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Gaza is not Israel’s to give away, nor is it America’s to ‘take ownership of’. Gaza is the Palestinians’, and they, in turn, are not some pawns on a geopolitical chess board, nor wanderers on some empty road, but the inhabitants of a real place called Palestine, and in Palestine it is their right to make their home.
As Mahmoud Darwish wrote:
“My country is not a suitcase
I am not a traveller
I am the lover and the land is the beloved.”
Self-determination is a right under international law for all peoples. Donald Trump’s absurd assertion of an American ownership over Gaza does not change that right, nor does it reduce by one iota the Israeli culpability for its destruction and the need for accountability for the crimes the IDF has committed.
The world must stand firm against the forced dislocation – the ethnic cleansing – of the Palestinian people. It must also stand firm against violations of sovereignty from Gaza to Greenland and from Palestine to Panama. The rules-based international order (if ever it existed) may be in tatters, but its rules were written by those who knew perpetual war and the ugly world of might-makes-right, to protect all of us, and no less an America in a time of relevant decline.
Americans, too, should look to our own history – the US-Philippines War comes to mind, when Spanish occupation transitioned to American conflict – as does Vietnam when French rule over Indochina was handed off to our young to die for. An American role of the type Donald Trump has discussed for Gaza is not in our national interest. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians will not make America safe, and the building of beachfront hotels on the graves of dead children will not make America prosperous.
If the United States wants to play a constructive role here, it surely has capabilities that are relevant, from its world-leading Unexploded Ordnance clearance programme run, through grants to expert organisations, out of my old Bureau at the State Department, to its unique degree of leverage over Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to make it yield to our will, and not vice versa.
As I look at the response to Trump’s comments from people across America, and particularly from his own MAGA base, I can see a unique discomfort with and opposition to an Americanisation of Israel’s occupation. If there is one silver lining, it is this – that now, more than ever, the American people understand it is time for A New Policy.
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