Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza, a real estate fantasy with destructive potential

It costs a job to find in the files such a biased position in favor of Israel at least in public, by a president of the United States. Never before, besides, a White House chief had talked about seizing the Gaza Strip and displacing the Palestinians from there.

Although the proposal hides – as it really does – a political strategy that violates international law, even surprises with its light language, in a real estate warning tone, calling to transform the area, watered by the blood of thousands of people, in a “piece of good, fresh and beautiful land”. Trump was clear in his words: he raised a business to build a “Riviera del Oriente Middle”.

Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who flanked the president, could avoid a smile when Trump clearly validated the claims of the extreme Israeli right, who has for a while wanting to throw the Palestinians of their territories. That is an action that so far Israel has not dared to do.

“Very good quality housing can be built, such as a beautiful citylike a place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they will end up dying, ”Trump said before the White House journalists on Tuesday night. The idea is very similar to a plan proposed at the time by Trump’s son -in -law, Jared Kushner, an investor, to get the Palestinians from Gaza and “clean it” in order to “develop” the Mediterranean coast of the territory.

However, the plan is an absurd for multiple reasons. One of them – the main one – is that it ignores the roots of the problem in the Middle East, discards the Palestinian rights to return to their homes and violates specific international laws.

There are also practical reasons why this idea is a fantasy. The neighboring Arab countries, whose land and money would be needed as vital supplies, They totally oppose the Palestinian eviction. All house a large number of refugees with a incendiary potential that would quickly destabilize the internal security of those states. Gaza’s total evacuation would also advise the dreams of a Palestinian state and create a precedent that could also generate doubts about the Palestinian presence in the West Bank, a district that the UN considers, as Gaza, a territory occupied by Israel.

The idea that a large number of Palestinians accept to leave Gaza to live in an idyllic suburb in another place is also based on a superficial understanding of the history of the conflict that left them dispossessed. And torpedo the basis of laborious peace agreements that Israel knew how to work with Egypt and Jordan.

The Palestinians commemorate this year the 77th anniversary of their expulsion in 1948 of what is now Israel, an episode that is in the heart of its national struggle. They call her Nakba (Catastrophe in Arabic). These are 700,000 people who They fled or left their homes during the Arab-Israeli war that followed the establishment of Israel.

Today they add a community of six million refugees in camps in areas of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the West Bank. The issue is one of more delicate issues in the peace conversations that failed for the last time 15 years ago. Now, many Palestinians fear that their painful story is repeated on a larger scale.

Trump’s announcement is just an indication of how the stage has been altered in the Middle East since Gaza’s War. But it also reveals a notable historical amnesia. The recent US attempts to remodel regional geopolitics (from Iraq to Libya) ended in disasters. And further over time, the entire colonial project of powers such as Great Britain and France to draw borders and impose their interests plant the seeds of a conflict that, a century later, still continues.