US President Donald Trump outlines his Gaza plan to reporters on Air Force One on January 27. Mandel Ngan/AFP
His ‘clean-out Gaza’ plan, under which the Palestinians who have been living in the besieged enclave for millennia will be provided safe haven in Egypt and Jordan, or, as some Israeli media reports claim, even in distant Indonesia in Southeast Asia or Albania in Europe, until the war-ravaged Gaza Strip is rebuilt and ready for habitation.
Trump said that Gaza’s residents could be relocated “temporarily or could be long-term.” This is maverick Trump’s euphemism for a permanent relocation: a master stroke of deception. Those who have studied Israeli practices know well that evicted means evicted permanently. The right to return is a dream and a hitherto unanswered prayer, as vouchsafed by the Palestinian Nakba generation living in refugee camps within Palestine and in neighbouring countries, and their offspring, who still carry the rusty iron keys of their houses from which they were evicted in 1948 when Israel was set up.
Trump’s words must be like music to Israel’s hardline leaders, whose ravenous appetite for Palestinian land knows no bounds until much of the Arab world is ethnically cleansed of.
When Israel’s hardline prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, agreed to the much-prayed-for ceasefire agreement on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, it certainly raised many eyebrows. It was unbelievable. Much of the credit went to Trump, who sent his special envoy to Israel to persuade Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire proposals.
When Netanyahu did, the sceptics wondered what Trump trick made the Israeli prime minister say yes. The secret is now in the open. His ‘clean-out-Gaza’ plan makes many analysts put two and two together and conclude that neither the ceasefire deal nor the Trump plan will lead to a two-state solution but to a single state where there will be no Palestinians. Israel’s origin and its 76-year history show that land grabbed is land annexed. Israel believes in expansion, which it justifies not only on biblical terms but also by citing security.
Take, for instance, the Israeli government ministers’ statement on newly occupied Syrian territories. They say Israeli troops will occupy these areas to provide security to Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights. This is Israel’s tried and tested formula for territorial expansion. This reminds me of the 2017 Neelan Thiruchelvam memorial oration delivered by Professor Eyal Weizman, an expert in spatial and visual cultures at the University of London. He highlighted Israel’s land-grabbing strategy under the topic ‘Forensic Architecture: Space and Violence in Palestine and Beyond”.
If I remember the content of his lecture correctly, he said it would all begin with what was seen as an innocuous exercise of building a communications tower in a Palestinian area on the West Bank. The Palestinians have little option but to evacuate themselves to another area. They can take whatever is offered as compensation, which is hardly adequate, or forego it in protest.
Israel uses the Land Acquisition Law of 1953 to take over Palestinian land. Despite criticism from international human rights groups, Israeli governments have invoked the law to expropriate land for purposes such as development, settlement, or security. The law has been used to retroactively validate prior expropriations and transfer ownership to Israeli state institutions.
Prof. Weizman said that once the small plot of land was secured for the tower site, temporary houses would be built to accommodate Israeli technicians. Soon the communications tower will become a communications station, requiring more technicians. More houses would be built not only for the Israeli workers but also for their families and the troops who provide security to the workers. More land would be acquired to house the expanding workforce and their families. A settlement would thus be built. It would require more security and a security buffer. More Palestinian land would be acquired. There is no end to the expansion. It is state policy.
Trump’s plan was manna for the extremist Israeli leaders. Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, welcomed the idea as “out-of-the-box thinking,” which will enable Palestinians to “establish new and good lives in other places.”
But both Egypt, which borders the Gaza Strip, and Jordan, which shares a border with the West Bank, have rejected the plan.
Gaza’s Palestinian people, who matter, have rejected it outright and said that, under no circumstances, would they let go of the Palestinian land they bravely defended, enduring 15 months of Israel’s genocidal barbarity.
So what will Trump and his Zionist allies propose if they fail to wheedle the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip to Egypt and Jordan? Will the Trump administration let Israel renew its bombardment of the Gaza Strip once Hamas releases all the hostages under the ceasefire deal? This is likely, given the ceasefire deal’s fragility, reeked with Israel’s repeated threats to revoke the agreement on the unsubstantiated claim that Hamas is not keeping its part of the deal.
The Trump plan is drawing wide criticism from international human rights experts from across the globe. The widely respected UN’s special rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, denounced Trump’s plan and called it “ethnic cleansing.” “It is illegal, immoral, and irresponsible,” she said.
If the Palestinians are forcibly removed, it is a breach of international law, especially the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). According to the Rome Statute, the forcible eviction of a population is a war crime.
But does Trump care about international law? The US has a poor record of respecting international law, whether under a Democratic president or a Republican president. The US would go to any extent to undermine international law to achieve its national interest goals. Last year, the US House of Representatives pass the “Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act,” which sought to impose sanctions on the ICC and its officials if they attempted to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies, especially Israel.
Trump is not the answer. He is the problem. The Palestinians’ plight, which took the form of a genocide under Biden’s watch, may become worse under Trump’s watch with his preposterous Middle East policy. Already under his watch, Jenin and several West Bank areas are seeing Gaza-like onslaughts by Israeli troops. Nearly a thousand Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, and some 15,000 have been forcibly evicted in Jenin alone, while armed Israeli settlers, freed by Trump from Biden-era sanctions, grab more and more Palestinian land.
Under Trump’s watch, Israel yesterday banned the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israeli-occupied territories. The ban which will severely affect Palestinian lives goes well with the Trump-Netanyahu schemes to ratchet up the difficulties the Palestinians are suffering. Their plan is to make Gaza unlivable and force the Palestinians out.
Trump cares not about Palestinian suffering. He is not a humanitarian. Instead of empathising with the suffering Palestinians, he is salivating for the Mediterranean seafront real estate that is Gaza, which is also rich in unexploited gas and oil deposits. This is part of the game the US and Israel have been playing together for the past 76 years at the expense of Palestinian suffering while subjugating the Arabs.
No comments:
Post a Comment