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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Jonathan Cook| <• Choose your language • Elija su idioma | |
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Middle East Eye – 14 March 2025
Anyone trying to make sense of the Trump administration’s policy towards Gaza should have a thumping headache by now.
Initially, US President Donald Trump called for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the tiny territory wrecked by Israel over the past year and a half, so that he could build the “Riviera of the Middle East” on the crushed bodies of Gaza’s children.
He followed up last week with an explicitly genocidal threat addressed to “the people of Gaza” – all two million-plus of them. They would be “DEAD” if the Israeli hostages held by Hamas were not quickly released – a decision over which Gaza’s population has precisely no control.
To make this extermination threat more credible, his administration has expedited the transfer of an extra $4bn worth of US weapons to Israel, bypassing Congressional approval.
Those arms include more of the 2,000lb bombs sent by the Biden administration, which turned Gaza into a “demolition site“, as Trump himself called it.
The White House also nodded through Israel’s reimposition of a blockade that has once again choked off food, water and fuel to the enclave – further evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent.
But while all this was going on, Trump also dispatched to the region a special envoy, Adam Boehler, to negotiate the release of the few dozen Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
He was given permission to break with more than 30 years of US foreign policy and meet directly with Hamas, long designated a terrorist organisation by Washington.
The meeting reportedly took place without Israel’s knowledge.
One Israeli official observed: “You can’t announce that this organisation [Hamas] needs to be eliminated and destroyed, and give Israel full backing to do it, and at the same time conduct secret and intimate contacts with the group.”
In an interview with CNN at the weekend, Boehler remarked of Hamas: “They don’t have horns growing out of their head. They’re actually guys like us. They’re pretty nice guys.”
Then, in another unprecedented move, Boehler gave interviews to Israeli TV channels to speak directly to the Israeli public – apparently to prevent Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from misrepresenting the content of his talks with Hamas.
In one interview, Boehler said Hamas had proposed a five to 10-year truce with Israel. During that period, Hamas would be expected to “lay down its arms” and forgo political power in Gaza. He the proposal as “not a bad first offer”.
In another, he referred to Palestinian prisoners as “hostages”.
His approach left Israel quietly seething but unable to say much for fear of antagonising Trump.
In parallel, Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff – who reportedly laid down the law early on to Netanyahu by ordering him to attend a meeting on the Sabbath – headed to Doha this week to try to restore a ceasefire deal he had previously negotiated.
He appears determined to push Israel into honouring the second phase of that agreement, which requires the Israeli army to withdraw from Gaza and halt its war on the enclave. That would pave the way for a third phase, in which Gaza is reconstructed.
Witkoff’s terms, according to reports, are that Hamas agrees to demilitarise and its fighters leave the enclave.
Israel is deeply opposed to a second phase. It wants to stick with phase one, in which it finishes swapping the remaining Israeli captives held by Hamas for some of the many thousands of Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli torture camps.
The idea is that, once completed, Israel will be free to restart the slaughter.
Boehler reinforced Witkoff’s message, saying the White House hoped to “jump-start” talks and that the US was not “an agent of Israel” – implicitly acknowledging that, for many decades, it has very much looked like one.
Trump indicated a change of heart himself on Wednesday, telling reporters at the White House: “Nobody will expel the Palestinians.”
Apparently confounding Boehler’s claim that the US is able to make its own decisions about the Middle East, Trump was reported on Thursday to have removed him from dealing with the hostages issue following Israeli objections.
Meanwhile, Trump noisily shredded First Amendment protections on political speech, specifically in relation to Israel.
He signed an executive order empowering US authorities to arrest and deport visa holders protesting Israel’s year-and-a-half-long slaughter in Gaza – or what the world’s highest court is investigating as a “plausible” genocide.
That quickly resulted in the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last spring’s student protests at New York’s Columbia University – one of the most high-profile of dozens of protracted demonstrations on US campuses last year, which were often met with police violence.
The Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of “activities” – namely, campus protests – supposedly “aligned to Hamas”. These demonstrations, it alleged, threatened “US national security”.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump wrote on social media, declaring that his administration would be coming after anyone “engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity”. Axios reported last week that Secretary of State Marco Rubio planned to use AI to search through foreign students’ social media accounts for signs of “terrorist” sympathies.
These developments formalise Washington’s working assumption that any opposition to Israel’s killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children should be equated with terrorism – a view increasingly shared, it seems, by UK and European authorities.
In concert, the White House announced that it was cancelling some $400m in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University over its “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”.
Confusingly, the university administration was among the most hardline in calling in police to crush the protests against the genocide. But the financial cuts had the intended effect, with Columbia announcing on Thursday it would inflict stringent punishments, including expulsions and degree revocations, on students and graduates who had taken part in a campus sit-in last year.
Some 60 other institutions have reportedly received letters warning that they are in danger of funding cuts if they do not “protect Jewish students” – a reference to those who cheerlead Israel’s war crimes.
That will come at a heavy price for other students, including many Jewish students, who have been exercising their constitutional right to criticise Israel’s crimes.
A sword of retribution now hangs over every single publicly funded centre of higher learning in the US: crush any sign of opposition to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, or face dire financial consequences.
Does any of this amount to a clear strategy? Does it make any sense?
These mixed messages fit a pattern with the Trump administration. Its wider strategy is, as Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories, calls it: psychological overwhelming.
“Hitting us every day with XXL [extra-extra large] doses of baffling rhetoric and erratic policies serves to ‘control the script’, distracting and disorienting us, normalising the absurd, all while disrupting global stability (and consolidating US control).”
The White House is doing something similar over Ukraine.
It is now talking directly to Russia, shutting the door on Nato membership for Ukraine, publicly humiliating Ukraine’s president, while also threateningmore sanctions and tariffs on Moscow unless it agrees to a rapid ceasefire.
The Trump administration’s goal is to normalise its inconsistencies, hypocrisies, lies and misdirections so they become entirely unremarkable.
Opposition to its will – a will that can change from day to day, or week to week – will be treated as treasonous. The only safe response in such circumstances is acquiescence, passivity and silence.
In the tumultuous political landscape Trump has created, the one constant – our North Star – is the western media’s uncritical cheerleading of the West’s war industries.
Consider the Biden administration. The media’s harshest condemnation came not over the destruction Washington wrought on Afghanistan during its 20-year occupation, but for ending the war – a war that had left the country in ruins and the official enemy, the Taliban, stronger than ever.
Contrast that with the media’s resolutely muted response to Biden’s 15 months of arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In doing so, the media eagerly cast aside their supposed humanitarian concerns, including their ritualistic nods to the post-Second World War global order and international law.
Similarly, the media have been openly critical of Trump’s overtures to Russia over Ukraine, siding with European leaders who insist the war must continue to the bitter end – regardless of how much higher the death toll of Ukrainians and Russians climbs as a result.
And predictably, the media have gone out of their way to accommodate Trump’s Israel-supporting, openly genocidal rhetoric and actions towards Gaza.
It was astonishing to watch outlets that regularly portray Trump as a threat to democracy contort themselves to whitewash his explicit call to exterminate “the people of Gaza” should the hostages not be immediately released. Instead, they mendaciously suggested he was referring only to Hamas leadership.
It is not just Trump and his team who are well practised in the dark arts of deception.
While the Trump administration may be playing fast and loose with Washington’s political culture, it is largely adhering to the West’s traditional script on Israel and Palestine.
Witkoff and Boehler are deploying a well-worn strategy, binding the Palestinians into what could be called an illegitimacy trap. Damned if you do; damned if you don’t.
Whatever Palestinians choose – and however much they are dispossessed and brutalised – it is they, and anyone who supports them, who are cast as the villains. The criminals. The oppressors. The Jew-haters. The terrorists.
This applies not only to Hamas but also to the accommodationists of Fatah.
