|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Moving Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip may not happen, but at least, there will be a four-year respite from pressure to achieve the unachievable.
By: Jonathan S. Tobin
Everyone who claims to be an “expert” on the Middle East is sure about one thing: President Donald Trump’s proposal to move Palestinian Arabs out of Gaza either cannot or should not happen. Of course, the same experts said the same thing about the 2020 Abraham Accords that achieved normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab and Muslim-majority countries. They also predicted that Trump’s moving of the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would set off Armageddon (it did not).
So, when faced with a choice between an “impossible” Trump idea and conventional wisdom from the foreign-policy establishment, perhaps it might be smart for some of those “experts” to pump the brakes on their apocalyptic warnings.
Nevertheless, they might be right this time—and at first glance, it’s hard to see how Trump’s idea can be put into effect without massive use of U.S. military force and equally massive expenditure of federal funds. And we already know that the administration has no intention of sending troops to Gaza or investing much, if any, money in the idea.
The end of the fantasy
Even if it doesn’t happen, Trump’s decision to champion the idea is enormously consequential. It decisively changes the conversation about the Middle East in a way that dwarfs the importance of even the most significant pro-Israel policy moves of his first term. Above all else, it means the end of the fantasy about the creation of a Palestinian state.
The international community, Arab and Muslim worlds, and the Palestinians themselves are outraged about the idea of a reconstruction plan for Gaza that would allow any people to leave the Strip. They are not appalled by it because they think it would be bad for Gaza civilians. Say what you like about Trump and his intentions or even those of Israelis and pro-Israel Americans who cheered his words, but it’s clear that it would be good for the Palestinian Arabs who have been stuck there to be given a fresh start somewhere else. And it would make it a lot more likely that the rebuilding of Gaza would not mean the reconstruction of Hamas terror fortifications and tunnels, as opposed to making it more livable or even developing its beachfront property.
It’s a nonstarter because all of these groups are still holding on to the idea that it must be preserved as a bastion of anti-Zionist irredentism. In their minds, Gaza’s only purpose is to serve, along with Judea and Samaria, and some of Jerusalem, as parts of an independent Palestinian state that they still believe must be set up next to Israel.
Nothing can be allowed to interfere with that failed idea. Not the Palestinians’ repeated rejection of two-state solutions dating back to the 1947 U.N. partition plan for the then-British Mandate for Palestine. Not their repeated refusals of peace plans or anything that might compel them to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state, no matter where its borders can be drawn. Not the clear intention of the genocidal Hamas terrorists who ran Gaza as an independent Palestinian state in all but name from 2007 until Oct. 6. 2023 to destroy the Jewish state and its people. And not the fact that the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority and Palestinian public opinion, in general, approve of Hamas and its goals, for which the barbaric atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, were just the trailer.
Wishing away Palestinian intransigence
None of this prevented the international community, in addition to every American administration until Trump 2.0, from holding onto the belief that a Palestinian state was the way to end the conflict. A Palestinian state was an integral part of the first Trump administration’s “Peace Through Prosperity” Mideast plan, though it was appropriately far less generous than previous offers. And even after Oct. 7, former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were among those who pretended that the last century of Palestinian Arab intransigence was meaningless and no reason to stop pushing for the same idea that had failed time and again.
The genius of Trump’s Gaza rebuilding proposal is not so much the simple logic of offering people the chance given to other refugee populations or anyone else in an area destroyed by war a new life elsewhere. And the key point is not wailing about its infeasibility or alleged violation of international law. Nor the fact that it is not in the interests of the United States or Israel to force the shaky regimes in Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians who are likely to want to overthrow those governments, and replace them with Hamas or allies like the Muslim Brotherhood.
The centerpiece of this project is its clear assumption that there will never be an independent Palestinian state in Gaza or elsewhere.
The P.A. may rule the internal affairs of Arabs in Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”). However, the corrupt kleptocracy that continues to subsidize terrorism through its “pay for slay” policy rewarding violent Palestinian terrorists, including those responsible for Oct. 7, has never shown any realistic interest in transitioning to a sovereign entity devoted to creating a peaceful and productive state alongside Israel.
Gaza has been a dagger pointed at Israel ever since it withdrew every soldier, settler and settlement from the Strip in the summer of 2005; two years later, P.A. rule (also run by its political party, Fatah) was toppled by Hamas in a bloody coup against its rivals.
Still, it remains an article of faith among the foreign-policy establishment that Israel must be compelled to facilitate the creation of a state—a state whose main purpose will serve, like Gaza under Hamas, as a springboard for Israel’s eventual destruction.
