For Trump, is Gaza merely real estate to be developed?

US President Donald Trump said recently that the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip should be moved to Egypt and/or Jordan. AP

It’s hardly surprising that one of US president Donald Trump's initial forays into Middle East policy has been the suggestion – repeated over the weekend – that the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip should be moved to Egypt and/or Jordan. The concept has been met with hosannas from the Israeli ultra-right, whose racist attitudes towards Palestinians are unabashed.

They want the entire population of the occupied territories removed to make way for Jewish settlers and permanent Jewish rule. But, this isn't merely a scandalous departure from decades of US policy towards the Palestinians – and civilians in conflict zones in general. It's also a deeply disturbing window into Mr Trump's attitudes towards the Palestinian people, their national cause and their individual and collective rights.

While Mr Trump and his officials attempted to clarify it could be either "temporary" or "long term" – Israel has never allowed substantial groups of Palestinians to return to any part of Palestine once they are removed. The idea that Israel would agree to see millions of Palestinians leave "Eretz Israel" and ever allow them to return en masse would require Israeli officials to have a completely different mentality as well as a different relationship with the Palestinians.

Israel's policy that goes back to the 1940s of refusing the return of Palestinian under almost any circumstances will almost certainly continue. The temporary would become long-term and long term permanent, as with the mass displacements during the 1947-48 and 1967 wars. Any "guarantees" stating otherwise from Mr Trump or anybody else would be unenforceable.

Trump seems to view the Palestinians as if they were obstreperous tenants in a New York property that he is looking to develop, who simply are in the way and must be got rid of

What's most significant about this non-starter of a policy idea is the extent to which it reveals that Mr Trump seems to view Palestinians, both as people and as a collective, as virtual non-humans. It would appear he sees them not as people with rights, concerns or interests, but as Lego pieces to be moved around for his, or Washington's, or Israel's convenience.

Mr Trump seems to regard at Palestinians as if they were obstreperous tenants in a New York property that he is looking to develop, who simply are in the way and must be got rid of. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the past has waxed eloquent about creating beautiful beachfront property developments in Gaza, as if it were not one of the most squalid and overcrowded areas in the world, populated almost entirely by refugees from what became southern Israel in the late 1940s.

A camp for displaced Palestinians, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on January 23. Reuters

But if the population is in the way of such development, there is an obvious solution: "get 'em out by Friday", as the old Genesis song put it. In one of the greatest modern biographies, The Power Broker, journalist Robert Caro describes how the architect of modern New York urban planning, Robert Moses, swept aside long-standing communities to make way for his new expressways and highways. It is this very Manhattan real estate logic that permeates Mr Trump's suggestion that the Palestinians of Gaza should simply be gone.

It's not going to happen, of course. Jordan has already taken far more than its fair share of Palestinian refugees from both the 1948 and 1967 conflicts, and that has created a degree of political instability in the country, which would only be exacerbated by further displacement. Jordan has also served as a home for Syrian and Iraqi refugees, but it cannot be a dumping ground for the persecuted peoples of the region.

Egypt will be even more categorical in refusing Mr Trump's entreaties. The Egyptian policy against allowing the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt dates back to the early 1950s, to the era of King Farouk and before full independence from British hegemony. There is virtually nothing the US could offer Egypt within the realm of possibility that is likely to shift Cairo on this matter. Mr Trump and others in Washington may believe that Egyptian and Jordanian dependence on Washington, military and other aid programmes, or assorted additional carrots and sticks might shift Cairo and Amman on this issue, but they will almost certainly be disappointed.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Trump has not consulted the Palestinians of Gaza, or any other Palestinians. But he won't find them any more enthusiastic, no matter how wretched living conditions in Gaza have become. Over 95 per cent of the Palestinian population of Gaza are already refugees from southern Israel, and the idea that they would be displaced yet again is not only morally and politically repugnant, it is likely to be met with the most resounding rejection from 2.2 million Palestinians clinging on to the last bit of their country in which they have a desperate and besieged toehold.

Worst of all, Mr Trump's Gaza concept sends the worst possible signals about his potential policies towards Israeli annexation and expulsion plans in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli government contains several ministers who have made it clear that they view Mr Trump's reelection as the perfect opportunity to annex much, if not all, of the occupied West Bank – parts of Palestine far more central to their vision of Zionism than not only Gaza but much of Israel itself.

Mr Trump may disappoint them by pushing Israel to make some gestures towards eventual Palestinian statehood to secure a triangular agreement with Saudi Arabia. But if he can't shift the Israeli government on this, or even more ominously if he never tries, and if more than 2 million Palestinians can be removed from Gaza to make way for reconstruction or beachfront development projects or anything else, then surely large numbers of Palestinians in the West Bank can be removed to make way for a formalised and consolidated greater Israel (an expansion anticipated in Mr Trump's January 2020 "Peace to Prosperity" plan).

Mr Trump may be just musing, but he is musing as the new American president. Everything he says, especially when he repeats it at length, has considerable significance, if not as a policy proposal, then at least as an indication of how he is thinking. And, from a Palestinian – or even just a human rights – perspective, these ideas about the cleansing of Gaza are exceptionally chilling. Unfortunately, they show that those of us who warned it wasn't true that US policy towards Gaza couldn't get any worse might be completely correct.

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