Fawaz Turki :
After we gasped with incomprehension and our jaws dropped, feeling at once incredulous and shocked at what the president of the United States was saying, we had to ask the obvious question: Was the man for real?
While sitting alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office on Tuesday after afternoon – and later that day at a press conference – President Trump presented his plan for the future of Gaza, in which he envisioned the transfer of the more than 2 million of its inhabitants to “new homes” outside the Strip, which US troops would be dispatched to claim “ownership” of and there build the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Then he rambled on incoherently, insisting that “the US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we’ll do a job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous explosives and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out … do a real job, do something different”.
Then, to affirm, if unwittingly, that the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes would be an act of mass, permanent displacement – an act that sundry legal experts were quick to point out amounted to ethnic leaning, and possibly a war crime – he said, “I hope we can do something where they [Gazans] wouldn’t want to go back”, adding, seemingly as an afterthought, that he was “looking for a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land to resettle them permanently”.
To see an American president publicly endorsing the ethnic cleansing of well over 2 million people from their homes and the transformation of their land into a large real estate development scheme – without them having a say in the matter – was truly a landmark moment in the history of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East, effectively a moment when the United States so facilely declared its intention to subvert international law, coming close as it did on President Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
Predictably, world leaders, including in particular leaders of nations in the Middle East, were swift in their condemnations and outright dismissals. And the adjectives used by political commentators went from “outlandish”, “hare-brained”, “untethered”, “surreal”, “horrifying” and even “hilarious” to … well, this column doesn’t have that much space and you don’t have that much time. Let’s just say the shock waves President Trump’s scheme caused went far and wide.
The President’s cluelessness was not only reflected in the assumption that Gazans would, as it were, gladly go gentle into that good night, happy to live in the housing development built for them outside their homeland, but in how pitiably little he knew about who the Palestinians are as a people and how much their attachment to the land is an integral part of who and what they are.
To many people in the West, in particular people like Donald Trump, land is real estate. To Palestinians – as indeed to peoples elsewhere in the Third World – the relationship they had since time immemorial developed with their land, the very land on which and off which they lived, the land that had birthed both their ancestors and their mythologies of hope, is sacred, as attested to in one of their proverbs, ardi-aardi.
The term translates as “my land is my honour”, commonly understood to mean that one’s land represents the outward sum of one’s nobility as a human being.
Only in one’s own is one thoroughly humanised and only there is the essential repertoire of one’s national, cultural and historical consciousness truly expressed. Few, if any, people in the White House, on the Hill or at the State Department understand – or will ever want to bring themselves to understand – that.
Folks, the Republican president was indeed for real on Tuesday as were earlier on Friday Republican lawmakers in the US House and Senate who introduced bills that would bar the use of the term “West Bank” in United States government documents, replacing them with the phrase “Judea and Samaria”, names widely used by Israeli far-right ultranationalists whose agenda is the annexation of the Palestinian territory and, in their words, the “trucking” of its inhabitants to neighbouring states.
We’re looking here at four rough years ahead.
(Fawaz Turki is a noted academic, journalist and author based in Washington DC. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
Special to Gulf News).
