`GENTRIFICATION OF GAZA` Standing with Israel`s visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a joint press meet on February 5, 2025, US President Donald Trump spoke about taking over and owning Gaza and resettling Gaza`s Palestinian population elsewhere, in `a beautiful area with homes and safety [where] they can live out their lives in peace and harmony` because `the only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It`s right now a demolition site. . . Virtually every building is down.

This was the continuation of his January 20 inauguration day comments about Gaza being a `phenomenal location`, where `beautiful things could be done.` These musings were followed by his offhand comments on January 26, where he told reporters on Air Force One that Gazans should be moved to Egypt and Jordan and `we` should just `clean out` the enclave.

The February 5 comments, which he read from a text prepared for him by someone since he normally ad-libs have therefore been taken seriously by concerned world leaders within and outside the Middle East.

His Gaza Plan, or what many now describe sardonically as his `Riviera Plan`, has since been roundly dismissed and condemned by virtually everyone except Israel`s far right.

After the negative international reaction, administration officials tried to walk back some of what he said, especially in relation to expelling Gazans and resettling them in Egypt, Jordan or even Somali land, clarifying that any such resettlement would be temporary.

Trump torpedoed that effort by doubling down the next day and stated that `This [Gaza Plan] was not a decision made lightly. Everybody I`ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent.

Then, on February 10, he sat down with Fox News channel`s Bret Baier and said Palestinians would have no right to return under his `I would own it` plan and that there could be as many as six different sites for Gazans to live outside the enclave.What should one make of it? The plan is morally reprehensible, of course. Any attempt to implement it would violate several provisions of international law, which we shall refer to in due course; forced displacement is considered ethnic cleansing. The plan has no details and lacks sinews.

So why should anyone be worried about it if it is so outlandish and is dead on arrival? One answer should be obvious: regardless of whether it can or cannot be implemented, there`s a thick miasma of 19th century colonialism that hangs around it. That itself is enough for all conscientious peoples and leaders of the world to call it out for what it is 21st century imperialism that flies in the face of the moral and legal-normative values that have painstakingly evolved over a century-and-half.

Also, no less troubling is the fact that it follows close on the heels of Israel`s genocidal war the world has seen unfold live on cameras.

That demands even greater urgency from the world to ensure that the unholy alliance between the political scions of Ze`ev Jabotinsky and a `non-denominational Christian` supported by `American evangelical Protestants` cannot carry this sordid tale any further.

HOW DID IT BEGIN? On February 15, 2024, Jared Kushner, Trump`s son-in-law and a former property dealer, spoke with Professor Tarek Masoud, faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative at Harvard`s Kennedy School of Government, as part of the speakers` series.

He told Masoud that `Gaza`s waterfront property could be very valuable... if people would focus on building up livelihoods... It`s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there but, from Israel`s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.` But he added that he didn`t `think that Israel has stated that they don`t want the people to move back there afterwards` [italics added].

Kushner was Trump`s senior White House adviser in his first term and played a key role in the Abraham Accords that normalised relations between Tel Aviv and four Arab countries in 2020. His Saudi-backed firm Affinity Partners `received the green-light from Israeli regulators to double its stake in Phoenix Financial Ltd`, as reported by Bloomberg on January 15 this year. Phoenix is a major Israeli financial firm and funds the construction of illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The nod from Israeli regulators came days before Trump`s inauguration.

For his part, Kushner told Bloomberg that `Investing in Phoenix in July 2024 was a decision rooted in my belief in Israel`s resiliency and the fundamentals of Phoenix`s business. Six months later, the increased value of our shares reaffirms my conviction both in Israel`s strength and the growing promise of Phoenix.

According to Who Profits, an NGO that tracks Israel`s illegal occupation, Phoenix Financial has financed and insured construction projects throughout Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights. Phoenix also owns an 80 percent stake in a large shopping mall in an illegal East Jerusalem settlement and stakes in various companies operating throughout other settlements.

BUSINESS DEALS OVER DEAD BODIES The `little bit of an unfortunate situation` in Gaza that Kushner spoke about, the International Court of Justice described in its interim judgement thus: `In the Court`s view, the facts and circumstances... are sufficient to conclude that at least some of the rights claimed by South Africa and for which it is seeking protection are plausible.

