I wish I could say I was surprised when Donald Trump blithely announced to the world his plan to remove the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, I really do. I wish I could say such a departure from the norms of the international order, that the most powerful man on the planet and leader of a nation that has long fancied itself as a benevolent hegemon saying these things would be a profound, stupefying shock.
I wish I could say that, but I can’t. Like a lobster being boiled alive slowly, the international order crafted with such care in the aftermath of the Second World War has been under assault for over two decades and slowly degraded to the point that when the US President suggested the ethnic cleansing of two million people to build a resort I was merely quite angry, I didn’t have that sense of surprise. I’m SAD I wasn’t surprised.
If I had to pick a point at which the rot became visible, it was probably when the United States launched its ill-judged invasion of Iraq in March 2004 in defiance of the United Nations but the causes of the decay probably reach much further back than that. It means we’ve lost something precious to the right-wing surge that regards international order as an unacceptable trammeling of sovereignty, even when that order produces win-win outcomes for all participants.
Trump’s plan definitely isn’t a spontaneous idea on his part. This one has deeper, festering roots. There are multiple solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of the world focuses on the two-state solution, others focus on a one-state solution, and even the three-state solution gets trotted out from time to time, but these are the solutions that are offered within the context of a rules-based international order. If that has degraded, other solutions come into play, the solutions that extremists on both sides have dreamt of.
Ethnic Cleansing. I hope you flinched at the phrase. It’s only a step below genocide on the rung of horrors that can befall a people. The removal of a group from their homelands is as good as destroying them, cast adrift and rootless a people become vulnerable to assimilation and disappearance, even if relocated to lands where their own ethnic group pre-dominates something profound is lost, which is to say nothing of the violence and suffering that accompanies every single instance where this has happened. And it has happened more often than you may think.
The Turks and Greeks ethnically cleansed their lands of Christians and Muslims respectively following Greece’s defeat in the Second Greco-Turkish War. Millions of Germans were expelled from Eastern European countries where they had lived for centuries at the conclusion of the Second World War.
We saw attempts at ethnic cleansing as Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Some of these were reversed, many were not (particularly those impacting Serbs fleeing Croatia and Kosovo).
And in case you think those are examples from the past, not a year and a half ago the world bore witness to the destruction of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh, the semi-independent Armenian state within the internationally recognized boundaries of Azerbaijan and the flight of over one hundred thousand people to Armenia proper and the world did nothing beyond a few token protests.
Ethnic cleansing is as much a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the one, two or three-state solutions. It is simply so horrible a solution that those who have advocated for it have been rightfully universally condemned yet the extremists on both sides still yearn for that simplest of solutions. All the pain and misery inflicted on one side of a complex debate, whereas they get everything they yearn for!
Don’t for a second think that something sounds too ghastly to ever actually happen. It certainly can.
Whilst I acknowledge that Hamas and other Palestinian groups do dream of inflicting a similar fate on Israel (and held a Conference in 2021 where they laid out their plans for a new Palestinian state you can read about here) I only do so to recognize that the intent is there among SOME. Hamas will never have the power to ethnically cleanse Israel and their conference, whilst horrific, was essentially people playing at a pathetic fantasy.
Israel on the other hand has the power to ethnically cleanse the occupied territories and in fact has already done so on two separate occasions. Israel’s creation in 1948 led directly to the flight of around seven hundred and fifty thousand people in an event commemorated as the Nakba (the catastrophe. Israel claims that the Palestinians left of their own accord to facilitate Arab military assaults on the nascent state, but the preponderance of evidence amassed over the years suggests that in most cases they were fleeing the Israeli advance). This was followed up by the Naksa (the setback) in 1967 which saw roughly three hundred thousand Palestinians ejected from the West Bank into Jordan and from Gaza into Egypt following the Six Day War. And Israel has waged an intense level of harassment and humiliation against Palestinians in the occupied territories for decades designed to make their existence in those territories untenable and facilitate voluntary emigration. The Israeli settler movement has been at the forefront of this campaign, slowly swallowing the lands of the West Bank whilst hemming the Palestinian population into urban areas. While I am unable to say if they have encouraged greater migration from the West Bank, I do believe they have done a thorough job in immiserating the local population.
The Settler movement never reconciled themselves to the disengagement of Gaza ordered by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon back in 2005. As in the West Bank they had multiple settlements strewn across the land, which required the corralling and supervision of the Palestinian population by the Israeli military to sustain. Eight thousand settlers and twenty-one settlements were removed from Gaza and they have sought their way back ever since. With their representatives holding such sway over the modern Israeli government (notably Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister) and with the reasoning that the October 7th atrocity would never have happened had Israel stayed in Gaza, the settlers have been openly advocating an Israeli return.
In March 2024 Orla Guerin wrote an article for the BBC where she met representatives of settler organisations already planning the resettlement of Gaza, a Gaza they foresee as being without Arabs. She speaks with settler leader Daniella Weiss…
“Gaza Arabs will not stay in the Gaza Strip,” she says. “Who will stay? Jews.”
