President Trump’s controversial plan for solving the Gaza crisis has been received by Israel and many local conservative outlets with approval and by practically everybody else with disbelief, criticism, and even insult. The president suggested that the U.S. would come to “own” Gaza, resettle its population, and redevelop the land.
“Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land,” he said. America would be “responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site” before it would “get rid of the destroyed buildings [and] level it out.”
He proposed that the 1.8 million people living in Gaza could be moved to Jordan, Egypt, other countries, or “various domains” for them to “permanently… live out their lives in peace and harmony”—but with no right of return. “We’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is.”
One can instantly see the problems with Trump’s “bold vision.” Nobody wants the Palestinians, whether those living in the West Bank or in Gaza, since history has shown they are nothing but trouble. To begin with, the Palestinians are not a nation with a long history, a universally recognized flag, an extensive literature, and demarcated borders, but an invented people whose date of birth is 1964 when the Palestinian National Organization (PLO) was established in Egypt under the aegis of the KGB and Yasser Arafat. This is, or should be, common knowledge.
Acting like a nation when they are a collection of mainly South Syrians finding themselves stateless after the collapse of the Ottoman regime in World War I may garner empathy from some quarters but should not confer international credibility upon them or elevate them above every other displaced peoples.
It is significant that there are two United Nations Agencies to address the refugee crises. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) deals with the millions of post-WWII European refugees, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was intended specifically for over 700,000 Palestinian refugees. They were special. There is no mystery in their unique status. They were anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, which is all it takes to justify moral turpitude and subsidize political malevolence.
More to the point, to put it bluntly, they are purveyors of disruption, as every Muslim nation in the Middle East is well aware. The so-called Palestinians are serviceable only as diplomatic and propaganda weapons aimed at Israel; otherwise, they are rejected, avoided, or expelled as liabilities to societal cohesion. Jordan recognized after the 1970 Black September movement that the Palestinians were a destabilizing force. It reacted by expelling the insurrectionists to Lebanon, where they have since effectively destroyed the country in the form of Hezbollah.
Egypt will have no dealings with Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian government combats as a threat to the state. Palestinian refugees, aka Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, assassinated the Egyptian PM Anwar Sadat, attempted to assassinate the Egyptian King twice, killed 16 Egyptian police officers, and murdered civilians, in order to create a state within another state just as they and their congeners have tried to do in Jordan, Lebanon and Israel.
Egypt is now proposing the formation of an independent, technocratic Palestinian committee to rule Gaza for an interim 6-month period “under the umbrella of” the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA), whose members would have no affiliations to Palestinian factions. How they plan to exclude Hamas from government when Hamas refuses to surrender power remains unaddressed. The Palestinian Authority, for its part, may be Palestinian, but it has no authority, having been trounced and booted out of Gaza by Hamas after a brief civil war in 2007.
As Townhall further reports, “Egyptian reconstruction plan for Gaza would cost $53 billion and avoid displacing Palestinians from the enclave, in contrast to U.S. President Donald Trump's ‘Middle East Riviera’ vision.” The money may be welcome, but the condition won’t fly.
What, then, is one to make of the civilian population of Gaza? As I pointed out in a previous article for PJ Media, Hamas has a strong grip on popular support. Indeed, a recent poll found that over 70% of Palestinians support the barbaric October 7 terror attacks by Hamas on defenseless Israeli civilians, including torching families alive, gang rape, beheadings, mass kidnap, and torture.
Polls also indicate the majority of Gazans are Hamas partisans and proxies. McGill University emeritus professor Philip Carl Salzman confirms that Palestinian opinion surveys in December 2023 have found that “the majority of Gazans strongly supported Hamas and were enthusiastic about the Hamas invasion of Israel and its atrocities against Israelis.”
The conundrum persists: Where are they to go? Former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard suggests that Gazans should move to Ireland, the most pro-Palestinian country in Europe. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is issuing visas to Gazan applicants, 3,000 of whom have already applied for admittance to the country. Canada’s witless Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set to import 5,000 Gazans into an already broken country. Very bad ideas. Even Islamic countries, as we have seen, want nothing to do with a population of fellow Muslims like the Gazans. The Swedish pivot is also striking: a Muslim-friendly county is, as of this writing, refusing asylum to Gazans.
Regrettably, Trump does not appear knowledgeable in the history, scholarship, and religious anatomy of Islam. He surely does not own a copy of the Koran, as did Thomas Jefferson, whose dislike of Islam, as Denise Spellberg explains in her captivating book, did not prevent him from studying its codification of law. (Jefferson kept a 1734 edition of the Koran in his library at Monticello.) But Trump tends to think the best of people until he learns otherwise — though it’s possible he is being cagily tactful in mothering the Gazans. In any event, one cannot take a vacation from history.
Trump will have a difficult time finding a haven for approximately 2 million Gazans. In the last analysis, if the Gazan entity, which is unwelcome practically everywhere, is to be successfully relocated, despite the usual howls of “ethnic cleansing,” a new home will have to be established for these people somewhere. Luckily, there is a historical precedent.
In 1903, the great Jewish political visionary Theodor Herzl, author of the utopian novel "Altneuland: The Old-New-Land" and the political treatise "The Jewish State," met with Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, in an effort to save the Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia from the murderous pogroms common in those countries.
Robert G. Weisbord explains in "African Zion: The Attempt to Establish a Jewish Colony in the East Africa" that the intention was to plant a Jewish settlement in British Uganda (now Kenya), since the Holy Land at the time, as the head of the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) Israel Zangwill declared, would have been a killing zone for Jews: “there are wild beasts in East Africa, but in Jerusalem there are wilder creatures. There are religious fanatics, hostile Muslims.”
After the Uganda Program was rejected at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, attention turned to possible settlements in Canada, Australia, Iraq, Libya, Angola, El Arish Egypt, and Texas (the Galveston scheme), projects which bore no fruit except for Galveston where 9000 Jews were peaceably resettled. Eventually, as Weisbord indicates, “the East African negotiations laid the groundwork for the Balfour Declaration” and for the foundation of the nation of Israel. Herzl’s vision had finally come to pass. In the conclusion to his utopian novel, the major characters debate the cause of their success. One says, “the united nation,” another “the new technology,” still another says “knowledge,” but the venerable Rabbi Shemuel proclaims “God!”
I am not invoking the benevolence of the Creator to solve the current problem. Nor am I suggesting there is any real connection between the Jewish people and the Gazans, between Judeo-Christian civilization and Islamic imperial supremacism, between a people suffering from vicious prejudicial attacks and a people committed to launching them. I am suggesting that a new home for Gazans may have to be carved out of the wilderness, perhaps somewhere in East, West, or South Africa, perhaps some Pacific atoll. And given that I have no sympathy for Islam and certainly none for the Gazans, I would not scruple to mark out a part of Antarctica as a future domicile, one that may cool down the customary rhetoric, hatred, and penchant for violence.
Realistically speaking, however, no country that wishes to survive or remain intact wants to house the entire Gazan cohort and their Hamas minglers, no matter how anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian they profess to be. This strongly implies that a new territory will have to be surveyed and set aside, a new “Uganda,” whose borders may need to be policed to prevent terrorist sorties and whose inhabitants would not be permitted to return to their former territory, as Trump has himself said. I can think of no other solution.
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