Faced with relentless dispossession through decades of Israeli colonisation, Palestinian factions have responded in the two main ways available to them.
One is to adopt the course enshrined in international law as the right of all occupied peoples: armed resistance. This is the path Hamas has taken as it governs the concentration camp that is Gaza.
Every US administration, including the current one, however, has conditioned any talks about statehood on Palestinians renouncing armed resistance from the outset, dismissing their right in international law as terrorism.
For that reason, until now, Hamas has always been excluded from negotiations. The talks that have taken place – over its head – have operated on the assumption that Hamas must be disarmed before Israel is expected to make any concessions.
Hamas must relinquish its weapons voluntarily – against an opponent armed to the teeth, whose bad faith in negotiations is legendary – or it will be forcibly disarmed by Israel or its rival, Fatah.
In other words, peace with Israel is premised on civil war for Palestinians.
That appears to be the course the Trump administration will pursue. For now, it is demanding that Hamas “demilitarise” voluntarily. When that fails, Hamas will find itself back at square one.
Faced with Trump’s plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from Gaza, Hamas has precisely no incentive to disarm.
In fact, it has a further disincentive. Its rivals in Fatah are all too visibly caught in their own, even more fatal, illegitimacy trap.
Mahmoud Abbas’s faction, which heads the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, has chosen the alternative to armed resistance: diplomacy and endless political accommodation.
The problem is that Israel has never shown the slightest interest in granting the Palestinians – even Fatah’s “moderates” – a state.
Even during the so-called apex of peacemaking – the Oslo Accords of the 1990s – Palestinian statehood was never mentioned.
Oslo was simply a nebulous process in which Israel was supposed to gradually withdraw from the occupied territories as Palestinian leaders took responsibility for maintaining “security” – meaning, in practice, Israel’s security.
In short, the Oslo concept of “peace” was little different from the catastrophic status quo in Gaza before the genocide began.
During its so-called disengagement in 2005, Israel pulled its soldiers back to a fortified cordon, and from there controlled all movement and trade in and out of the enclave.
In the vacated space, Israel allowed only a glorified local authority, running the schools, emptying the bins and acting as a security contractor for Israel against those not ready to accept this as their permanent fate.
Hamas refused to play ball.
Abbas’s PA, on the other hand, accepted this kind of model for its series of cantons across the West Bank – on the assumption that obedience would eventually pay dividends.
It hasn’t. Now Israel is gearing up to formally annex most of the West Bank, backed by the Trump administration. Behind the scenes, the White House is finagling support from the Gulf states.
Fatah cannot extricate itself any more than Hamas from the illegitimacy trap set for it by Washington and Europe.
Paradoxically, critics in Washington – backed by the media and European elites – dismiss Trump’s moves on Ukraine as appeasement of a supposedly resurgent Russian imperialism, rather than as peacemaking.
These same critics are equally discomfited by the Trump administration’s meetings with Hamas.
All of this breaks with the decades-old Washington consensus, which dictates who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, who are the law enforcers and who are the terrorists.
In typical fashion, Trump is disrupting these former certainties.
The reassuring, knee-jerk response is to take one side or another. Either Trump is a mould-breaker, remaking a dysfunctional world order. Or he is a fascist-in-the-making, who will hasten the collapse of the established world order, bringing it crashing down on our heads.
The truth is he is both.
There is a consistency to Trump’s approach to both Ukraine and Gaza – despite the apparent contradiction. In both he appears determined to bring to an end a failing status quo. In the former, he wants an end to war and destruction by forcing Ukraine’s surrender; in the latter, he wants the running sore of a Palestinian concentration camp gone by forcibly emptying it of its inhabitants.
This new consistency replaces an older one, in which Washington’s elite perpetuated forever wars against painted devils that justified the siphoning of national wealth into the coffers of the war industries on which that elite’s wealth depended.
The pretexts for those forever wars had become so threadbare, and so destabilising in a world of ever-depleting resources, that the elites behind those wars were utterly discredited.
