Ignacio Álvarez-Ossorio
Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Complutense University of Madrid
President Donald Trump has returned to the White House with a barrage of executive orders that represent a wholesale amendment to the policies of his predecessor Joe Biden. Also on the Palestinian question, Trump has made a U-turn, abandoning the traditional US support for the two-state formula and favoring the expulsion of the more than two million Gazans who have survived the fifteen months of bombardment that have caused at least 48,000 dead and 110,000 wounded.
Nothing new under the sun since, during his first term, Trump adopted a foreign policy aligned with Israel’s interests: he approved the transfer of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognized the annexation of the Golan Heights and cut off aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). At the same time, he promoted the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab world through the Abraham Accords and put forward the so-called Century Accord, a project that envisaged the annexation of major settler settlement blocs in exchange for channeling large investments to areas under Palestinian Authority control.
President Trump’s recent proposal to force the departure of more than two million people from the Gaza Strip is aligned with the positions of the fundamentalist and messianic sectors of Netanyahu’s government. Formations such as the Religious Zionist Party, Jewish Power or Likud itself have applauded this initiative, since it is consistent with their project of establishing a Greater Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, annexing not only the Gaza Strip, but also the whole of the West Bank. The US president himself has pointed out that Israel has “a fairly small piece of land” compared to the rest of the countries in the area, which could open the door to redrawing the borders of the Middle East that were established a century ago following the Sykes-Picot Accords.
Appointments made in recent weeks also cast doubt on the two-state solution, since prominent members of the new administration consider that Israel has a sacred claim to the Occupied Territories. This is the case, among others, of Mike Huckabee, the new ambassador to Israel, who declared to CNN that “the Palestinians do not really exist: they are a political tool to try to take land from Israel”. On another occasion, the evangelist politician stated: “We can never accept the idea of Israel being divided and Jerusalem being split in two. Let’s be clear: Israel’s borders are not set by the United Nations, but by God Almighty.”
Although Israeli politicians prefer to use the euphemism of “voluntary emigration”, the truth is that the expulsion of more than two million Palestinians cannot be sugar-coated, as it would represent an operation of ethnic cleansing that could be replicated, if successfully implemented, in the West Bank. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has not been signed by either the United States or Israel, categorically prohibits the deportation or forcible transfer of the population, which it considers a war crime and a crime against humanity.
The pretension of transforming a Gaza reduced to rubble after fifteen months of bombardment in the Middle East Riviera only adds salt to the wound. The possibility of turning the Palestinian tragedy into a business opportunity was already hinted at by Jared Kushner in a lecture delivered on February 15 last year at Harvard University. The president’s son-in-law and former White House advisor noted then that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and advised, “If I were Israel, I would bulldoze parts of the Negev desert and move the population there.”
In addition to being contrary to international law, the expulsion of more than two million people could come back as a boomerang not only against Washington, but also against its regional allies. On the one hand, it is to be expected that the Palestinian population will not leave their homes voluntarily, so the US could be forced to deploy troops to carry it out, which would have disastrous consequences for its international image. On the other hand, Egypt and Jordan, two of its strongest allies, have rejected the initiative outright, warning of the risks involved in the flood of hundreds of thousands of people without any resources and absolutely desperate. It should be remembered that Abdel Fattah Al Sisi’s Egypt and Abdallah II’s Jordan are in a critical economic situation and lack the necessary resources to face a humanitarian catastrophe of such magnitude, so they consider that an eventual expulsion would provoke a real earthquake in the Middle East and would endanger their own survival.
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