She claims that Palestinians want to leave Gaza and that other countries should take them in – although in a lengthy interview, she rarely uses the word “Palestinian”.
“The world is wide,” she says. “Africa is big. Canada is big. The world will absorb the people of Gaza. How we do it? We encourage it. Palestinians in Gaza, the good ones, will be enabled. I’m not saying forced, I say enabled because they want to go.”
There is no evidence that Palestinians want to leave their homeland – although many may now dream of escaping temporarily, to save their lives. For most Palestinians, there is no way out. The borders are tightly controlled by Israel and Egypt, and no foreign countries have offered refuge.
I put it to her that her comments sound like a plan for ethnic cleansing. She does not deny it.
“You can call it ethnic cleansing. I repeat again, the Arabs do not want, normal Arabs do not want to live in Gaza. If you want to call it cleansing, if you want to call it apartheid, you choose your definition. I choose the way to protect the state of Israel. “
People like Daniella have the ear of powerful people in the Israeli government and the Israeli government is clearly receptive to what is being suggested as this article recalls …
“The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy, an Israeli think tank, published a paper last week stating that thanks to the vicious Hamas attacks of October 7, “There is currently a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip.”
The paper continues, “There is no doubt that in order for this plan to be enacted, many conditions need to exist in parallel. At the moment, these conditions exist, and it is unclear when such an opportunity will arise again, if at all.”
The article goes on to point out that the Institute is headed by Meir Ben Shabbat, a former Chief of Staff for national security, and he was appointed to that position by Benjamin Netanyahu. The calls of the Israeli extreme right for the same outcome clearly show there is a desire within a sector of the Israeli establishment for this outcome. Netanyahu himself unveiled a plan (termed Gaza 2035) to turn Gaza into the hub of a free trade zone but one that has little reference to the desires of Palestinians, and comes across as macabre given his forces have levelled the enclave.
And they have powerful allies with the ear of Donald Trump. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who in his first term was tasked with finding ways towards peace in the Middle East (which culminated in the notoriously one-sided Trump peace plan), has been expressing interest in Gaza for several months now.
As this article in the Guardian records from March 2024
“Jared Kushner has praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip….
“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner told his interviewer, the faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative, Prof Tarek Masoud. Kushner also lamented “all the money” that had gone into the territory’s tunnel network and munitions instead of education and innovation.”
Does that plan sound familiar? The Times of Israel reports that Kushner was a driving force behind Trump’s remarks advocating almost the exact same thing, the critical distinction being that the United States would undertake the task of clearing the Strip rather than Israel.
The reaction to Trump’s remarks have been almost overwhelmingly negative. The three Arab countries who would need to be on side, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have rejected the proposals out of hand.
European Allies have rejected the proposals.
The United Nations have rejected them. and Trump’s contempt for his allies is nothing compared to his contempt for organisations such as the United Nations.
Some Republicans such as Rand Paul have even done the unthinkable and criticised the President for his remarks.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor and a man who has been covering the Middle East Conflict seemingly as long as I have been alive, flatly said in his analysis that it ‘won’t happen’.
And after his speech some of his officials have been said to be ‘walking back’ elements of his plan.
The man himself? Doubling down.
“The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region. They would actually have a chance to be happy, safe, and free.
The US, working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the US would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!”
After all, those Arab states may have rejected the idea out of hand, but then those countries are also heavily reliant on the US for a variety of reasons, affording Trump leverage. Could he wield it as he has done against other nations such as Colombia?
European Allies may have rejected the proposals, but Trump’s contempt for his nation’s allies has been on display since he began running for office. I doubt their objections would trouble him overmuch.
The United Nations may have rejected them but Trump’s contempt for his allies is nothing compared to his contempt for organisations such as the United Nations. Their objections will bother him even less.
Some Republicans have criticised Trump, but every Republican who has persisted in defying Trump or otherwise crossed him has paid a political price down the road. Trump is known to hold grudges.
And while I pray Jeremy Bowen is right the plan will go nowhere, I also think it would be a dangerous mistake to see this as an impossible fantasy. Trump is not letting this idea go and we have no idea what the final shape of his proposal may end up being if he intends to keep running with it.
Now, in spite of all I have said wherein I try and make the case that what is derided as impossible is in fact possible, do I actually expect there to be ethnic cleansing as proposed?
No.
But that is exactly how I should be able to describe the prospect without introspection. Impossible. Highly unlikely is not good enough given what is involved. The very fact that Trump has mentioned it, and that this could merely be the opening gambit in some negotiating process, is ominous enough in itself.
Not only as it is another body blow against the rules based international order (which people won’t miss till it’s gone it seems), but that he is starting at the extreme end of the scale before possibly moving to alternatives that are more palatable than ethnic cleansing. And given everything save genocide itself is more palatable than ethnic cleansing, what dark fate may await the peoples of the Occupied Territories that people can say ‘well at least they weren’t forced out at gunpoint’?
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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