The far-right, most especially Trump, is riding that wave of disillusionment. And its success stems precisely from this rule-breaking, by presenting itself as a new broom sweeping away the old guard of corporate war-makers.
As the Bidens, Starmers, Macrons, and Von der Leyens sink deeper into the mire, the more desperately they cling to a crumbling system. Trump’s disruption works against them.
But the new guard is no more invested in peace than the old, as Gaza makes clear. It is simply looking for new ways to do business – new deals that still siphon national wealth away from ordinary people and into the pockets of billionaires.
Trump would rather strike lucrative deals with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over resources – in both Russia and Ukraine – than sink more money into a futile war that locks up the region’s vast potential profits.
And he would rather put an end to Gaza’s decades-long status as a no-go zone, a holding centre for Palestinians, when it could instead be transformed into a playground for the rich, its vast offshore gas reserves finally exploited.
The new guard of kleptocrats is less interested in forever wars – not because they have any love for peace, but because they believe they’ve found a better way to make themselves even richer.
This newfound openness to “doing things differently” has an appeal, especially after decades of the same cynical elites waging the same cynical wars.
But make no mistake: the fundamentals remain unchanged. The rich are still looking out for themselves. They are still feathering their own nests, not yours. They still see the world as their plaything, where lesser humans – you and me – are expendable.
If he can, Trump will end the war in Ukraine by cutting a money-making deal, over Kyiv’s head, with Russia.
If he can, Trump will end the slaughter in Gaza by striking a deal with Israel and the Gulf states, over the heads of Hamas and Fatah, to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians from their homeland.
And if he can get away with it, Trump is ready for something else, too. He’s prepared to break heads at home to ensure his critics can’t stop him and his billionaire pals from getting their way.
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Ben Norton| <• Choose your language • Elija su idioma | |
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Topics
0:00 China "threat" claims
0:43 US military spending
1:34 US foreign interventions
2:40 USA is no. 1 arms dealer
3:57 Top weapons exporters
5:08 Growth in arms exports
5:56 Israel's suppliers
6:23 Top weapons importers
7:16 Europe doubles arms imports
8:32 Trump demands more NATO spending
10:47 Replacing welfare with warfare
12:56 Top military spenders
14:39 Real US military budget
15:40 DOGE ignores Pentagon fraud
17:00 Outro || Geopolitical Economy Report ||
Donald Trump has threatened to colonize Greenland and make it a US territory, even though 85% of people there oppose this. Ben Norton explains the geopolitical and economic reasons: the USA wants to block China from the Arctic region and to profit from the territory's natural resources, especially critical minerals.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License •
ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist| <• Choose your language • Elija su idioma | |
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It takes some cheek to write a tweet like this. As usual it seeks to intimidate. Typically, it's full of lies and distortions, and totally lacking in compassion. But keep this in mind: Biden and the Democrats —those exemplars of liberal democracy—were also criminalising anti-Zionism resistance by conflating it with anti-Semitism. Or calling Hamas terrorists. (Image: https://x.com/WhiteHouse)
“Since yesterday, I have been subjected to a vicious, coordinated, and dehumanizing doxxing campaign led by Columbia affiliates Shai Davidai and David Lederer who, among others, have labeled me (sic!) a security threat and called for my deportation, he began.
Their attacks have incited a wave of hate, including calls for my deportation and death threats. I have outlined the wider context below, yet Columbia has not provided any meaningful support or resources in response to this escalating threat, he added.
I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”
Mahmoud Khalil email to Columbia University interim president on March 7, one day before he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Nations that claim to protect the rights to speak and assembly freely are instead violating those rights. Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil is just the latest victim of an insidious trend, in which private individuals and organizations demand that their governments punish anyone who publicly speaks out against Israel or United States policies toward that government. The requests are made quite publicly, as the Israel friendly New York Post confirmed in a headline, “Zionist org preps list of foreign pro-Hamas students, hoping Trump will deport them.”
