Eurasia Press & News
US President Donald Trump and his team are seriously proposing to deport two million Gazans to neighboring Middle Eastern countries or even to Indonesia for the time needed to rebuild the war-torn region. Although the likelihood of these plans coming to fruition is extremely low (none of the proposed countries are categorically ready to accept Palestinian refugees), the very normalization of discussions on forced displacement is a direct consequence of the lack of Palestinian statehood. However, in addition to the creation of an independent Palestine, there was also a plan to unite Jews and Arabs in one state, and this may not be the worst alternative to deportation.
Palestine is probably the main modern geopolitical paradox. Several million people consider themselves Palestinians and even have Palestinian passports. Palestine is recognized as an independent state in most countries of the world, Palestinian diplomatic missions are open in Rome, Kyiv and Kuala Lumpur, Palestine has its own history, its own culture, its own political parties and even its own traditions of government. However, a sovereign state of Palestine has not yet de facto emerged.
Usually, international recognition, embassies in foreign capitals and other pleasant things are a superstructure over the basic state institutions, such as bureaucracy, the judicial system, security forces, etc. They can be effective or ineffective, but no matter what they are, the state cannot exist without them. This is a kind of basic starter kit, without which, well, anyone who claims political subjectivity cannot do without it.
And you can delve as much as you like into the intricacies of how politics and economics are organized on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip, looking for something that confirms the subjectivity of Palestine, but you will never collect a complete set.
Pro-Palestinian politicians and commentators in the West like to repeat that this is temporary, that the state of Palestine is in the process of being created. And they are not being disingenuous, they just don’t always add an important detail – this process has been going on for several decades, and there is still no end in sight.
The process of creating a state and its residents acquiring real civil rights will never be completed, first of all because it contradicts the interests of another, already existing state. The name of this state is Israel. And it is on it that it depends: whether Palestine will be sovereign or not. For decades, starting with Golda Meir, the Israeli political elites have been inclined to think that it will not be. Israel does not want to create a state with its own hands that will either be hostile to it from the start or will very soon become so.
Israel does not want to create with its own hands a state that will either be hostile to it from the start or will very soon become so.
Israel, which controls the majority of the legal Palestinian economy and directly interferes in the administration of Palestinian lands, whose army rules over Arab cities and towns without regard for Palestinian officials and security forces, which pays for the creation of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories from its budget and arms their residents from its arsenals, will not dare to allow the Palestinians to build anything more than an autonomy controlled by the Jewish state.
And all because the Palestinian state project and the Israeli project do not simply contradict each other, they are literally antipodes. First of all, due to the fact that the existing borders of Israel, at a minimum, deeply penetrate into the territories where the Palestinians are trying to build their statehood, and at a maximum, coincide with the borders of the country that the Palestinians would like to call their own.
And what is very important is that Israel is not alone in resisting the process of the emergence of a real Palestinian state. The United States, Great Britain, France and a number of their neighbors and allies have not yet been included in the nearly 150 countries that have recognized Palestinian statehood. Politicians there make endless statements about supporting the Palestinians, spend billions on programs to help them, condemn the actions of the Israelis on Arab lands, but they do not even try to pressure Israel, demanding that it allow the Palestinians to create their own state, and do not take real steps toward recognizing this state.
They have many reasons for this. Among them is the extremely popular ideology of Christian Zionism in the US, whose followers consider the restoration of the Jewish state within its ancient borders (that is, including the current Palestinian territories) not just pleasing to God, but necessary for the salvation of humanity. And the fear that an independent Palestine, controlling its own borders and possessing a real army, will turn into a second Iran – obsessed with revolutionary ideas, militant and unpredictable. And the fear that separatist movements, including European ones, will want to achieve independence using the same methods as the Palestinians. That is, including terrorism.
In general, the West perceives the current uneasy status quo as acceptable, and any deviation from it causes real fear. The current state of affairs in the Middle East threatens new intifadas and regular military operations, including large-scale ones. But its change is completely unpredictable. No one can say what role fanatical Iranian ayatollahs will play in an independent Palestine, how many seats in its parliament will be controlled by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which of the world’s rogue regimes and for what purpose will try to drag it into its orbit of influence.
