Will The Zionist Dream of Ethnically Cleansing Gaza Work?

From 1953 – 1954, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) negotiated an agreement with the Egyptian government to relocate 12,000 displaced Palestinians to the Northern Sinai. After an Israeli raid on refugee camps in southern Gaza in 1955, huge protests erupted in Gaza against the plan, forcing the Egyptian government to call it off. 

One of the people leading those protests was Ahmad Al-Haaj, then 21, a survivor of the Nakba. Al-Haaj served a total of 10 years in Israeli and Egyptian prisons for his political activism. Outside of prison, he lived his life in a rented apartment in Gaza, although he could financially afford to build a house. For him, Gaza was a place of temporary refuge, and he didn’t want to accept his status as a refugee. When the Great March of Return erupted in Gaza in 2018, Al-Haaj was an active participant, emphasizing his right to return home to the parts of Palestine now called Israel — 69 years after he became a refugee, in 1948.

Today, more than 80% of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees of the Nakba, like Al-Haaj, whose central demand of return has remained. 

A year ago, Al-Haaj died in Gaza City at the age of 90, under siege, refusing to be displaced again. 

Al-Haaj’s story is emblematic of the Palestinian response to Trump’s proposal to ​“take over” Gaza. While Trump acts as a real estate developer, treating 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza like tenants he can evict, his administration fails to understand the connection Palestinians have to their land. Trump referred to Gaza as a ​“demolition site,” treating Palestinians as disposable commodities. 

For 15 months, Israel’s assault on Gaza — which claimed the lives of more than 61,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, injured 110,000 others and destroyed much of Gaza’s infrastructure —failed to push Palestinians into Egypt and failed to stop them from returning. The only explanation is that Palestinians are determined to stay, even on rubble. It’s evident from the scenes of half a million Palestinians returning to Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip after the cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas, even without access to water, food or other services. 

They had their land to which they belong and to which they are returning. 

This connection to the land extends to those killed by Israel. Palestinians who survived the genocide want to maintain this connection by burying their loved ones in proper cemeteries in their towns and villages, after many were buried in makeshift graveyards. On February 4, family and friends of Refaat Alareer, Gaza’s storyteller, assassinated by Israel on Dec. 6, 2023, were able to locate his grave and the graves of his brother, Salah, sister, Asmaa, and four nephews. They moved the bodies to a proper cemetery near the neighborhood where Refaat was born and lived. 

Like Refaat, the Palestinians are rooted to their land and any attempt to ethnically cleanse them will fail. Just as previous plans to depopulate Gaza failed, Trump’s proposal will fail. 

In 1969, the Israeli government introduced a secret plan to send 60,000 young people from Gaza on one-way tickets to Latin America. The plan failed and was exposed, and the Palestinians stayed on their land. 

Another Israeli plan to depopulate and evacuate Gaza was also introduced 55 years ago and failed. The Jordanian newspaper Al-Dastoor wrote in March 1970, ​“A plan to evict 300,000 Palestinians from Gaza begins.” Today, 2.3 million Palestinians still live in Gaza.

Hosts of an Israeli radio program recently fantasized about Gaza as a parking lot. Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he wished he could wake up one morning and find the Gaza Strip sinking into the sea. These are colonial fantasies that will never see the light of day. Today, Rabin is gone, but Gaza is still there.

What Palestinians need is not to be forced out of their homes, or for outside property developers to profit from rebuilding, but for more aid and materials to be allowed so that homes, hospitals, bakeries and educational institutions can be rebuilt and provide immediate relief. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Israel is supposed to allow 200,000 tents into Gaza; instead, the needed aid is being blocked.

What Palestinians need is for all refugees to be permitted to return in accordance with United Nations Resolution 194, not the sale of new bombs and D9 bulldozers to Israel.

Trump, who has suggested annexing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal since taking office, must wake up to the reality that Palestinians exist in Gaza despite Israel’s will, and they will remain on their land just as they have for centuries. The people of Gaza reject Trump’s proposal, but so do the people of the Middle East and the majority of the world.

Now, it’s up to the world to deal with Trump’s proposal seriously, to prevent another Nakba in Gaza in 2025.