All over “liberal” democracies the ability to speak out against the Zionist state is under attack. In Germany , the use of Arabic in protests has been banned. In the United States students protesting the Gaza genocide have been under various forms of attack since Joe Biden was in office. Students have been suspended, faculty have lost their jobs, and anyone with even a small public voice has been harassed. As of June 2024, more than 3,500 people on college campuses were arrested in protests.
Now the Donald Trump administration has upped the ante from the days of the Joe Biden commitment to aid Israeli war crimes at every opportunity. Giving Israel money to commit genocide is not enough for the Trump team. On March 6 the administration announced that a student protester had their student visa revoked and that a new program was in place which would use A.I. to identify students who are not U.S. citizens for the purpose of deporting them. Neither the student nor the institution was named, but it is now assumed that Khalil was the person in question. In their zeal to make an example of him, they failed to do a rudimentary check of his immigration status. When four plain clothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers approached Khalil and his pregnant wife, they were surprised to learn that he is in fact a U.S. permanent resident, a green card holder whose rights cannot be easily dismissed. One of the officers was identified as Elvin Hernandez, who was honored by Trump at the 2019 State of the Union address.
The cryptic announcement of a student visa revocation was followed by another declaration on March 7. The Justice Department’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism cancelled more than $400 million in government grants allocated to Columbia University "due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students." On March 8, Khalil was detained.
Columbia University was no innocent bystander in these events. The university continues to bow to pressure from the federal government and even some of their board members in silencing students. Columbia has instituted a secretive disciplinary process , which includes signing a non-disclosure agreement before they can access evidence being used against them. Students have been asked to name others and were falsely accused of having made statements they had not made or being present at protests they hadn’t attended. Mahmoud Khalil was himself subjected to this treatment. “I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with.” He refused to sign the nondisclosure agreement and was threatened with not being able to graduate, but he retained an attorney and Columbia backed down. Columbia has not responded to questions regarding Khalil’s arrest and whether they assisted ICE in an effort to placate the Trump administration and getting their funding back.
Activists are not the only targets in the campaign to silence those who speak out against war crimes and genocide. Independent journalists are also vulnerable. Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada was arrested in Switzerland . His colleague Asa Winstanley’s home in London was raided by police and his devices were seized. Richard Medhurst has been arrested in the United Kingdom and in Austria as well. Yves Engler was recently arrested in Montreal, Canada.
In most of these cases, the arrests were ultimately proven to have been carried out improperly. Zionist individuals and officials demanded that Engler and Abunimah be arrested. In both cases the charges were found to be invalid even under the laws of the local jurisdictions. In the case of Medhurst, a vague charge of supporting a “proscribed organization” has never been explained and his case has been postponed several times, depriving him of the ability to defend himself. Clearly the goal is to intimidate and silence him and others. Charges of violating the law are meant to impede his work and call his journalistic bona fides into question.
Their accusers are no doubt aware that charges may be dismissed. The goal of pressing ahead regardless is twofold. First, the person in question is prevented from publicly condemning Zionist acts and support for Israel from western governments while they are under arrest or sanction. Second, even if charges are dismissed, the arrests are a warning to others that the same treatment awaits anyone who might consider taking a public stance against Zionism. Very few people want to end up in jail, even for a few days like Abunimah and Engler.
The declaration of war against free speech is ironically proof of success. Israel is a pariah nation, condemned by most of the world’s governments and their people. The U.S. and its allies may give weapons and political impunity, but they can’t undo Israel’s status as a pariah nation.
They also can’t dispense with due process. Khalil called one of his attorneys while he was being detained and she in turn filed a habeas corpus petition in the middle of the night, which proved useful after ICE moved him to a facility 1,000 miles away in Louisiana. A federal judge prevented his removal and called all parties to meet in his chambers on March 12.
It doesn’t matter that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and even the president himself post bombastically on social media. Rubio declared on the X platform , “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported” and included a link to an article about Khalil’s arrest. Trump joined in with a characteristically ignorant post calling Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student.”
