'Nakba 2.0 must be resisted': The 'ethnic cleansing' of Gaza

In an apparently impromptu announcement the President declared: "The Gaza thing has not worked, it's never worked and I feel very differently about Gaza than a lot of people.

"I think they should get a good, fresh, beautiful piece of land... I don't know how they could want to stay, it's a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land, or numerous pieces of land... I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza."

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As has been noted by many, this scheme would amount to ethnic cleansing. Indeed, Trump has previously mused on a plan to "clean out" Gaza and move the population to Egypt and Jordan.

Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said: "President Trump’s remarks calling for the forcible transfer of Palestinians from the occupied Gaza Strip must be unequivocally and widely condemned. His language is inflammatory, outrageous and shameful, and his proposal amounts to a flagrant violation of international law. 

“Any plan to forcibly deport Palestinians outside the occupied territory against their will is a war crime."

First Minister John Swinney said: "I think what he said amounts to ethnic cleansing. It's about the forced repatriation of the Palestinian people. I cannot go along with that."

Lorna Slater, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens said: "Donald Trump’s proposals are horrific and would amount to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

“The last 15 months have inflicted so much death and destruction which has been armed, supported and fuelled by governments around the world including the UK."

The former First Minister, Humza Yousaf, is married to a Palestinian woman, Nadia El Nakla.

Her parents, Maged and Elizabeth, were trapped in Gaza in the early days of the war.

Mr Yousaf said: "It has only taken the world 77 years to notice the systematic eradication of the Palestinian people.

"When over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in 1948, it was called the Nakba, the great catastrophe. Trump's plan is Nakba 2.0 and must be resisted."

There are, of course, those who would deny that what Trump is proposing is what it is - an overt call for ethnic cleansing.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump speak during a joint press conference (Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) The American journalist Jonathan S. Tobin called it "an inherently sensible solution", the Scottish commentator Eve Barlow described it as a plan to "de-Nazify Gaza" and right-wing pundit Douglas Murray called it "a perfectly reasonable attempt to come to a decent solution to this problem".

One Twitter user opined: "The second you acknowledge that Palestinians can leave, that they have agency, that they can make choices about their future, the whole house of cards collapses."

The irony of the fact that Israel controls all but one of the border crossings, as well as the air and sea in an ongoing blockade of Gaza which means the residents who might want to leave are unable to, appears to have been lost on them.

Following the President's impromptu announcement the White House appeared to walk it back slightly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying on a trip to Guatemala that any resettlement would be temporary while reconstruction takes place. Trump appeared to refute this in a later post on Truth Social.

Even taking Rubio at his word, there's no reason to think any significant number of Palestinians would want to leave the land.

As 72-year-old Fathi Abu al-Saeed told Al Jazeera, gesturing at the destroyed streets of Khan Younis: “You see that pile of useless rubble? That’s more precious than the United States and everything in it.”

AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana (Image: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

One major factor in the ongoing and inexorable conflict is the fact all three major Abrahamic religions consider the area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea to be the Holy Land.

Jewish tradition holds that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, across the red sea and into the Promised Land, that the First Temple of King Solomon was built upon the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and that another temple will stand there when the messiah arrives.

For Christians, Bethlehem in the West Bank is where the saviour, Jesus Christ, was born and Golgotha outside Jerusalem where he was crucified before being reborn.

The Islamic tradition reveres Moses, Abraham and Jesus as prophets of Islam and holds that the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem stands on the site where Muhammad ascended to heaven.

As is often the case with insoluble conflicts around the globe, the issues can be traced back to the British Empire.

In return for Arab support against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, the British promised in 1915-16 to recognise Arab independence in the region while at the same time secretly agreeing with France to split it into separate spheres of influence.

In 1917 Arthur Balfour, who was Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh at the time, expressing the British government's support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.

Attempting to reconcile the fundamentally unreconcilable, British Mandatory Palestine was established in 1920.

The first census, carried out in 1922, concluded around 78% of the population comprised Arabic-speaking Muslims with Jews making up around 11% of the population and Christians 10%.

By 1936 both Arab population growth and Jewish immigration - many fleeing persecution in Europe - had increased the total population from around 750,000 to 1.3m.

Following the Arab revolt the British decided to partition the land into a Jewish state and an Arab one, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1947.

At the time the Muslim population made up around 60% of Palestine and the Jewish 30%, and Arab leaders made clear they would not accept any form of territorial division - particularly not a partition plan which would designate 56.47% of the territory as Israel.

The day after the British left the territory a military coalition of Arab states invaded, but was ultimately defeated and the state of Israel was established on all of the UN area proposed for a Jewish state and over half of the land designated for the proposed Palestinian state.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in what they term the 'Nakba' or 'catastrophe' - today 80% of the population of Gaza is made up of refugees or their descendants.

Those expelled have no right to return to their former lands, while under Israeli law every Jew has the unrestricted right to immigrate to Israel.

Following the six day war of 1967 Israel occupied both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, as well as annexing the Golan Heights from Syria, leading more or less to the current status quo.

Given the history, it's no surprise that those in Gaza, the West Bank and the vast Palestinian diaspora are fearful of any plan to remove them from the land even if it's billed as temporary.

Some commentators have responded by arguing that the people of Gaza, having elected Hamas in 2006, cannot be trusted to live peacefully alongside Israel - especially given the October 7 attacks of 2023 which killed 1,180 Israelis, 797 of them civilians, and saw over 250 taken captive.

"There’d be peace in the Middle East tomorrow if the Palestinians wanted peace," runs the argument.

However, there has been significant movement toward a two-state solution on the Palestinian side. The PLO recognised Israel's right to exist in 1993 having previously accepted the pre-1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian state.

Even Hamas, while maintaining its refusal to recognise Israel, has said it would negotiate for a state "along the lines of the 4th of June 1967".

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has said he will "not compromise" on "full Israeli security control over all the territory west of Jordan" which, by his own admission, is "contrary to a Palestinian state". Ten of his 32 members of the Knesset attended a conference titled 'Preparing to Resettle Gaza' in October last year.

Trump's plans are unlikely ever to come to fruition.

Israel 'handing over' the Gaza Strip to the US and Palestinians being moved out - even temporarily - would require American boots on the ground.

Official IDF figures state that 844 of its troops were killed in Gaza following its invasion, and any attempt to displace people would face similar fierce opposition. The American public won't accept more of its children dying in the Middle East.

By his rhetoric alone, though, hopes that Trump's unconventional style could promote peace appear to be in vain.