As`ad AbuKhalil
DONALD TRUMP does not have a comprehensive plan for Gaza: He has instead a general, vague idea that Palestinians in Gaza should be expelled to make Israel safer.
The New York Times indicated that Trump held not a single meeting concerning Gaza and that “the plan” was not discussed within White House policy circles. He may well have heard the question mentioned by one of his Zionist advisers and went along with it without worrying about repercussions and even practical feasibility.
As is known, Trump derives most of his news from (mainstream) conservative media such as Fox News and Newsmax. There, you would not see Palestinians as victims; they can only be portrayed as terrorists. When the latest batch of Israeli prisoners was released, three of them last Saturday, Trump commented on their appearances implying that they were deliberately starved, and not that the entire population of Gaza was purposefully starved by Israel.
He did not see the hundreds of Palestinian prisoners when they were released and how emaciated they all looked. I could not recognize Palestinian leftist leader, Khalida Jarrar, after her release from prison a few weeks ago.
The idea of ethnic cleansing has been at the heart of the Zionist project since its inception. You won’t find one Zionist leader who did not refer in his or her published writings or diaries to the expulsion of Palestinians.
In The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, we find this entry from 1895:
“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Zionist leaders knew that the native population would not willingly give up its homeland and that other violent methods must be enacted to achieve a Jewish majority entirely atop an existing Palestinian homeland. Trump’s vision for Gaza is a direct elaboration on Herzl’s vision; Trump is merely more open and explicit about it.
Palestinians’ National Liberation
Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, often emphasise economic opportunities for Palestinians because they think that the native population, once granted prosperity and material well-being, would easily give up their nationalist aspirations and settle in any neighboring country.
The reference by Trump to real-estate development assumes that Palestinians have been fighting solely for material improvement of their lives and not for the liberation of their historic homeland. The Likud Party’s vision for the West Bank and Gaza in the Camp David negotiations with Egypt in 1978 was predicated on the same concept.
Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud Party and a former prime minister, believed that municipal improvement in the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza would eradicate any expression of Palestinian nationalist stirrings. But Palestinians have sacrificed their material well-being for the sake of their nationalist goal of liberation; we are talking about a people who consistently have been willing to give up their lives to achieve political freedom and to end the Zionist occupation.
The idea that economic giveaways would eradicate the national aspirations of the Palestinian people can also be traced back to Herzl who, in his less famous book, Altneuland, imagined a future Israeli state where Arabs were happy to be subjected because they were beneficiaries of the prosperity of the new Jewish state.
The British government also proposed ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1937. The Peel Commission report called for the “partition of the land,” with Jews controlling around 20 percent of Palestine, but that included the most fertile part of the country. At the time, Jews owned a mere 5.7 percent of the land, when the Palestinians were 70 percent of the population.
There was a problem in that partition scheme, however: What do you do with the Arabs who reside in the Jewish section of the new state after partition? The British government proposed “exchanges of population,” namely that the 225,000 Arabs who lived in the Jewish state would be “exchanged” for the 1,250 Jews who lived in the Arab state.
That was considered by Zionists and Britain as a fair deal. However, the Arabs did not find the idea of ethnic cleansing particularly appealing and they certainly were not willing to cede any part of their homeland to the new immigrants. That hundreds of thousands of them would have to be expelled made the plan seem even more unacceptable.
The plans for ethnic cleansing went into effect when, in 1948, the Zionist forces fought the Arabs to establish a Jewish state against the wishes of the native population. Arabs constituted around two-thirds of the people by 1948, despite heavy waves of Jewish immigration from Europe.
David Ben–Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement and the first prime minister of Israel, would give orders in 1948 to expel the inhabitants of the land. Even earlier, he had told a meeting of the Jewish Agency in 1938: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral about it.”
Palestinian historian Nur Masalha devoted a book to this question, The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Thinking and Practice: Historical Roots and Contemporary Challenges.
In it, he notes that in internal debates in 1938, Zionist leaders conceded that “internal transfers” were carried out in the 1920s and 1930s to make way for new Jewish settlements.
Zionists would expel peasants from newly purchased land and then ban them from working in the cities under the “Hebrew Labor” rule, which prohibited Palestinians from employment in Jewish enterprises. This meant that Zionists were not willing to provide the Palestinians with either political rights or even economic well-being from at least the 1920s.
Gaza
Gaza is the direct product of earlier campaigns of Israeli ethnic cleansing, as 80 per cent of its population are Palestinians who were victims of ethnic cleansing from successive Israeli wars and massacres. And Israel was very eager after it occupied Gaza in 1967 to implement its old Zionist plans for ethnic cleansing.
Arabic newspapers from 1968 (such as An–Nahar, published in Beirut) show repeated attempts by Israel to “dump” thousands of Palestinian refugees from Gaza into Jordan. The government there had to close the King Hussein bridge to prevent Israel from getting rid of the Palestinian population of Gaza. In 1970, Jordanian newspapers (such as Ad–Dustur) warned that Israel began its plan to empty the Gaza strip of its population.
Israel has always wanted an empty Gaza (or a “purified” Gaza, where Arabs are banned from residence) because its restless population has been rebellious since Israel’s occupation of 80 percent of Palestine was complete in 1948.
The first incidents of Palestinian armed resistance began in the 1950s in Gaza. The Israeli government reputedly bombed Egyptian targets near the border to control the Palestinian population in Gaza. The 1956 Tripartite Aggression against Egypt — with France and Britain joining Israel — was an attempt to bring down the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser, which had been aiding the resistance fighters of Gaza.
The notion that Trump could prevail with his idea because Arab governments are obedient to the US has not been proven correct. Arab rulers, especially in Jordan and Egypt, but also in Saudi Arabia, cannot agree to a plan that would: 1) inflame Arab public opinion; 2) antagonize forever the Palestinian population, and 3) threaten the stability of their own countries.
There are limits to how far Arab governments will go to appease Trump. Saudi media only recently began providing unfavorable coverage of Israel and even mentioning plans for ethnic cleansing, as they had respected the secret rapprochement between Israel and the kingdom.
After several years of muted coverage of Palestine, the Saudi regime was offended when Benjamin Netanyahu — elaborating on Trump’s plan — suggested that Saudi Arabia would take in the Palestinian population of Gaza.
An Arab government that participates in Trump’s cleansing plans would not last long: Its population and the newly arrived Palestinians would mount armed insurrection against the regime.
Trump can continue to make statements about the beautification of the real estate of Gaza, but he won’t be able to find a state that will host ethnically cleansed Palestinians. The notion that the Palestinians would peacefully follow expulsion orders betrays an ignorance of Palestinian history.
The US and Israel are frustrated because the war of genocide and the holocaust visited on Gaza have failed to eradicate Hamas.
The scenes of Hamas military forces parading before the cameras exposed the US and Israel’s failure in the recent long war, now paused. The unbreakable partners assumed that by killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, survivors would abandon Hamas and flock to support the militia of the collaborationist Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah. A similar calculation was made about Lebanon, that the war of aggression would eliminate Hizbullah as both a military and political force.
There are no chances of success for the Trump’s idea, and he may very casually drop it.
His recent meeting with the Jordanian king demonstrated to him that no Arab ally would be able to go along with this stance. That Jordan is willing to accept 2,000 Palestinian young cancer patients is not at all an indication that Jordan — or any other Arab country — would be able to participate in a plan that would see the expulsion of more than 2 million Palestinians from Gaza.
Arab governments are already working on a plan to rebuild Gaza without relocating Palestinians to neighboring countries. Trump will either abandon this ill-thought-out idea or he will have to clash with all of America’s Arab allies in the region.
c. Consortium News
