On April 7, US President Donald Trump met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the second time since his inauguration. Addressing the media, Trump doubled his previous comments on the Gaza Strip, describing him as an “incredible element of important real estate”.
Trump has also repeated his suggestion that Palestinians should leave the band “to different countries” and stated that people “really like this vision. … Many people love my concept”.
A few days later, around 70% of Gaza had been transformed into a “non-go area” for the Palestinians. Confirming that Israel works “in accordance with the vision of the American president, which we are looking to achieve”, the Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz declared the intention of Israel to “grasp” more territory, adding that the “voluntary passage” will be given to the Palestinians who want to leave.
It is now clear that Trump’s statements on Gaza had the effect of legitimizing a long -standing Israeli vision of the ethnic cleansing of the band. What the American president calls “my concept” is in fact not at all his.
During the decades of Israeli occupation and colonization of the Gaza Strip, there have been several plans to empty or disperse the Palestinian population in order to guarantee full control of this part of Palestine. The power of colonial practices has also been tested. For example, to draw Israeli settlers and thus help transform the demography of Gaza, the band was at some point even the promotion of “Hawaii of Israel”.
Left of the Israeli war of objectives in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the Gaza Strip came out of the Armistice agreements of 1949 under the Egyptian military regime. Constituting only a small part of what was until then the district of Gaza in Palestine, the Gaza Strip sheltered two groups of Palestinians: the local population and the refugees – people who had been forced to leave their land while Israel expanded its territorial scope during the war.
While weapons were silent, the Gaza Strip has become known in Israeli political circles as “unfinished work” – a slice of land alongside the Egyptian border that Israeli leaders would like to control, preferably without its Palestinian population.
Israel’s first attempt to take Gaza by force occurred in 1956. But under pressure from the American president Dwight Eisenhower, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion had no choice but to withdraw and end the Israeli occupation. The sloppy attempt taught Israel an important lesson in Israel: to redesign the Middle East map and to make its territorial expansion program a success, Israel needed American support and approval.
The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was much more successful in this regard. Thanks to conquest and occupation, the Gaza Strip was subject to direct Israeli domination. This opened the door to revitalize the “transfer” – forced displacement and the ethnic cleaning of the Palestinians. Given as both necessary and authorized or, in the words of Ben Gurion, “an important and Zionist human idea”, the transfer was recognized as an effective tool to advance the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
During the following years, as noted by the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha, the transfer acquired different labels. These understood “the exchange of population”, the “Arabic return to Arabia”, “voluntary emigration” and “rehabilitation”, different Israeli governments adopting different approaches.
An approach was the “open bridges” of the Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, who allowed the Palestinians of Gaza to leave for other countries in search of work. Another was to open offices in the Gaza refugee camps to organize and pay travel and passports for Palestinians willing to “voluntarily migrate”, which has indeed transformed the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry into a “World Travel Agency”. Whatever the approach, Israel’s political objective remained the same: to create a reader in Palestinians to leave the band.
“I want them to go all, even if they go to the moon,” said Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. Expressing Israeli frustration, Eshkol articulated the feeling of being stuck with what was considered the problem of Gaza. After all, only the Palestinian population there – and the population of important refugees in particular – stood in the process of the complete Israeli annexation.
In response to the “dilemma” of Gaza of Israel, his politicians also looked for more complete solutions. This led to an almost continuous flow of plans for the “rehabilitation” of the Palestinians outside the band. From immediately after the 1967 war, a variety of potential destinations appeared. These include the West Bank, the Sinai, Iraq or even as far as Canada and Australia peninsula.
Despite Israeli efforts and the development of plans – and to the great disappointment of Israeli decision -makers – the initiatives came at the origin of null because the number of Palestinians leaving the band remained limited. And given other considerations, including moral, legal and diplomatic plans, the plans to move a large number of Gaza Palestinians have been left in the drawer.
But as Israeli politicians turned to the examination of their menu of choice in the post-October 2023, the era, “voluntary emigration” or forced displacement, re-developed. No more sensitivity to international opinion and potential reactions. Instead, Trump paved the way, making statements on Gaza which, in fact, transform decades of ideology and Zionist practice into official American policy.
By means of his political position, the American president has legitimized a long -standing Israeli vision of ethnic cleaning in the strip. In the process, its articulation of politics has become closer to the component of revisionist Zionism which considered the Palestinians as foreigners in their own country and, consequently, “transferable”.
By arguing that the Palestinians must go to make Israel and the region in security, Trump moved away from the principle of the Palestinians of the international that the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – as elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territory – have legitimate rights to self -determination in their country. As such, Trump recalls the revisionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky Zionist ideologist, who argued that “when the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish request to be saved, it is like the claims of appetite in relation to the claims of famine” with a “transfer” linked to Jewish rights to the earth.
The cynical promises of a better future for people who find themselves nothing other than their land after a brutal war of erasure and plausible genocide must be taken seriously. The legitimacy that Trump has given to Israeli plans constitutes a threat in here and now, but he could also survive his presidency.
This is because he offered an American presidential sanction for ethnic cleaning as an acceptable tool. This leaves the door open to Israel – in the near or distant future – to continue the “transfer”, the “rehabilitation” and “voluntary emigration” of the Palestinians, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank.
In addition, the American president has repeatedly communicated American support to the crises of illegal lands and colonization. By suggesting that Gaza (and Greenland) could become an “American territory”, it has reintroduced and validated ideas that most world leaders had put on the heap of the scrap of history.
Finally, Trump has moved away from the premise American position from working towards a two -state solution. In fact, taking into account his statements, there seems to be a fundamental contempt for the Palestinians in Gaza and their collective right to self -determination.
By examining the current American policy against the historic archives, the “Riviera of the Middle East” of Trump seems to be a curious combination of Zionist ethnic cleaning under the model of “transfer” and the colonial ideal of “Hawaii of Israel”.
It is not surprising that Trump was encouraged by Israeli leaders while he calls for forced depopulation of the Gaza Strip and its transformation into a full -fledged colonial territory – annexed or other. After all, Trump’s ideas follow in the footsteps of the Zionist leaders of Ben Gurion in Netanyahu, under which the transfer has always been the favorite but diplomatic and legally difficult option.
With Trump who comes out in front, such challenges could turn into the opportunities of tomorrow. There remains the task of other states to resist itself in American Israeli normalization of continuous ethnic cleaning and colonial seizures in Palestine.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.