Leaving legal technicalities aside, the latest figures just before the ceasefire went into effect recorded at least 61,709 people killed, including 17,492 children. The figure for missing or presumed dead is 14,222 while 111,588 people, mostly women and children, have been wounded, a majority with life-altering injuries. Nearly 80 percent of Gaza`s infrastructure, especially in the north, has been completely destroyed.

It is important to position the business deals Kushner talks about and the Israeli perspective he refers to with the actual human tragedy that has unfolded and could well continue to unfold in Gaza and also in the West Bank.

Business is also Trump`s pivot, as is the brazen exercise of power. Neither he nor Kushner has any sense of history regarding the conflict and its human cost for the Palestinians over the past century. Both look at Palestine as sweetheart business deals that will make them money and, in the process, also secure peace without any reference to a just settlement of the Palestinian nakba.

In a February 7 post for Appointed Times, his substack, American political scientist Barnett Rubin writes under the title, `All Hands on Deck`: `The domestic and foreign policies of the oligarchy led by Donald Trump are united by the principles of contempt for law and rights, and the idolatry of wealth and force. Every government, movement and citizen in the world must ask can I live in a world without rules, even if rules entail hypocrisy and double standards? Will I acquiesce to a world where there is `No law, no heaven?` This is not a theatrical or melodramatic call. To understand Donald Trump, one must read American journalist Wayne Barrett`s book, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. First published in 1991, Barrett updated it in 2016.

WHO IS TRUMP? Barrett was an investigative reporter and wrote for Village Voice, the New York City`s alternative paper, founded in 1955 by, among others, writer Norman Mailer. Tom Robbins, a former colleague of Barrett`s at the Voice, described him after the latter`s death on November 19, 2017 as the city`s `foremost muckraker.

One might ask, given the number of books written about Trump, why Barrett`s? Having read a few, including Bob Woodward`s Trump trilogy, I would say that, while others have tried to look at Trump through what he does, Barrett unpacks Trump himself, to inform us why he does what he does.

It starts with grade-A narcissism. Writes Barrett: `A couple of months after [his presidential announcement speech], when asked to name a leader he looked to for advice on managing his company, Trump said, `Me ` A deputy in the Trump Tower office, where the interview took place, affirmed, `Mirror. The Mirror` Donald, who actually has a large mirror on the elaborate desk in his Tower apartment, added, `I look at me.Barrett`s book goes into the nitty-gritty of Trump`s life and what the magazine Mother Jones described as his `bent psyche`: `The Trump Tower apartments, and some of the offices above the atrium, had long been magnets for criminals. A half dozen felons, including the head of the [mob family] Gambino-tied concrete drivers` union, owned part or all of over two dozen units in the tower in its first decade. Trump`s cluelessness on foreign policy, apparent even in his opening speech, extended to the tower`s apartment and office occupants -a disturbing collection of international rogues.

It is this man, a rapacious practitioner of backroom deals, who told the reader in his ghostwritten book The Art of the Deal to `protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself`, and who now controls the most powerful office in the world, a `chaos president` to quote former president George W Bush`s son Jeb Bush.

The portrait that emerges is of an unscrupulous narcissist who will use the law when it suits him, break and bend it when doing so is required, whose id, the primitive and instinctual part of the mind, dominates his working within the corrupted structures of capitalism.

But he is what America has got and he is what the world has to deal with.

As Caesar stood on the banks of Rubicon, debating the pros and cons of crossing the river, a stranger sat playing a pipe. Mark Twain, quoting the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius, tells the reader that the stranger `snatched a trumpet from one of [the soldiers], ran to the river with it and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side.

That decided the matter. `Upon this, Caesar exclaimed: `Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The Die Is Cast.

Why is this important? Having voted in Trump for the second and perhaps more ominous time, America might just have crossed the Rubicon and by doing so `changed the future of the whole human race, for all time.Omar Khayyam called it the `moving finger.` Once it has written, the course of events gets fixed and the counterfactuals, T.S. Eliot`s `what might have been`, become meaningless or, at most, an academic exercise.

INTERNATIONAL LAW AND TRUMP We have already talked about Trump`s contempt for domestic law, norms and regulations. What he does within and has already set out to do is a fight the Americans have to fight, and they may already be in trouble. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way call it `The Path to American Authoritarianism` in a February Foreign Affairs essay, and argue that America is headed towards `competitive authoritarianism`, where competing interests would `weaponise the state.

