US President Donald Trump displayed his usual combination of disruption and delusion with his bombshell proposal on February 4 for the United States to take over and develop the Gaza Strip after displacing its Palestinian residents to destinations unknown. The proposal has little chance of being implemented, does not seem to have emerged from a serious policy review within the Trump administration, and overturns all the assumed foundations of the last half century of Arab-Israeli peacemaking. But it is fully consistent with recent and historical American policies on Palestine-Israel, and significantly clarifies several points of global interest, including US foreign policy values, the current weakened condition of Palestinians and Arabs, the influence of Zionism/Israel in the United States and around the world, and the ongoing trajectory of Western imperial and colonial legacies that refuse to die.
The most significant and troubling aspect of the Trump proposal is that it clarifies how the United States and Israel now work as a formal team that uses immense military power to run amok across the Middle East and perhaps further afield. The Trump proposal, apparently whimsical, spontaneous, and unstudied, offers no serious details about what will happen to Gaza and its indigenous Palestinian population, so we should not waste time analyzing mythical ideas or eventualities.
The big development is how the American-Israeli alliance now formalizes with a bang the heretofore sporadic destruction of the body of international humanitarian and human rights laws and protections that were created after WWII to prevent a recurrence of crimes like the Nazi Holocaust against European Jews. Israel has long ignored these legal and moral safeguards in its actions in Palestine and the Middle East, attacking, occupying, and annexing Arab territories at will and disrupting and destroying the lives of millions of people.
The United States and most western powers routinely looked on and expressed ‘concern’ about Israel’s settlement or annexation of occupied Palestinian lands or slaughter of civilians. Only the United States formally and consistently provided most of the financial, military, and diplomatic support that allowed Israel to pursue its colonial policies since 1967, as the Joe Biden administration did in enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The United States now has shifted from merely being complicit in the genocide to initiating and being a full participant in this latest “crime against humanity” plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
This now makes the United States and Zionism/Israel the biggest threat to global peace, security, and stability in two related realms. The first is the danger of attacking, occupying, or ethnically cleansing populations that resist American-Israeli plans. The second is the corrosive impact of US government support of Israeli manipulations of Western human and citizenship rights to prevent criticism of Israel. This slowly whittles down rights of free speech, equal rights, due process of law, access to quality university education, and other such arenas that must submit to Zionist/Israeli demands which should be placed above basic constitutional rights in the United States, United Kingdom, and other Western countries.
The Trump plan’s heightened cruelty toward and contempt for Palestinians and their rights is significant for its dramatic and sudden scale, and for scrapping half a century of Washington’s purported commitment to a two-state resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict. It is not new, however, in its attitude toward Palestinian national rights, for US policy since Israel’s creation in 1947-48 has supported Zionist aims over equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians, and consistently dehumanized Palestinians and denied them their human dignity, agency, and self-determination—as the Biden and Trump administrations both have confirmed.
The American (and British) legacy over the entire past century has allowed Israel to act with impunity across the entire Middle East, and to bend Western foreign policies to its liking, which we see dramatized nowadays. The extreme nature of these latest Trump proposals indicates that the United States has taken its role as the standard bearer of Western imperial legacies in the Middle East to a higher level of direct military occupation of Palestinian lands and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while simultaneously ordering sovereign states like Jordan and Egypt to host expelled Palestinians from Gaza. This endangers the stability of those countries if they give in to American demands, given their people’s intense opposition to new US-Israeli oppressive initiatives. These regimes are heavily dependent on American military and economic support, which Trump could easily withhold to pressure them, in the process badly destabilizing them.
Another danger is that the US-Israel entente might wait until the hostages/prisoners exchanges in Gaza are completed in the coming months, to then encourage the Palestinians to leave Gaza by imposing new restrictions or bombing and starving them once more, as the Israeli Army has been doing over the past 16 months. This could happen while restrictions on imports into Gaza also make it impossible for Gazans to rebuild their society after Israel’s genocidal war.
The larger meaning of such possible moves is that the entente will now experiment with new ways to deny Arab states and peoples their sovereign rights, keeping them instead in a condition of permanent imperial vassals. Many smaller states around the world should be worried that this new variety of twenty-first century American-Israeli imperialism that is imposed by military and economic might could be used in other places around the world.
Most dimensions of the Trump proposal and its possible consequences remain to be clarified in the months ahead, although Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to calm down the ensuing international uproar by saying the displacement of Palestinians would be temporary. One troubling sign is that 7 out of 10 Israelis polled recently said they supported expelling the Palestinians from Gaza, meaning that this idea reflects much more than rightwing Zionist extremist sentiments. This, indeed, makes resistance to Trump’s dangerous proposal essential for preserving Palestinian human and national rights as well as regional stability in the Middle East.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.