The American president’s right imagined to the lands of others is very familiar to Africans.
The declaration of the American president Donald Trump which he planned to expel all the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and to transform him into a “riviera of the Middle East under American control” made a right condemnation around the world, Including ironically western nations, this supported the genocidal bombing of Israel which devastated the territory. Many underline that ethnic cleaning violates international law and that Geneva conventions explicitly prohibit the forced displacement of civilian populations, for any reason whatsoever.
All this is true but as an annoyance, I was attracted by an aspect slightly different from the declaration of Trump: his right imagined to the land of others. The claims he makes to have the right to take Gaza should not be isolated from the affirmations he made on Greenland and the Panamanian territory. They all spring from the same root, which was nourished by half a millennial of European colonial enlargement.
The white fantasies of rights on the land of other peoples can be retraced from the Treaty of 1479 of Alcacovas, which established the principle according to which an area outside of Europe could be claimed by a European country and was followed in The 50 years by the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Saragossa Treaty with which the Portuguese and the Spanish pretended to divide the globe between them. There is a clear line of this to the infamous conference of West Berlin-Africa 400 years later, which the United States has assisted and all the great European powers which established the legal demand of Europeans that all Africa could be occupied by anyone could take it.
It is in Berlin that the doctrine of “effective occupation” – essentially requiring occupation powers to demonstrate that they could enforce their rule and protect free trade in order to legitimize their assertions – was articulated. The precedent of the use of the protection and development of capitalism to justify the colonial occupation is reflected today in the affirmation of Trump according to which he reconstructs and internationalizes Gaza, creating jobs and prosperity for “everyone ». Essentially, Trump involuntarily tries to base his colonial claim in Gaza on doctrine: that he can impose American domination, in this case by the expulsion of the natives, and that it will allow trade to flourish.
To be fair, Trump is based solely on ideas that have been circulating for months, largely emanating from Israel, who seek to justify the continuous occupation under the section to transform Gaza into Dubai or Singapore. In May of last year, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu allegedly revealed such a plan which would retain Israeli control of the territory and would justify it by the implementation of a “Marshall Plan” which would make it “a port important industrialist on the Mediterranean “and to be part of” a massive free trade area “.
As Africans can attest to it, the ideas that sacrifice local sovereignty and the altar rights of international free trade plans rarely work well for the natives. The structures intended to allow free trade presented by the Berlin conference 140 years ago gave birth to the horror which was the free state of the Congo – a real hell which, in 23 years, cost life to life Up to 13 million Congolese. The conference also supervised and militarized which has become known as Scramble for Africa, which was accompanied by brutal wars of conquest, illness and extermination campaigns. More than a century later, Africans still live with impact.
Despite this, all over the world, the memories of the Berlin conference and the devastation it has transformed faded. In 2017, addressing the Berlin humanitarian congress, then the CICR operations coordinator Mamadou Sow began his remarks by noting: “I am from Africa. And it’s very interesting to be in Berlin for a congress ”. The joke fell flat. He would comment later X that it was the day he “realized that the majority of educated Europeans know little about their colonial history”. Today, people are likely to blame the Africans themselves for its consequences, just as the Palestinians are systematically blamed for the consequences of the occupation and the Israeli blockade. How often we called the false refrain that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005, hoping that the newly independent country would become the Singapore of the Middle East, but that Hamas transformed it into a base of terror?
But the lesson is clear. The recolonization of Gaza, whether by Israel, the United States or any coalition of states, is neither viable nor moral. There is no alternative to local Palestinian sovereignty. It is the responsibility of African countries to rely on the history of Berlin and to say with one voice: never again!
The opinions expressed in this article are the own authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