What we are witnessing is a disregard for both domestic and international law. How America shapes up internally or, more aptly, frays will also have consequences for the external world. Our concern right now is, however, with international law and Trump`s avowed announcements to destroy that meticulously crafted regime.

In recent times, it began with the Lieber Code. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Abraham Lincoln `wanted to provide instructions to Union officers on the particularly complicated legal issues arising from non international armed conflicts.` Jurist-academic Franz Lieber, teaching constitutional questions at Columbia Law School, was asked to write one.

The result was 157 provisions that deal with a wide range of legal issues in armed conflict. Many of its provisions, for instance the permissibility of starving civilians, would rankle modern sensibility. But, as German jurist Jenny Gesley says, the code became the basis for `many subsequent international codifications of the laws and customs of war, in particular the International Declaration Concerning the Laws and Customs of War agreed upon at the Brussels Conference in 1874, and the Hague Conventions on Land Warfare of 1899 and 1907.

These provisions were further honed and nuanced through multiple iterations of the Geneva Conventions that resulted in the International Humanitarian Law (IHL), which are a set of rules that seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict.

Other International Law provisions prohibit wars of aggression, occupation and annexation. States have also pushed for other norms to preserve territorial boundaries, by drafting instruments that seek to establish a duty not to recognise the transfer of title in certain cases involving forcible acquisitions of territory, and advocated for what came to be known as the “duty of non-recognition” of occupation and annexations.

Similarly, there are laws and regulations against forced displacement of populations. Even circumstances in which it can serve a legitimate purpose — to safeguard the popula-tion from an ongoing military operation — such displacement “must meet certain minimum safeguards and take place in conditions of safety and dignity.”

The permanent displacement of a popu-lation, the attempt to create ethnically homogeneous geographic areas, is ethnic cleansing and, there-fore, completely illegal under International Law. In other words, the Gaza case (or West Bank), if Trump or Israel were to actually try to do what is being proposed, will be an open and shut case stamped IL-LEGAL, besides being morally deplorable.

IS TRUMP THE FIRST IMPERIALIST?

No, he isn’t. But at least through his pronouncements he seems to be going back to the 19th centu-ry.

Daniel Immerwahr, American historian and professor at Northwestern University, explains to the reader in his 2019 book, How to Hide an Empire, of how US imperialism began — with guano, bird-poop. East Coast farms were suffering soil exhaustion and soil required fertilisation. That’s where guano and hundreds of uninhabited Pacific islands came in.

The entire exercise was codified in The Guano Islands Act of 1865. It “enabled citizens of the United States to take possession of unclaimed islands containing guano deposits in the name of the United States.” Migratory birds for centuries were coming to these remote islands and pooping. There was guano everywhere and it needed to be blasted. Labour conditions were terrible and the white masters cruel.

So in Navassa island near Haiti, the African-American workers mutinied and killed five white supervisors. They were tried and sentenced to death. Enter E J Waring, a black lawyer, to defend the mutineers. He made the argument that they could not be tried in US courts because guano islands were foreign territory and because the US could not claim overseas territory. The US Supreme Court (USSC) mulled the question and declared that the guano islands were US territory and therefore the mutineers could be tried in the US.

As Immerwahr says, in doing so, the USSC “lays the basis for the legal foundation for the US empire, be-cause it establishes the constitutionality of the fact that the US can claim overseas territory and that is consonant with the US Constitution.”

This is also the beginning of much interest in the US about expanding to not just small islands but larger colonies. To cut it short, during the American-Spanish war, the US ends up occupying Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and playing a most ironic and deceit-ful hand, the Philippines, by first supporting the insurgents and then simply taking over Manila and the rest of the country.

Later, in the first decade of the 20th century, the term colonies was considered too brazen and it was decided to call them territories.

After World War II, the US decided to hide its empire through a web of international and financial institutions, leading to what Pan-African revolutionary and Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah called neo-colonialism, the “worst form of imperialism” because “power [is exercised] without responsibility and, for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”

A year after Nkrumah’s book Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism came out, he was ousted from power in an allegedly CIA-backed coup, ironically corroborating what he had argued in the book. The literature on the US’ covert (and other times overt) financial and geopolit-ical imperialism is thick and has attracted such international scholars as Noam Chomsky, Michael Hud-son, Abraham Newman and Henry Ferrell, to name just a few. Hudson calls it “super-imperialism.”

