The End of ‘Palestine’
Yesterday, President Donald Trump single-handedly collapsed the most destructive idea of the last hundred years—Palestine. During meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, Trump said he was going to move 1.7 million Palestinians out of Gaza. And just like that, he broke the long spell that had captured generations of world leaders, peace activists, and Middle East terror masters alike, who had paradoxically come to regard the repeated failure and haunting secondary consequences of the idea of joint Arab Muslim and Jewish statehood in the same small piece of land as proof of its necessity.
Palestine was a misshapen idea from the beginning, engendered by an act of pure negation. The Arabs could have gone along with the U.N.’s partition plan like the Jews did, and chosen to build whatever version of Switzerland or Belgium on the eastern Med in 1948. Instead, they resoundingly chose war. That’s the storied “Nakba” at the core of the Palestinian legend—the catastrophe that drove the Arabs from their land and hung a key around the neck of a nation waiting to go home. The Arabs chose the catastrophe; they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.
Yet despite repeated military failures, and the increasing distance between the first-world powerhouse that the Israelis built and their increasingly war-torn, third-world neighborhood, the global conscience was always predisposed to rebuilding what the Palestinians destroyed. Accordingly, the Palestinian Arabs became a tribe of feral children whose identity was carved out of the relentless vow to eliminate Israel and slaughter the Jews en masse—despite repeated failures, each one more crushing than the last.
Trump said, enough, we’re not rebuilding Gaza. Time for a new idea—the Gazans have to to go, they can try to start again somewhere else, in a land where every building still standing isn’t already wired to explode.
Gazans waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.
What if they won’t go, or if the Egyptians and Jordanians won’t take them? They’ll take them, said Trump. Ah, he’s talking big, but it’s not real, say the experts—after all, he’s a real estate guy, and he’s pretending it’s just another property deal to pressure Hamas—Mar-a-Gaza. You can’t move a million people just like that, says an American electorate that elected Trump because he promised to deport tens of millions of illegal aliens who crossed the U.S. border in the last four years. He’s nuts says the D.C. foreign policy crowd: He’ll destabilize Egypt and Jordan, and undermine America’s best Arab friends and allies in the region.
Yet Trump is right to see both Egypt and Jordan as paltry constructions with little-to-no ability to project force on America’s behalf, and whose survival depends month to month on American aid. Cairo is useful to the United States only insofar as it, one, makes sure the Suez Canal is open and, two, observes the peace treaty with Israel—i.e., continues its campaign of repression against a populace of 112 million people who can barely afford to buy bread, and many of whose dreams are filled with the same insanity that drives Hamas. The only antidote to this misery that Egypt’s rulers have found is blaming the Zionists next door for the ills of their own society, while torturing religious extremists in their prisons. Maybe when Elon Musk is finished fixing Washington he can conduct an audit of where American money goes in Egypt. Somehow, I doubt he’d get in the door.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s problem is that he allowed Hamas to smuggle arms through the Philadelphi crossing into Gaza, thereby violating Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel—which is what we nominally pay him for. From the perspective of Trump, an American president keen to enforce treaty obligations, Sisi has a new chance to prove himself as a friend of America and not a grafting liar by adding a million Gazans—who in the past have been ruled by Egypt and have family names like al-Masri (“the Egyptian”)—to Egypt’s existing population of 112 million, amounting percentagewise to roughly the same number of legal immigrants that the United States accepts per year. Sisi can deal with the Hamas members among the Gazan immigrants the same way he deals with Muslim Brotherhood militants in his own society—or he can give them all medals for their service. It’s up to him.
And if not? Well, he might remember that Hosni Mubarak’s regime collapsed not because of Muslim Brotherhood-led street protests during the 2011 Arab Spring but because Barack Obama withdrew his support from the longtime U.S. ally.
With money from the Gulf states, or even Israel, Sisi can afford to absorb Palestinians and might even volunteer to take all of Gaza—the average salary in Egypt at present being the equivalent of $5,000 per year. He can then leave Jordan’s King Abdullah responsible for the rest of the Palestinians in the likely event that Trump, as he did in his first term, encourages Netanyahu to annex the Jordan Valley, or goes a step further and acknowledges Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.
