Photo courtesy of BBC
Gaza, a thriving cosmopolitan trading town along Via Maris trade route between Egypt and Turkey until 1948, became the Gaza Strip since then and remained the largest refugee camp for two million descendants of Nakba returnees until October 2023.
Since then, Israel had killed not 48,000, which was popularly quoted by the media based on Hamas sources, but 300,000 to 400,000 according to a recent revelation (Ralph Nader, “Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Death: It is Ten Times Greater”, Counterpunch, February 24).
After Israel bombed and flattened every home, building and facility and turned that 365 km2 of land into a heap of rubble, it is now a piece of real estate to the landlord US President Donald Trump. His proposal to turn that Gaza into another Riviera after chasing out the Palestinian post-Israeli genocide returnees to neighbouring Arab countries, notably to Jordan and Egypt, before handing it over to Israel has sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. To sell his diabolic plan to the Arab world President Trump invited King Abdullah II of Jordan to the White House and that puppet in turn suggested that he would discuss the matter with President El-Sisi of Egypt. Having realised the danger of domestic uprising the plan would provoke not only in Jordan and Egypt but throughout the Middle East, Egypt is busy preparing a counterplan to rebuild Gaza without removing its indigenous population. President El-Sisi hopes to get the approval for his plan from the other Arab puppets. But the irony is just as in 1948 when it was too late and too little for Arab countries to intervene with any force to stop the Nakba, so also in 2025 after watching helplessly Gaza being pulverized, desolated and cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants in the ongoing Nakba, Arab regimes are trying to devise a counterplan to please President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while paying lip service to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence.
Details of the alternative plan are yet to be finalized but it appears that reconstruction of Gaza would take three to five years and would be a collective effort undertaken by the Arab countries possibly with assistance from EU and UN. The project is expected to be completed in three stages. In the first stage safe zones would be created to relocate the displaced temporarily and clear the rubble. The second stage would be the phase of reconstruction and the final stage would reinitiate the political process towards a two state solution. The administration of the entire project would be in the hands of a committee of technocrats representing different groups except Hamas.
In the meantime, Mr Netanyahu while endorsing President Trump’s idea that transferring Palestinians from Gaza is the “only viable plan” added a rider to it and said that emigration should be “voluntary”. Accordingly, his Defence Minister Israel Katz has established a ministerial body to coordinate and assist Palestinians who wish to leave voluntarily to third party countries. Having declared UNWRA illegal in Gaza and made the operation of other aid agencies unworkable, Israel would starve the Palestinians to a point where they would be forced to choose migration as the only viable alternative. Voluntary migration would thus turn out to be forced migration in practice. But one thing is clear from the outset and that is to allow nearly two million Palestinians to flood into Jordan and Egypt or elsewhere in the Middle East would mean converting the Palestinian liberation struggle into a regional one, which none of those regimes would like. Not only that, if Israel is allowed to get Gaza cleared of Palestinians what is there to stop repeating its genocide mission in Occupied West Bank the home for another three million Palestinians? That mission has already started and nearly 40,000 Palestinians had been expelled from Jenin. According to Mr Netanyahu, Israeli tanks and troops would remain in the West Bank “as long as it takes”. This is a dangerous escalation. What are the Arab puppets going to do now?
The truth of the matter is that Arab countries have long given up their concern for Palestine. Therefore, whatever the shape of the counterplan, the final objective would be to please Trump administration and normalize relations with Israel. If that is not true, then the key question is whether the Arab countries and Muslim nations worldwide would go beyond rejecting the Trump proposal and take the initiative to push for the restoration of the Palestinian homeland. Israel will never agree to a two state solution. Nor will it agree to a one state solution with Palestinian citizens in Israel. In that case do the Arab regimes with all their petrodollars have the military means to confront Israel to make Palestinian homeland a reality? Absolutely not.
The saga of Arab weakness started with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is a long history to narrate in a few paragraphs. But to put it in a nutshell, after getting rid of the “Sick Man of Europe” the then two leading imperial powers, Britain and France, were determined not to allow again a Muslim power to rise and threaten Western supremacy. They created new countries out of the Ottoman territory colonized almost all of them except Saudi Arabia and injected the idea of territorial nationalism to replace the Muslim ideal of brotherhood. Nationalism spelt a death blow to Muslim religious unity. To keep the world of Islam further divided and weak, Israel was planted at the heart of the Arab world and was armed to its teeth until it became a nuclear power.
At least they had a chance in late 1970s to wake up and utilize their petrodollars not to build palaces, playgrounds and hotels but to invest in scientific research and development to emerge as a counterweight to Israel. They missed that opportunity and it is a sorry tale to go into the reasons for it. Palestinians as a result are paying the price for the historic slumber of Arabs. The only solution available now is to turn Palestinian struggle into a global phenomenon. As Ilan Pappe rightly put it, it is a confrontation between Global Palestine based in Global South and Global Israel based in Global North.
A fundamental truth that the Arab counter planners must understand is that Palestinian thirst for freedom and independence cannot be quenched by reconstruction. What is there to prevent Israel from destroying again what would be rebuilt? The so-called Arab counterplan without first achieving a homeland for Palestinians is nothing but an exercise in futility.