The world bears responsibility for the current phase of the US-Israeli alliance

US President Donald Trump’s plan to take over Gaza is the latest example of how much the international community has done nothing for Palestinians since Israel’s establishment in Palestine in 1948. Rhetorical outrage means nothing, except for the fact that several leaders are now worried that forced expulsion of Palestinians to their countries would translate to an immigration and possibly security burden. If world leaders were truly concerned that forcibly displacing Palestinians violates international law, they would have worked seriously to dismantle Israel at its earliest stages and allowed for the legitimate right of return of Palestinian refugees to be exercised.

Palestinians, said Trump, have no alternative but to leave “the big pile of rubble”, which is how he described Gaza. Countries with “humanitarian hearts” should take in Palestinians. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East Envoy, explained further the deranged train of thought. “A better life is not necessarily tied to the physical space that you are in today,” Witkoff told Fox News. “A better life is about better opportunity, better financial conditions, better aspirations for you and your family. That doesn’t occur because you get to pitch a tent in the Gaza Strip and you’re surrounded by 30,000 munitions that could go off at any moment.”

Palestinians in Gaza have been rendered refugees countless times.

Does being forced into external displacement carry with it a guarantee of a better life? Does Witkoff think that Palestinian refugees in overcrowded refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon are content that they have a “better life” because they are not in Gaza or anywhere else in occupied Palestine, their homeland? Does he think that Palestinian construction is equivalent to a pitched tent?

The hypocrisy of feigning concern for Palestinians living amid unexploded munitions rings hollow, given that the US remained Israel’s main weapons supplier throughout the genocide and participated first hand in the wiping out of entire generations of Palestinian families. Indeed, the US supplied the munitions that turned Gaza into a “big pile of rubble”, probably in violation of its own federal laws.

You have to learn from history, Trump said during the press conference. What has Trump learnt? That colonialism is profitable and genocide reaps huge profits for the perpetrators? How about another lesson from history? A lesson that teaches the international community that decolonisation was always an option and, in fact, it still is. And that by legitimising Israel’s existence, they have legitimised all forms of violence against Palestinians, including the latest US proposal which seemed to have satisfied Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immensely and which he described as “a remarkable idea”. That indicted war criminal can’t sink any lower, surely.

Annexation is looking far different than that which the world envisaged during Trump’s first presidency, when the focus was on the occupied West Bank. The world bided its time even though Palestinians could not afford to. The result was genocide under the Biden administration, which was the supposed better alternative to Trump, and annexation is now back on the table with Gaza purportedly to become the “Riviera of the Middle East”, a slice of prime real estate beachfront property which, in reality, is home to over two million Palestinians, most of them refugees from elsewhere in their occupied land.

The Israeli military has now been given the order to prepare for “voluntary” transfer, even as the White House backtracked on Trump’s comments.

How does “voluntary” transfer happen under military occupation? At gunpoint?

According to Israel’s Defence Minister Israel Katz, “Gaza’s residents should be allowed the freedom to exit and emigrate, as is the practice anywhere around the world.” On a one-way ticket, he might have added. Less than a month ago, remember, Israel had all Palestinians in Gaza besieged in overpopulated areas, all the better to kill them during its genocide. Where was their right of free movement then? Moreover, in the decades before the genocide started in earnest, the occupation regime had no qualms about preventing Palestinians from travelling freely. It still doesn’t.

Palestinians have already rejected Trump’s plan, as have many governments, in theory at least. Instead of bleating incessantly about international law while doing nothing, though, world leaders need to indulge in one particular lesson from history that they have avoided since the 1947 Partition Plan: listen to the Palestinians; decolonise the land; end the occupation; free Palestine.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250206-the-world-bears-responsibility-for-the-current-phase-of-the-us-israeli-alliance/