What Trump has done is to serve notice that the United States will no longer regard the facilitating of this destructive concept as a policy goal. On the contrary, he has made it clear that whatever else does or doesn’t happen in the coming years, a different solution has to be found for the Palestinians. The people who cheered the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping and wanton destruction on Oct. 7 will not be rewarded for this with more pressure on Jerusalem to do something the overwhelming majority of Israelis from right to left oppose as not so much unwise as suicidal.
The ‘nakba’ narrative
There are consequences for generations of intransigence that has hardened into a belief system inextricably linking Palestinian nationalism to unending war on the Jews. Trump is the first American president since the conflict began to explicitly state what those consequences must be.
Since the Jewish people regained sovereignty over their ancient homeland in 1948, the Palestinian Arabs and their foreign enablers held onto the nakba narrative, which holds the creation of modern-day Israel as the great “catastrophe” or “disaster” that must be reversed. Since the late 1980s, American policymakers have tried to split the difference between the two peoples by pushing for a two-state solution that would, in theory, make everyone happy. But that was just a form of denial about Palestinian intentions for Israel’s destruction that no proof of the folly of the idea could be allowed to disturb.
That’s why Trump’s idea is so painful. Contrary to Palestinian claims, it is not a repeat of the nakba, when Arabs fled the territory of the newborn State of Israel while an even greater number of Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Muslim and Arab world. It is recognition that the Palestinians must be compelled to give up their ambition to turn back the clock to 1948 or even 1917 (the date of Britain’s Balfour Declaration that declared that empire’s support for the idea of a Jewish National Home). And the only way to conclusively do that is to take away from them even the possibility of more Oct. 7-style attacks through which they hope to isolate and gradually wear down Israelis to the point where they will give up.
Chances for a state
The notion of a two-state solution died a long time ago.
Yet it could have easily been put into effect if only veteran terrorist and P.A. leader Yasser Arafat—newly off his title as chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organization with blood on his hands—had said “yes” to the offers of independence and statehood offered him by former President Bill Clinton and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But after Arafat answered that peace offer with the terrorist war of attrition known as the Second Intifada, most Israelis understood that the land for peace schemes they had been sold was nothing more than land for terror. The conversion of Gaza into a terror state and missile launching pad against Israeli civilians after 2005 only confirmed that unhappy truth.
Still, the Palestinians had more opportunities and much international support. Statehood could have happened when President George W. Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an even sweeter offer to Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. And the opportunity for Palestinian statehood was always a theoretical possibility during the eight years of the presidency of Barack Obama, who did everything he could to tilt the diplomatic playing field in their direction.
But after Oct. 7 and the war that followed it, it’s safe to say that Palestinian statehood stopped being anything but a tired and meaningless policy concept that had outlived its sell-by date.
What lies ahead for the Palestinians or Gaza? It’s hard to say.
Trump pushed for a ceasefire/hostage release deal that could leave Hamas in power in Gaza. But his statements about the necessity for the removal of much, if not all, of the Palestinian population for the area to be rebuilt shows he doesn’t want that to happen. And as much as he would like for there to be no wars taking place on his watch, it seems unlikely that he would oppose further Israeli efforts to finish off Hamas—as Biden and Harris did—once it’s clear that the ceasefire will not force its disarming and eviction from power. The era of “daylight” between the United States and Israel is also over.
It’s entirely possible that the Palestinians in Gaza will insist on staying in the same state of limbo that they have chosen for themselves since 1948. They may continue waiting for Israel’s destruction so the descendants of the original refugees can go “home” to a country that never actually existed as a separate Palestinian Arab nation and never will. And it’s equally possible that with or without Hamas leadership, the political culture of the Palestinians is so twisted and intransigent that few will dare to take Trump up on his offer of the resettlement they’ve been denied for all these years for fear of being killed by Hamas operatives or their neighbors.
But there should be no doubt that despite the calumnies heaped upon Trump for having the temerity to discard foreign-policy conventional wisdom, this is the best offer the Palestinians will ever likely get.
There is no rational alternative
They may get the satisfaction of seeing Trump’s idea die for lack of support from anyone but Israel. But the alternative to the problem is for the Palestinian people to remain living in squalor, where they are only considered useful by their leaders, activists, university students and others who exploit the situation, as cannon fodder to wage war against the Jewish state.
What Trump has done is to consign the idea of Palestinian statehood to the ash heap of history, where it belongs. Along with his withdrawal from UNRWA—the U.N. refugee agency that has refused to resettle the Palestinians since 1948 and that helped perpetuate the war on Israel—and his recent defunding of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose “humanitarian” projects similarly helped prop up Palestinian intransigence, Trump has decisively shifted U.S. policy away from fantasy to realism.
American support was always essential for Palestinian statehood. That is finished. His critics may decry this all they want, but the bitter truth they fail to acknowledge is that their alternatives to Trump’s Gaza idea are even more unrealistic and dangerous than his.
(JNS.org)
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
