Holocaust Remembrance Day, the return of many thousands to their homes in northern Gaza, and President Trump’s comments about Palestinians finding a home elsewhere have all collided this week.
Let’s leave aside the ghosts stirred by Elon Musk’s hand gestures and unwelcome interventions in German politics. The future of peoples and their mass movement are proving to be as much an issue in the twenty-first century as it was in the twentieth.
As horrific bloodshed flares once again in the Middle East, the patience of Donald Trump is wearing thin. And – as in other areas of foreign policy – he is “thinking outside the box”. His threats could impose peace – but they could also enshrine a system in which Jews, the victims of history, become the oppressors and in which the concept of Palestine and Palestinians disappears, at least temporarily.
What is happening now in the Middle East is a consequence of the Second World War and the years afterwards. The state of Israel came about after millennia of antisemitism culminated in the final solution, die Endlösung der Judenfrage, when a European Nation, Nazi Germany, attempted genocide, and systematically exterminated six million Jews.
Both Israelis and Palestinians have a historic claim on the wedge of territory bordered by Egypt, Lebanon, the Jordan river, and the Mediterranean, as defined by the United Nations in 1947. The next year saw the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, when approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven out of land they were living on in a war with Israelis. Meanwhile, for decades since, Jews were given little option but to leave for Israel by pogroms and persecution in Russia, Poland, Eastern Europe, Iraq and Syria.
The challenge for the global community now, once again, is whether there is any way for Palestinians and Israelis to live together peacefully in land to which they both lay claim. The rest of the world has long clung to the idea of partition – a “two state solution” but has been reluctant to get further involved.
The leaderships of neither Israel nor the Palestinians seem inclined to accept the idea of coexistence, especially after the horrors unleashed by the Hamas terror attacks on Israel on 7 and 8 October 2023.
Amidst allegations of torture and rape, 1,139 people, mostly civilians, were murdered by attackers coming out of Gaza and around 250 were taken hostage. Many times more people, over 40,000, have been killed by Israel in its military response. Once again the majority of the victims are civilians, women and, particularly, children.
Conflict between the two sides dates all the way back to the tribal rivalry of the Hebrews and the Philistines. From the beginning of the Common Era, 2025 years ago, Jews were dispersed in a diaspora after coming under domination by the Romans, Christians, Muslims, Arabs, Ottomans and European imperialists. Anti-semitism, persecution for being Jewish, manifested in massacre, expulsion and the denial of rights. Israel appears to be visiting a mirror image of much of this suffering on the Palestinian occupants of Gaza and the West Bank.
The Israeli government claims that all it wants is to live securely at peace within its own borders. Arab nations including Egypt and the Emirates have come to accept Israel’s right to exist. But in the year 2000, the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat walked away from what US President Bill Clinton saw as “a once in a lifetime peace opportunity”, by rejecting a remarkable offer from the Israeli government of a Palestinian state in a minimum 73 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip and capital in Jerusalem.
Since then, Palestinian political leadership has been overwhelmingly hostile to Israel. The chant “from the river to the sea” does not allow for the existence of a Jewish state.
The recent assaults on Gaza and Lebanon are justified as attempts to eradicate Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror organisations which are attacking Israel and its citizens. This has resulted in much collateral damage.
The cause of “security” has led to territorial expansion. Prime Minister Netanyahu told me directly that it is impossible for his nation to be secure so long as its enemies are living just yards away. In contravention of UN resolutions, Israeli settlers have annexed East Jerusalem and much of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, what they call Judea and Samaria in a “Greater Israel”.
This is territorial expansion for national security in defiance of international norms of a piece with President Trumps’ expressed intentions to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal in the interests of US Security.
His latest comments about Gaza cannot be taken likely. The dilemma for the international community is that he is talking as the real-estate developer he once was, describing Gaza as “a phenomenal location, on the sea, the best weather…some beautiful things could be done with it”, and he is talking as an authoritarian ally of Israel.
Given the extent of the destruction in Gaza, there is some logic to his view that it is “literally a demolition site, almost everything is destroyed and people are dying there so I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where they can live in peace for a change…could be temporarily or could be longer term”.
The word “or” is very important. Permanent displacement of some 1.5 million Palestinians would be ethnic cleansing and would result in Jewish settlement of Gaza. Not surprisingly, rightwing Israeli politicians have “praised” Trump’s comments. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich says they are a “wonderful idea”.
Egypt and Jordan, the two countries Trump identified to provide possible new homes for Palestinians, have flatly rejected the idea. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the most important Arab nation. Its wealth will be vital for any reconstruction. It has not yet joined the Abraham Accords, brokered by the last Trump administration, which normalised relations between Israel and Gulf states.
Speaking to me on Times Radio this weekend, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the UK insisted that his country wants better relations with Israel but that is entirely dependent on the acceptance of a two-state solution by both sides. Trump is wooing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud as a key ally but, for any chance of the Nobel Peace Prize he covets, he will have to think more carefully about the geographical requirements of the Palestinians. Craven as they are, his allies would never agree to the elimination of a Palestinian entity.
Redrawing the map would be bold enough. It has happened before. As the old Jewish joke goes “Israel’s fine but we’d rather have had Warsaw”.