As of now, it is still true that only immigration judges can revoke green cards or order deportations. Non-citizens also have due process rights in this country, and the system cannot be obstructed on the whims of people who want protest against Israel to end. Rubio and Trump and the people who have instigated these actions must still bring evidence to court and follow a process that gives some expectation of fairness.
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Due Dissidence| <• Choose your language • Elija su idioma | |
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Due Dissidence
• The Electronic Intifada
3 February 2025
Trump speaking on "developing Gaza" (EI)
It seems that neither Israel nor the US is willing to leave us, the people of Gaza, to exist in peace. Even after the announcement of a fragile ceasefire in the genocidal war perpetrated by the Israeli colonial occupation – backed by American support and brokered with Egyptian and Qatari guarantees – US President Donald Trump made yet another deeply contentious declaration. He proposed to “clean out that whole thing,” suggesting the relocation of “a million and a half” Palestinians to neighboring countries like Jordan and Egypt, framing it as a so-called humanitarian solution.
I read his words twice, trying to grasp the full weight of what he meant by “thing.” It was unmistakable – he was referring to Gaza itself, a land that is home to over two million people who have endured decades of siege, bombardment and forced displacement. To Trump, Gaza is not a place of life, history and resistance but an obstacle to be erased, its people reduced to a problem for the US’ favorite spoiled child to “solve.”
Describing a phone call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Trump called Gaza “a real mess” and said that he urged King Abdullah to take in more Palestinians. He suggested the new arrangement could be temporary or long-term for the displaced, claiming it would allow them to “live in peace for a change.”
“I’d like Egypt to take people, and I’d like Jordan to take people,” he said. However, both Egypt and Jordan rejected the proposal to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.
This isn’t new. Trump views Gaza not as a homeland but as a real estate problem to be solved. He recently called it a “phenomenal location,” yet at the same time likened it to a “massive demolition site.” His words echo those of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who spoke last year of Gaza’s “valuable” waterfront property as if it were prime land for redevelopment – once its people were conveniently erased.
In Gaza, Trump’s proposal was met with both defiance and deep concern. Some dismissed it outright, refusing to take his words seriously, especially after the Israeli military withdrew from most areas of the coastal territory, allowing residents to return to their devastated neighborhoods in northern Gaza. The general sentiment voiced in Gaza was that if they didn’t leave during the bombardments, when the pressure to abandon homes was at its peak, why would they leave now, after the killing has paused?
Others, however, saw his statement as a warning that Gaza’s reconstruction might be deliberately stalled, making it uninhabitable and forcing its residents to leave. Even without direct military action, another kind of war continues – one of deprivation. Severe restrictions on food, medicine, water and fuel have made daily life a battle for survival. Hospitals struggle to function, families wait in endless lines for clean water, and frequent power cuts plunge entire neighborhoods into darkness.
If these conditions persist, staying in Gaza may become an unbearable choice. Parents will face the excruciating decision of watching their children suffer from hunger and illness or leaving behind their homeland. Humanitarian aid – already a lifeline for survival – could be weaponized, conditioned in ways that push for relocation under the guise of necessity. What bombs failed to achieve, creeping desperation might.
Although Egypt and Jordan have so far resisted such proposals, diplomatic efforts could lead to pressure on them to accept Palestinian refugees as part of an international peace settlement.
On 11 October 2023, when US official John Kirby spoke of “safe passage” for Gazans to flee, my father, sitting in our living room, turned off the radio in disgust. His face darkened, and he waved his hand dismissively. “We will not leave,” he said firmly, as if addressing Kirby himself – or the forces behind the relentless cycles of displacement that have haunted our people for generations.
My father often spoke of his grandfather’s exile in 1948 – the lands lost, the painful separation from his father after the 1967 war. When my grandfather left to work in Egypt, he was never allowed to return. These were not isolated stories but part of a long history of displacement, of families torn apart, of promises broken.
