Trump's Gaza plan sparks global outrage and rejection

We think of bad ideas as being just bad because of the way they make bad use of our time. But nothing surpasses, for their jarring effect, preposterous ones, especially when they are advanced, seemingly in earnest, by the president of a nation that prides itself on being “leader of the free world”.

If you must know, President Donald Trump has stumbled upon what he seems to consider a sure-fire panacea for bringing peace to Palestine — clean out Gaza of Gazans, beginning with “probably a million and a half people”.

Chatting with reporters on Air Force One, Trump said he had spoken on the phone with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and Egypt’s President Sissi, about his plan to “clean out Gaza”, a proposal previously advocated by Israel’s far-right ultranationalists, messianic settlers, military hardliners. He added that this taking of people “could be temporary” or “could be long term”.

If, as president of the United States, Donald Trump had thought that he was making the governments of Jordan and Egypt, as we say, an offer they couldn’t refuse, he was immediately disabused of the notion.

The Jordanian foreign minister, publicly rebuffed the proposal, saying curtly: “Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians”.

So was equally firm Egypt’s position. In fact, that position had been made clear from the outset of the Gaza war, when expansionist Israelis in and out of government began floating ideas about the ethnic cleansing of the enclave and colonising it with Israelis.

Egypt’s ambassador to the US, Motaz Zahran, had as early as October 2023 made clear his country’s stand on the issue in an op-ed in The Hill newspaper in which he stated: “Egypt’s stance is clear: It cannot be part of any solution that involves the transfer of Palestinians to Sinai or elsewhere in Egypt, an unimaginable tragedy for a resilient people who have an unbreakable bond with their ancestral land”.

The idea of displacement of Gazans drew immediate criticism from government officials across the Arab world. And for its incoherence, not to mention its obvious contravention of international humanitarian law, it drew harsh, outright dismissal from the European Union. Many of whose member states were quick to identify it as an attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its population.

A German foreign ministry spokesperson, as a case in point, said on Monday that Berlin “shared the view of the European Union, our Arab allies and the United Nations ... that the Palestinian population must not be expelled from Gaza and that Gaza must not be permanently occupied or recolonised”.

No wonder. Trump’s plan is not only in direct conflict with anything that, by a stretch, may pass for a practical plan of any kind but it is, strictly speaking, loony tunes.

Trump’s proposed solution of the Palestine Question rekindles crushing memories and conjures up horrific images in the minds of those of us to whom the history of Palestinian displacement — displacement that has recurred over and over again since 1948 — is a lived experience and thus an indivisible part of their identity.

Long trek home

Here are some headlines of news stories datelined Gaza from last week: In carts and on foot, Gazans make the long trek home. Displaced Palestinians reunite with loved ones in Northern Gaza.

Palestinians return to ruined homes, communities and lives. Tens of thousands of Palestinians begin journeying home to devastated Northern Gaza.

The one headline missing here is this: Who will heal the trauma these unfortunates’ children will endure for the rest of their lives?

These Gazans are, at least, an internally displaced community, still living in their ancestral homeland. Now President Trump wants “probably a million and a half” of them to be sent elsewhere and to live their lives outside that homeland as a stateless people. And a people who become stateless instantly become, in the words of Hannah Arendt, who herself was once stateless, a people who “have no right to have rights”.

No one, not even the president of a big power like the United States of America, has the right to deny a people, any people on God’s green earth, their right to have rights.

Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.