It is a humbling sight watching battered Palestinians stream, mostly on foot, into northern Gaza like a long, winding river.
The quiet, dignified procession back to the flattened remnants of their homes and uncertain lives is a moving testament to the resolve of a people who, despite the pervasive grief and loss, are determined to reclaim and rebuild what a genocidal regime sought to erase.
Palestinians, as I wrote in a column earlier this month, are indefatigable.
In that same piece, I explored the meaning of four words that came to mind when a ceasefire was finally struck following 15 months of relentless terror: relief, gratitude, acknowledgement, and shame.
There was a fifth word that I had planned to include but, in the happy moment brimming with renewed possibilities and hope-fueled celebrations, it seemed off-key.
The word was “fear”.
I feared the predictable rush to declare “winners” and “losers” when it should be apparent that genocide only produces ruin, death, and destruction.
A spate of instant-coffee-quick columns was indeed published claiming that Israel had lost the “war” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been “humiliated” since, though damaged, Hamas has emerged intact and still in strutting command of Gaza.
True or not, the commentary reminded me of the jarring and short-sighted triumphalism on depressing display in the raw residue of the lethal events of October 7, 2023.
Soon after the ceasefire was announced, I was gripped by a foreboding sense of déjà vu.
I feared that the agreement would only subdue Israel’s killing lust in Gaza for a little while and, in the meantime, Netanyahu and rancid company would unleash their unbridled wrath on imprisoned Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The horrors unfolding in the West Bank – the brutal invasion, the murders of children, women and men, the forced expulsions and blockades – are a mirror of Israel’s wanton ruthlessness in Gaza now on pause.
Finally, I feared that the credit, if not praise, that then-US President-elect Donald Trump received – even among some misguided Palestinian writers – for having brokered the deal to silence the guns while the Biden administration dithered, would be replaced quickly by disappointment and bitter betrayal.
Trump’s so-called “push” for a ceasefire was more a matter of self-aggrandising optics on the eve of an inauguration than evidence of a sincere belief in peace or a genuine desire to stop the wholesale suffering of besieged Palestinians.
It seemed plain to me that Trump – ever the preening autocrat – had never considered and would never consider Palestinians as human beings worthy of his concern or attention.
As an instructive result, the ceasefire accord was designed to mollify Trump’s please-me-instantly impulses and to use as a cudgel to crow over one of President Joe Biden’s signature foreign policy failures as he departed the Oval Office.
As always, America’s new commander-in-chief’s allegiances are with Israel – fanatical lock, stock and barrel – and the ceasefire is a Trojan horse meant to conceal Trump’s sinister plans.
Sure enough, in a spasm of clarity and honesty, Trump told a gaggle of reporters on Air Force One on Saturday that he wanted to “just clean out” Gaza with the help of Jordan and Egypt.
“I would like Egypt to take people,” Trump said. “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over.’”
It was vintage Trump: Reduce Palestinians and their ancestral home to a plot of land to be ethnically cleansed on a wave-a-wand-like whim.
The “mess” would be solved and – surprise, surprise – no doubt Trump-friendly property developers would profit handsomely by ridding Gaza of Palestinians to make way for rampaging Israeli settlers and a host of seaside resorts.
All of it, every crazed, diabolical ounce of it, is the stuff of dreams for Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s genocide-giddy finance minister, Trump’s icy, calculating son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the president’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who is reportedly “mulling over” the preposterous idea of having Palestinians “voluntarily” migrate to Indonesia.
Trump’s calls to “clean out” Gaza of Palestinians are a near-verbatim facsimile of appalling remarks Kushner made at Harvard University last February.
At the time in that supposedly august venue, the former senior foreign policy adviser during Trump’s first term, suggested that Israel should remove Palestinians from Gaza while it “cleans up” the annihilated coastal enclave.
“From Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said.
He added, for extraordinary measure, that Gaza’s “waterfront property” was potentially “very valuable”.
Again, like his scheming father-in-law, Kushner views Gaza as another lucrative real estate venture and surviving, traumatised Palestinians – an irritating inconvenience.
Rather than Indonesia, Kushner apparently prefers to convince Palestinians “with diplomacy” to agree to be shipped en masse to Egypt or moved to the Naqab Desert.
“I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there,” he said. “I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”
Yes, of course, “finish the job” – nice and neat – just like Papa Trump envisions.
On cue, the gullible pundits who, only days ago, applauded Trump for applying the kind of convincing pressure that only a US president can exercise on a recalcitrant Israel, were shouting about “red lines” that had been crossed vis-a-vis the possible forcible eviction of Palestinians.
Although preoccupied with finding and burying the entombed bodies of their dead loved ones, Palestinians took time from that urgent task to tell Trump, Kushner, and Witkoff that they shall not be moved – anywhere, at any time, by anybody.
Yet my fears persist.
I fear that the Trump-appointed zealots, who believe that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, that Israel has “biblical” dominion over the West Bank, and that a Third Temple should be erected on the debris of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, will prevail during the next four years.
My fears are rooted in the knowledge that Palestinians have been abandoned by the “international community” for more than 75 years, including while they were victims of a blatant genocide.
I have little, if any, faith in that same cowardly “international community” standing in Trump’s bulldozing way if he and his equally callous confederates decide to “purge” Palestine of its people forever.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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