 1967 six day war especially they have decided to wash their hands off from the Palestine issue. President Trump may have become their saviour. But will the Palestinians just surrender and leave?
In retrospect, the blame for the present catastrophe in Gaza may be placed on Hamas and its rocket attack on October 7, 2023. But was there any alternative? Let’s read the considered view of Ilan Pappe, a principled critique and campaigner against Israel’s settler colonialism. “The Hamas fighters who stormed on 7 October were largely young people who learned the language of violence from the bombs that Israel dropped on them. This is not a justification for what they did. But we should not be certain that, had we been subject to the same trauma, with no resolution in sight, we would respond much better” (A Very Short History of the Palestinian Conflict, One World 2024, p. 138). As the Secretary General of UN Antonio Guterres said that the Hamas attack “did not happen in a vacuum” but resulted from 56 years of “suffocating occupation”.
The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has a long history and may go back to the 19th century. There is hardly any evidence in modern history where a community of people native to their soil and occupied by outsides occupation suddenly gave up their freedom struggle in exchange for material comfort elsewhere. Even if the Arab countries swallow President Trump’s bait, no Palestinian is going to leave Palestine. Hamas is more popular now than ever before and other Palestinian groups are coalescing with Hamas to take the struggle to a different level. Hamas will hold on to its first covenant: “Palestine is an Islamic wakf (endowment) consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it or any part of it, should not be given up”. It is Israel that has to learn now how to live with its Arab neighbour in peace.