Any Arab leader who openly collaborates with an US-Israeli Nakba scheme signs his own death warrant, argues Mouin Rabbani [photo credit: Getty Images]
Although Gaza City is among the world’s oldest cities, the Gaza Strip did not exist until the mid-twentieth century. It was created as a direct result of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of those regions of the British Mandate of Palestine that became the state of Israel.
Initiated in late 1947 by Zionist militias, and continued by the Israeli military until the early 1950s, the Nakba saw some 200,000 Palestinians, many from the much larger Gaza District, forcibly expelled to a rectangular strip in Palestine’s southwestern corner comprising a mere one per cent of the territory of the former British Mandate.
Previously home to 80,000 Palestinians, the population of the Gaza Strip more than tripled, virtually overnight. The sudden transformation also produced a humanitarian crisis that would be rivalled only by the current one, and like it also a direct result of Israeli policy.
Long before Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967 it became obsessed with reducing its population. It believed, entirely correctly, that the presence of hundreds of thousands of embittered, uprooted, pauperised refugees, often within walking distance of their former homes, was a recipe for irredentism and formed a permanent threat to the new state’s security.
Rather than resolve this dilemma by complying with its international obligations and enable their return, Israel’s leaders put forward a series of proposals to displace the Palestinians it had dispossessed yet further from their homes – to Libya, Iraq, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and at one point even Paraguay. None made much of a dent in Gaza’s demography, and bolstered by improvements in public health and increasing fertility rates, the Gaza Strip soon became one of the most densely populated territories on earth.
As Israel feared, the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians also played a key role in the formation and development of the contemporary Palestinian national movement.
Many of the founding leaders of Fatah, and later Islamic Jihad and Hamas, including Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir, Salah Khalaf, Fathi Shiqaqi, Abdel-Aziz Awda, Shaikh Ahmad Yasin, and Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, to name but a few, were connected to the Gaza Strip, more often than not as refugees. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems perfectly logical that the October 7 2023 attacks emerged from the Gaza Strip rather than the West Bank or Lebanon.
Serious discussion of the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, what Israelis call “voluntary transfer”, had largely dissipated from the mainstream during the 1980s and, particularly after the 1993 Oslo Accords, became the preserve of the extreme right.
Rather than proposing mass expulsion in response to Israel’s inability to crush a growing insurgency in the territory during the First Intifada, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 expressed the hope that he would one day wake up “to find that Gaza has sunk into the sea”.
The genocidal hysteria unleashed within Israel in response to the October 2023 attacks, and the unconditional support offered its extreme right government by Israel’s Western sponsors and allies, revived ethnic cleansing as a policy objective within both Israeli elites and the mainstream. Israeli politicians and commentators went straight from denying there had ever been a Nakba to demanding a second one here and now.
Gaza riviera: Dead in the water
This time the main proposal, to force the Gaza Strip’s Palestinians into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, was also embraced by the United States and endorsed to varying degrees by European governments and politicians. In late 2023 President Biden sent his hapless Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, on a tour of Washington’s key Arab client regimes to plan its implementation. To his considerable surprise his efforts were not only rebuffed but dismissed out of hand.
What Blinken – who previously thought partitioning Iraq into three sectarian statelets was a brilliant idea – on this occasion failed to grasp is that the loyalty of Arab leaders to Washington does not extend to the level of committing political suicide.
The Nakba, and a determination to remain on their land and resist further displacement by Israel, is not only central to contemporary Palestinian identity but also defines Arab perceptions of Palestine and their solidarity with its people. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that expulsion is viewed as a fate worse than death.
This being the case, any Arab leader who openly collaborates with an US-Israeli Nakba scheme signs his own death warrant.
Speaking at Harvard University several months later, the slumlord and failed real estate developer, Trump’s son-in-law Prince Jared of Kushner, put forward a similar idea. Describing the Gaza Strip as “valuable waterfront property”, he proposed that Israel “move the people out” of the Gaza Strip and then “clean it up”.
Apparently informed of Blinken’s car crash diplomacy by his Arab investors, Kushner left Sinai unmentioned and instead proposed that Israel sequester the Gaza Strip’s Palestinian population in the Negev Desert.
Once Israel had sanitized the territory to its satisfaction, and with its property apportioned to the appropriate investors, the Palestinians would be permitted to resume their lives as displaced refugees in the Gaza Strip.
It seems fairly clear that Kushner played a starring role in formulating his father-in-law’s proposal and encouraged him to float it. Presumably, an assessment that Israel has been immeasurably strengthened rather than weakened during the past 15 months, and belief that Trump unlike Biden can bend Arab leaders to his will, produced the delusion on steroids that the White House circulated in recent days.
That Trump is already walking back key elements of his proposal despite claiming it was received with unanimous ecstasy demonstrates that it’s dead in the water and won’t be going anywhere. To begin with, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have already voted with their feet.
According to the United Nations, more than half a million have returned to the northern Gaza Strip, while only approximately 50,000 have headed south – to other regions of the territory rather than massing at the Egyptian border. US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff’s claim that Palestinians were returning to the north, taking stock of the systematic destruction, and heading straight back clearly lacks a basis in reality.
Palestine is still the issue
Not less importantly, Israel has failed to defeat the Palestinians, and without military victory a Gaza Nakba is impractical.
Will the US armed forces seek succeed where Israel has not? We’ll apparently never know, because opposition from within his own base persuaded Trump to quickly retract what appeared to be a commitment to send US troops into Gaza.
Secondly, Washington’s closest Arab allies have once again rejected the proposal out of hand, only this time more forcefully and more publicly than with Blinken in 2023.
The Saudi foreign ministry, apparently alarmed and incensed in equal measure by Trump’s additional claim that Riyadh is not making Palestinian statehood a condition for normalisation with Israel, went so far as to put out a press release at 4:30 in the morning to make its position unambiguously clear.
Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, and even the United Arab Emirates issued similar public declarations. Yet clearly, the public rebuke from Saudi Arabia was pivotal in bringing Trump back to earth.
It will take the new administration some time to recognise that the Middle East in 2025 is a different kettle of fish than that which it left behind in 2020. In the meantime significant damage has already been done. Ethnic cleansing, normalised behind closed doors by the Biden administration, has now been placed in the public domain by the Trump presidency. And this applies equally to the West Bank.
The core principle of US-EU-Israeli policy, that Palestinians must have no role in determining their future, that it should be decided for them, and that this future must be designed to serve Israeli and Western rather than Palestinian interests, has been reconfirmed. And Israel has been given an implicit license to derail the ceasefire agreement at the time of its choosing. Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s fugitive prime minister, could barely contain his glee during his joint appearance with the US president.
As others have noted, Trump’s proposals regarding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal may be equally harebrained but in contrast to the Gaza Riviera scheme are at least identifiably connected to US interests. The challenge now is to impress upon Washington that it’s interests are better served by compelling Israel to fulfil its commitments under the ceasefire agreements it was forced to accept, rather than indulge its genocidal fantasies.
Mouin Rabbani is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies.
Follow Mouin on X: @MouinRabbani
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