No one can say what role the fanatical Iranian ayatollahs will play in an independent Palestine, how many seats in its parliament will be controlled by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Progressive (no irony intended) professors at prestigious universities and commentators from influential media outlets can talk as much as they like about how the popularity of radical ideas and movements among Palestinians is a direct consequence of the Israeli occupation, and the longer it lasts, the more radical the Palestinians will be, but this will not change reality.
Israel will continue to control the Palestinian borders, will not withdraw its troops from Arab lands, will not stop searches and arrests, and will not demolish settlements. Because it has no other effective mechanisms for its own defense. Its partners in the West, although they are outraged by the systematic violation of Palestinian rights, realize that they can do nothing about it, they do not know any ways to bring closer the emergence of an independent and at the same time safe for Israel Palestine.
As a result, millions of people – those same Palestinian Arabs – are deprived of their own statehood and all the rights that residents of established countries have. That is, not only Palestine, but also its residents are deprived of subjectivity – real, not just declared. In many countries of the world that have recognized Palestine, its passports are not considered real documents, and their holders are stateless persons for the local authorities. Simply because it is completely unclear how and with whom to interact in the event that a Palestinian citizen breaks the law abroad or something happens to him. Palestine does not have real statehood, which means there are no administrative bodies capable of independently resolving such issues.
Not only Palestine, but also its inhabitants are deprived of subjectivity – real, not just declared
And on an emotional level, a stateless person is a person without a homeland, without a country that he can call his own, almost an outcast. A Syrian driven from his home by war, or an Afghan who fled from the Taliban, are perceived as victims of circumstances. They are accepted in Europe largely because in both the Syrian and Afghan crises one can predict a certain moment of détente, after which the refugees will be able to return home: the war will end, the Taliban will repeal the most cannibalistic of their laws, the government will be replaced by a less radical one. In general, the country exists, political processes are taking place in it, which means that everything can change.
The Palestinians have no country, there have been no real political processes for a long time, and there are no prerequisites for their fate to change. In the eyes of foreigners, they are not victims of circumstances that have suddenly befallen them, they have always been like that. Yes, yesterday they were bombed, and today they are planning to resettle them en masse for several years to Jordan, Egypt or even Indonesia – so this is their fate, they have lived like this their whole lives.
When Donald Trump starts talking about how he will simply up and evict people from Gaza for the time it takes to rebuild the war-torn region, he clearly demonstrates that Palestine is not a subject for him. He is not going to ask any Palestinians for permission or even discuss the terms of the eviction of two million people. The only people he is going to talk to are the authorities of the countries where he plans to send the Palestinians.
But the fact is that for these authorities, too, the Palestinians are strangers, also incomprehensible and frightening. Even Gaza residents with European passports were allowed into Egypt, the only country besides Israel that borders the Gaza Strip, very reluctantly after the war began, and under the obligation to leave the country within 24 hours. What can we say about those who do not have such documents.
The current Egyptian leadership grew out of the military junta that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013 after it won the country’s first democratic elections. This Islamist group had created several foreign branches. The most successful of them is now known as Hamas, and before the war in Gaza, it wielded all power in the region.
Cairo understands perfectly well that among the two million Palestinians they are being offered to accept, there are many members and sympathizers of Hamas who have not forgotten and have not forgiven the persecution of their Egyptian comrades. For the central authorities, these are not just refugees, they are potential enemies – two million militants and their families, who will have to be fed and treated at their own expense, while they may be plotting something bad against these authorities.
Jordan is also in no hurry to open its borders to those whom Donald Trump intends to expel from Gaza, albeit temporarily. And this is not only due to complicated logistics, although it is indeed difficult to imagine two million people moving to the Jordanian border through Israeli territory. Jordan was the country that hosted perhaps the largest number of Palestinian refugees after the wars of the middle of the last century.
Many of the refugees did not like the Jordanian order, which is why they first tried to kill the king, and then unleashed a real war, now known as “Black September.” The Jordanian authorities then – in the early 1970s – barely defeated the enemy and forced the refugees to move to Lebanon or Syria. And now Trump is asking the Jordanians to enter this river a second time.
Many refugees did not like the Jordanian order, which is why they first tried to kill the king, and then even started a real war.