Since the CIA has long treated the Hashemite Kingdom as a key asset, we can expect within the next week The Washington Post’s David Ignatius to publish an article based on intelligence sources—i.e., U.S. and Jordanian spies—concocting a story about Trump’s rationale for “destabilizing Jordan.” The reality is that the Jordanians, with U.S. help, put down a Palestinian rebellion in 1970. The country of a little more than 11 million is already estimated to be two-thirds Palestinian, the rest Jordanian tribesmen, and it’s hard to see how adding another 500,000 Palestinians will make it harder for Jordan’s notoriously effective security services to contain their neighbors, especially if the offer includes a few dozen more Black Hawk helicopters. After all, no one will expect the Jordanians to allow Hamas to build a giant tunnel-city stuffed with rocket factories beneath their encampments while giving them billions in foreign aid to pay for it all.
Again, the key players here aren’t Jordan and Egypt but the oil rich Gulf Cooperation Council states, especially Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and of course Qatar. Trump might make Saudi largesse in resettling the Gazans a precondition for the much-hyped prospect of normalizing relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. Given the fact that Israel regularly attracts nine- and 10-figure investments from Silicon Valley’s biggest funds, the reality is that the Saudis have little to offer Israel except for money applied to exactly this type of local purpose. Moving millions of Gazans who have repeatedly attacked their Israeli neighbors out of what is now a shattered war zone is a sensible investment in the kind of stability that helps rich people get richer.
The Arabs and Democrats are only the most vocal of the many opposed to Trump’s initiative. Left-wing governments from Europe to Australia are lining up to pledge their allegiance to the fantasy of a Palestinian state, in the hopes of propitiating Muslim and Arab constituencies at home—whose understanding of “peace” means eliminating Israel. But even leaving the patent bad faith of those professing “peace” aside, moving Gazans out of Gaza is the only sane option 14 months after they initiated a campaign of rape, murder, and hostage-taking that brought their own house down on their heads.
After all, what’s more fanciful, moving 1.7 million people out of Gaza, a large portion of whom would simply be required to board air-conditioned buses or walk across the nearby Egypt border, or compelling them to live in a giant rubble field booby-trapped by an Iran-backed terrorist group? Estimates vary as to how long it would take to clear Gaza of explosives—half a decade or more? Fifteen years? Twenty? Are the Gazans supposed to live quietly in tents for the next decade or two while their homes are rebuilt next door? Where? In “temporary cities” made of Dwell Magazine-like rehabbed shipping containers built by graduates of Birmingham University? In Hamas’ tunnels?
Regardless, should the Palestinians remain in Gaza, they would invariably return to war no matter how much munificence the Gulf Arab states, the European Union, and perhaps even the U.S. might shower on the toxic sand castle built over the past two decades with billions of Western aid money. Proof the Palestinians can’t and won’t keep the peace is that even after they won a reprieve when Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff forced the Biden administration’s cease-fire on Jerusalem, Hamas and its NGO-supported human shields celebrated in the streets as if the Hamas space program had successfully landed Palestinians on Mars. Even as Israel released jailed murderers, the Gazans paraded Israeli hostages through the ruins of Gaza like trophies of war.
The Saudis, Qataris, Emiratis and others who now rend their clothes while lamenting the likely fate of their ant-farm death cult might well have counseled: Quiet brothers, you have been spared. Don’t bring attention to yourselves. For the winds of Gaza shift on a whim and who knows if you are not next to be swept away by fate—or the American president.
Here is the stark reality: Gazans, not just the enlisted members of the Hamas brigades, waged an exterminationist campaign against Israel, and they lost. At virtually any other time in history, save the last 75 years, they would be lucky to lose only territory and not have their legend and language permanently deleted from the book of the living.
Trump’s generous offer to the Gazans therefore signals a return to history, but with a twist. Trump has not only spared them, but vowed to provide them with new lives, better lives, work, new homes, a chance to raise their families in peace, an existence not premised on total and permanent war with a more powerful adversary destined to rout them entirely, and would have already done so if not for the objections of other powerful global players.
Trump, in his innovative mercy, has offered to save the Palestinian people from their own history, and give them a new idea to live by. They should thank their maker for the chance to start anew—and give thanks as well to the American president, who realistically promises them a better future, backed by U.S. global power. Given the repeated failure of the multi-decade-long dream of eliminating and replacing the Jews of Israel, it seems unlikely that the Palestinians will receive a better offer.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/end-of-palestine