He told me of the 1970s: the expulsion of families from Jabaliya refugee camp when the Israeli military marked the homes of freedom fighters with an X, giving them just 48 hours to leave before their houses were destroyed. Other homes were demolished under the pretext of widening roads – another tactic of forced displacement. One of those families was the Daouds, my father’s neighbors, who came to say goodbye before being forced to Al-Arish in Egypt, uncertain if they would ever return.
This strategy of expelling Palestinians from Gaza is not new. In 1953, a plan negotiated between Egypt and UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, aimed to relocate 60,000 refugees from Gaza to Sinai, backed by $30 million in UNRWA funding. By 1955, as Israeli military raids escalated, the plan gained momentum – but mass protests forced its cancellation.
In 1956-57, Israeli finance minister Levi Eshkol allocated $500,000 to finance the departure of 200 Palestinian refugee families from Gaza. By 1969, Israeli officials were considering measures to lower Gaza’s standard of living vis-à-vis the West Bank in order to encourage out-migration. Under Ariel Sharon’s military command in 1971, Israel destroyed thousands of homes and deported 12,000 civilians to Sinai, many of whom were placed in the “Canada Camp” near the Egyptian border, where they lived in limbo for years. These policies were part of a broader strategy to fragment Palestinian society, reduce the refugee population, and eliminate their political identity, continuing the long history of displacement in Gaza.
Martyred Gaza. This tiny strip of land is a mirror to the moral depravity of the West and its compassionless leaders.
Such policies have long shaped Palestinian awareness, reinforcing a collective understanding that displacement is not incidental but deliberate. This is why so many in northern Gaza refused to move south during the recent genocidal war, recognizing the latest so-called evacuation orders as part of a familiar strategy of forced transfer. They knew this wasn’t just about escaping bombardment – it was about resisting erasure.
Similarly, in the south, despite relentless pressure and violence, many chose to remain rather than risk becoming part of another wave of forced exile. They never once considered crossing the border into Egypt. Resistance in Gaza has never been just an individual act; it is a collective stand against a history that demands repetition.
Western colonial powers have long viewed Gaza, and Palestinians more broadly, not as a people with history, culture and agency, but as a population to be controlled, discarded or managed. To them, we are human animals, marginalized and expendable, to be displaced, starved and erased without consequence. Trump’s words – reducing Gaza to a “thing” to “clean out” – are not an anomaly but a clear reflection of this dehumanizing mindset.
Yet history proves them wrong. Gaza is not an object of policy or a mere crisis zone. It is alive with flesh and blood, a land of resistance that has defied every attempt to erase it. Those labeled as refugees have dismantled even the most sophisticated colonial strategies. The people deemed powerless have continuously disrupted the occupier’s best-laid plans.
What we have endured is not just another war or humanitarian catastrophe; it is a systematic effort to break and erase us. And despite everything, they failed. Our losses are immeasurable – great people, entire families, homes, streets and histories etched into the walls of our cities. Dreams and futures have been stolen. But when we saw people return to their destroyed homes on 27 January 2025, stepping over ruins and sifting through the wreckage, it proved that our bond with this land is unbreakable.
As Gaza has thwarted previous plans of forced transfer, it will thwart the current one as well. A place home to mostly Palestinian refugees expelled in 1948 will forever haunt Israel as a curse. And just as Palestinians in Gaza have returned to their northern ruins, one day, they will return to their original hometowns.
This great return march speaks to a deeper truth that even the most powerful armies must now confront. Against advanced weaponry, AI-driven warfare, missiles and an arsenal designed to crush them, the so-called poorest and most marginalized have stood their ground.
Gaza will never return to what it once was – a truth we cannot deny. Perhaps what lies ahead will be even harder, perhaps another war is already forming. But one certainty remains: Our connection to this land is stronger than any force that seeks to sever it. Israel does not understand us. Neither does the United States. For there is a fundamental difference between belonging to a land and occupying it. They believe control comes through domination. We know that true belonging is unbreakable.
Malak Hijazi is a Gaza-based writer.
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