On April 7, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the second time since its inauguration. In statements to the media, Trump doubled his previous comments on the Gaza Strip, describing him as an “incredible piece of important real estate.”
Trump also repeated his suggestion that the Palestinians should leave the strip “to the different country” and affirm that people “really love that vision … Many people like my concept.”
Days later, about 70 percent of Gaza had become a “non-logo zone” for the Palestinians. Confirming that Israel is working “according to the vision of the president of the United States, which we consider to realize”, the Israeli defense minister, Israel Katz, declared Israel’s intention to “seize” territory, and added that “he wants the Palestinians.
It is now clear that Trump’s statements on Gaza have had the effect of legitimation, an Israeli vision of ethnic cleaning of the strip. What the president of the United States calls “my concept”, in fact, is not his at all.
Approximately decades of Israeli occupation and colonization of the Gaza Strip, there have been multiple plans to empty or disperse the Palestinian population in an attempt to ensure total control over this part of Palestine. The power of colonial practices has also tried. For example, to draw Israeli settlers and, therefore, help transform Gaza’s demography, the strip was at a time only promoted as the “Hawaii of Israel”.
Leaving the objectives of the Israeli war in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the Gaza Strip left the 1949 armistice agreements under the Egyptian military government. By consisting only a small part of what had until then the Gaza district of Palestine, the Gaza Strip was home to two groups of Palestinians: the local population and refugees, people who had been forced to leave their land as Israel reached the duration of the war.
When the weapons were silent, the Gaza Strip was known in the Israeli policy circles as the “uninounted work”, a portion of land next to the Egyptian border that Israel’s leaders would like to control, preferably with their Palestinian population.
Israel’s first attempt to take Gaza by force occurred in 1956. But under the pressure of the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion had no choice but to retire and end the Israeli occupation. The failed attempt taught Israel an important lesson: to draw the map of the Middle East and make its territical expansionist agenda a success, Israel needed US support and approval.
The 1967 Arab-Israeli war was much more successful in this regard. Through the conquest and occupation, the Gaza Strip was carried under the direct Israeli domain. This opened the “transfer” of revitalization: forced displacement and ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians. Seen as necessary and allowed or, in the words of Ben-Gurion, “an important human and Zionist idea”, the transfer was collected as an effective tool to advance the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
In the following years, as pointed out by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha, the transfer acquired different labels. These included “population exchange”, “Arab return to Arabia”, “voluntary emigration” and “rehabilitation” with different Israeli governments that adopt different approaches.
An approach was the “open bridges” of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, which allowed the Palestinians to go to other countries in search of work. Another was to open crimes in the refugee fields of Gaza to organic and pay trips and passports for the Palestinians willing to “voluntarily migrate”, which in effect turned the Ministry of Israeli Foreign Affairs into a “global travel agency.” Regardless of the approach, Israel’s political objective remained the same: to create an impulse in the Palestinians to leave the strip.
“I want everyone to leave, even if they go to the moon,” said Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. In expressing Israeli frustration, Eshkol articulated the feeling of being trapped with what was considered Gaza’s problem. After all, only the Palestinian population there, and the sizeox refugee population in particular, were in the path of complete Israeli annexation.
In response to the “dilemma” of Gaza de Israel, their politicians also sought more comprehensive solutions. This led to an almost continuous flow of plans for “rehabilitation” or Palestinians out of the strip. Starting immediately after the 1967 war, a variety of potential destinations emerged. These included the West Bank, the Peninsula of the Sinai, Iraq, or even as far as Canada and Australia.
Despite the Israeli efforts and the elaboration of the plans, and for the disappointment of the decision makers of Israel, the initiatives were nothing as the number of Palestinians who leave the strip remained limited. And given other considerations, including moral, legal and diplomatic, plans to displace a large number of Gaza Palestinians were in the drawer.
But as Israeli politicians turned to examine their options menu in the subsequent era of October 7, 2023, “voluntary emigration”, or forced displacement, figured again. Gone are any sensitivity to international opinion and potential reactions. Instead, Trump has led the way, making statements on Gaza who in effect convert decades of ideology and Zionist practice into official US politics.
Through his policy position, the president of the United States has legitimized an Israeli vision of ethnic cleaning in the strip. In the process, its articulation of politics has increasingly approaching the thread of revisionist Zionism that saw the Palestinians as extraterrestrials in their own land and, therefore, “transferable”.
When arguing that the Palestinians need to go to make Israel and the region safe, Trump has moved away from the shared international principle that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, in another part of the land of occupied Palestinian territory have the land. As such, Trump reminds the revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who argued that “when the Arab claim faces our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite rights” TowarstrachtrachtrasheterTet Land. “
The cynical promises of a better future for people who have nothing more than their land after a brutal erase and plausible genocide should be taken seriously. The legitimacy that Trump has given to the Israeli plans raises a threat here and now, but it could also be his presidency.
This is because it has sacrificed the presidential sanction of American ethnic cleaning as an acceptable tool. This leaves the open for Israel, in the near or distant future, to pursue “transfer”, “rehabilitation” and “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians, either in Gaza or the West Bank.
In addition, the US president has repeatedly communicated the support of the United States for illegal land and colonization seizures. Suggesting that Gaza (and Greenland) could become “territory of the United States”, has reinduted and validated ideas that most world leaders had put in the history of history.
Finally, Trump has moved away the position of the United States from the premise of working towards a solution of two states. In fact, considering their statements, there seems to be a fundamental contempt for the Palestinians in Gaza and their collective right to self -determination.
When observing the current policy of the United States against the Historical Registry, the “Riviera del Middle East” of Trump seems a curious combination of Zionist ethnic cleaning under the “transfer” model and the colonial ideal of the “Hawaii of Israel”.
It is not surprising that Trump has encouraged Bone by the Israeli leaders, since he asks for the forced depopulation of the Gaza Strip and its transformation into colonial territory of sufficient substitute, annexes or ethere after all, Trump’s ideas follow the steps of the Zionist leaders of Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, under which the transfer has been the preferred option challenging
With Trump leaving the front, such challenges could become the opportunities of tomorrow. It remains the task of other states to face Israeli-American normalization of continuous ethnic cleaning and the hoarding of colonial land in Palestine.
The opinions expressed in this article are typical of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