Trump has removed the fig leaf from the crotch.

SO HOW WILL IT PLAY OUT?

An ideal world for Trump would be what Barrett called an “auto-erotic autobiography”. Mercifully, the real world contains many actors, state and non-state. Some will toe his line; others will push back. The real world is far too complex even for the megalomania that informs Trump.

He knows that. He is not a fool. So what’s his strategy? To act as a mad man and force others to take him seriously, like what Nixon tried to do with the Vietnamese and failed? Maybe. What is clear is that he sets the opening price to create what negotiation theory calls the anchoring effect and what psycho-logical studies have shown to have a considerable and persistent effect on other parties. In doing so, he claims value for himself by taking as much value away from the other party as he can, a process akin to bargaining for items that do not have a fixed price.

Take his original ultimatum to Panama on the canal. He began with a maximal-ist claim: the US built it and the US should take it over and run it. The claim was also sprinkled with half-facts and untruths. Was he prepared to occupy Panama? No. He wanted the Chinese booted out and Panama to get out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. He got both. In other words, start big and bully and then negotiate.

The question is, how will he deal with Gaza? Perhaps a better question would be, is his Gaza Plan about Gaza?

Look at it like this: if he ratchets up pressure on Egypt, Jordan and Saudi on issue XYZ and then wants them to make concessions on ABC, the real prize, how would these countries react, especially if they believe that it’s easier to concede on ABC and there’s even a better quid for the quo in terms of closer relations with the US and the benefits to be accrued from that?

Also, what is a bigger prize for Israel, West Bank and East Jerusalem or Gaza? In theory, if Israel, which has already turned the West Bank into multiple bantustans, could an-nex that territory, it could let Gaza be, leaving it destroyed and miserable for years to come.

None of this might come to pass. Of all the issues on Trump’s plate, Palestine is the most complex and vexing. In his last tenure, he threw his weight squarely behind Israel, shutting down the PLO office in New York, legitimising Israel’s occupation of the Golan, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and facilitating illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. That begot the October 7 military attack by Hamas, among other factors. If he continues with the same policy, we could see more violence and, possibly, even the reversal of the normalisation pro-cess.

Meanwhile, the fragile ceasefire is already threatened because Israel has violated the benchmarks for aid delivery and Hamas has announced it will withhold the prisoner swap. Trump has weighed in by saying that if Hamas doesn’t release all the prisoners by Saturday, all hell will break loose.

CONCLUSION

One scenario is for Trump to force the targeted Arab states, most of whom are the US’ vassals, to take the Palestinians. Those states will have to weigh the conse-quences of capitulating to US pressure with anger in their streets. That anger is thick and palpable and it can’t be lightly dismissed.

But let’s assume, in theory, that they would. Jordan’s King Ab-dullah II bin Al-Hussein looked distraught in his meeting with Trump. Egypt’s President, Fattah el-Sisi says he will stay away from a White House meeting if Gaza displacement is on the agenda but has also said Egypt is preparing a plan for Gaza’s future. All this implies that Trump, like last time, is subtracting the Palestinians from their future.

That said, we still have the problem of how to move the Palestinians out of their lands. Would West Bank follow, what Israeli far right calls Judea and Samaria? Some 200,000 Gazans have already left the strip, mostly those with foreign passports. Some others might too: students, children, older people and women. But it will be merely a percentage of the total. The majority would stay, as would the fighters.

Would Trump give a nod to Israeli Occupa-tion Forces to resume their genocidal assault on Gaza and force the Gazans out of the strip? That’s what the Israeli far right definitely wants. But if he does, it would be clear as daylight that Trump has, in fact, sanctioned Israel’s genocidal campaign. That would be an order of magnitude worse than Joe Biden’s legacy. It would also fly in the face of Trump’s claim that he is a unifier and doesn’t want to embroil the US in wars.

That would also have consequences for an international order that, despite state interests, is underpinned by legal and moral constraints. Other powers, global and re-gional, would take a cue from the US and resort to the use of force, attacking, occupying and annexing territories. The world would be back to the 19th century, Thomas Hobbes without a check by John Locke.

There’s a Y-junction here and, as Robert Frost told us, we can’t travel both: allow Israel to exterminate the Palestinians or right the original wrong. The first leads to more violence and anarchy, the second to a strengthening of legal-moral norms. I am not wagering on the first.

The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies.

X: @ejazhaider