More exotic options, such as sending people from Gaza to Indonesia, which is more than six thousand kilometers away, are simply some kind of information noise that the team of the current US president produces on any occasion on an unimaginable scale.
But what is important here is not the final destination of the Palestinians’ resettlement, but the normalization of the idea of the forced resettlement of a huge mass of people, albeit under the plausible pretext of rebuilding their destroyed homes. And this normalization is a direct consequence of the still-failed statehood of Palestine.
It seemed that all this was in the past. That the bloody episodes of the First World War, when Ottoman Assyrians and Armenians were driven out of Anatolia to Syria and Iraq with bayonets, would not be repeated. That the Nazis’ “Madagascar plan” to resettle all European Jews on an island off the coast of Africa, which was never implemented, would remain a sinister historical curiosity. But no.
All these deportations – those that took place, those that failed, and those that were planned – have in common the fact that the peoples being expelled are deprived of political subjectivity; they did not or do not have their own states, their own governments, capable of standing up for them, ready to defend them.
The state is not just a coat of arms, an anthem and a portrait of the president in the office of an official. It is, first of all, a system of collective protection of people who recognize themselves as one nation, who share common values and who are ready to sacrifice some of their rights for the sake of preserving these values. Non-state systems of protecting nations do not work or practically do not work. Nominal ones, existing only on paper or not extending their authority beyond the offices of the heads of state, are also helpless.
When Norway or other countries recognize an independent Palestine in the midst of the war in Gaza, they please only the officials sitting in the Palestinian government complex in Ramallah, ninety percent of whom have never been to Gaza. These officials can report another diplomatic victory, receive a bonus, or even go on a business trip to Oslo to personally thank the Norwegians for their position. The people in Gaza itself do not care about all these games.
Recognizing the absence of Palestinian statehood in reality, as well as boycotts, rallies and mass actions do not save people in war zones, do not stop bombs and bullets, do not heal wounds and do not feed the hungry. They only help residents of prosperous, peaceful countries feel their involvement in something important, give them the opportunity to tell themselves that they did not stand aside when blood was shed. Some may think that this is already a lot, but it is not.
Human tragedies – in the Middle East or elsewhere – are devalued when populists and poseurs use them as engines to push them into the political mainstream. Europe is about to see the third generation of politicians retire who, in their youth, promised to do everything to stop the bloodshed in the Middle East. And they are unlikely to feel any remorse for not keeping their promise.
For the world, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the norm, it has existed for decades, sometimes dying down, sometimes flaring up again. Only extraordinary events like the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 force Americans and Europeans to remember the Arab-Israeli confrontation far from their borders, which has lasted for almost eighty years. And it will continue to be so.
It is obvious that there is no need to expect the creation of an independent Palestine recognized by Israel in the foreseeable future – Israel and its partners are already talking about this almost openly. But this is not the only way to solve the problem of protecting the rights of Palestinians. In addition to the currently clearly unrealizable plan to divide historical Palestine into Arab and Jewish states (known as a two-state solution), there is also a one-state solution plan, which envisages the unification of these peoples in a single state.
This plan has many shortcomings, it is not even clear what to call such a state. Not to take the anecdotal Israelite invented by Muammar Gaddafi. And in general, the experience of uniting representatives of different ethnic or religious groups within the same borders definitely shows that in the Middle East, something useful rarely comes out of this. It is enough to look at Iraq and Syria.
But Israel has something that many of its Arab neighbors have always lacked: democracy and a strong civil society. Thanks to these factors, thanks to really working laws, it was possible to integrate hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens of Israel into a state that was initially created as a mono-ethnic Jewish state. The experience of this integration shows that there are no insurmountable differences between the Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land. Extending the rights of Israeli citizens to residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could solve a lot of their problems, put an end to hostility, and make radicals like Hamas and Islamic Jihad unpopular marginals.
Extending Israeli citizenship rights to residents of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank could solve a lot of their problems
This plan, of course, is not to the liking of either the aforementioned radicals, or the thousands of Palestinian officials who receive a salary for simulating vigorous activity for the benefit of a state that still does not exist, or the Israeli right, who are convinced that Israel must remain Jewish. But for now it looks like the only one whose implementation could stop the endless Middle East war and make people forget about “peace” plans that include mass deportations and other points that smack of outright genocide.
