For the far-right magnate who became president, Donald Trump, everything is a business opportunity and his property as a representative of U.S. imperialism. Thsi is the logic he uses when he has tries to bully governments, states, students and workers. The Palestinians, who will never give up their right to self-determination, have already warned him: Palestine is not for sale.
By Soraya Misleh
This is the cry that echoed in the streets of Washington on February 4 during the protests demanding the arrest of Trump’s criminal subordinate Benjamin Netanyahu and denouncing the handshake stained with Palestinian blood.
Trump’s shameless proposal that the United States take control of Gaza, along with the genocidal Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, is part of these negotiations. After 15 months of genocide in Gaza, the proposal is for normalization of relations, especially with Saudi Arabia, and the desire to consolidate a long-cherished family business: to turn Gaza, in Trump’s own words, into a “Riviera” with resorts and real estate developments to welcome billionaires on their summer vacations. Moreover, he would hand this “deal of a century” over to his son-in-law, the Zionist Jared Kushner.
Trump hypocritically justified his proposal by saying that Gaza is destroyed and uninhabitable, and that it is a place of misfortune for the Palestinian people, of death and bombs. Therefore, he has argued, the best thing for the Palestinian people to do is to permanently settle outside of it.
The cynical tone was that of a father worried about his children who cannot make decisions for themselves. Trump made the above statements alongside the main person responsible for the murder of more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza in the last 15 months alone, most of them women and children, and who had on his face a smile as cynical and pathetic as Trump’s. Netanyahu’s smile belied his feeling of trust and comfort in being at his boss’s side.
Ridiculously, Trump has blamed the destruction of Gaza on “bad luck” after the United States supplied billions of dollars, tons of weapons and bombs for the genocide undertaken on the Strip, just as it has supported a further advance of the ethnic cleansing already underway in the West Bank. And he says the two million Palestinians would like to leave, ignoring the historic images of those displaced in the southern strip returning to the north, singing of their collective joy and pain as they returned home. He has also ignored the scenes of Palestinians clearing the rubble from their homes, improvising survival, and planning the reconstruction of Gaza with the same firm promise that they will neither forget nor forgive the crimes committee against their people.
The dehumanization and racism of the colonizer has been expressed in the bizarre Trump/Netanyahu scene that was shamelessly broadcast to the world. The latest photo makes clear that the Palestinian people have obviously been absent from the decision-making about their present and future, as if they were incapable of taking their destiny into their own hands. This is the case with the ongoing Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe that is the cornerstone of the creation of the genocidal state of Israel in 1948. Orientalist ideology permeates every gesture and action of U.S. imperialism and its military enclave, Israel, whose fascist methods expose its true face to the world.
The Palestinian people–as the Zionist leaders have always imagined them in their colonial project and other writings since the late nineteenth century–must be despised or eliminated, colonized for their own good. This is the rhetoric that Trump expressed in his speech on February 4, alongside Netanyahu.
Gaza is not a place of misfortune. On the contrary, it is the land of heroes, the land of Palestine. The Palestinian people are resisting. And the Palestinians have immediately answered Trump’s plan with the following words of resistance: “We can only leave Gaza to return to the land stolen from us in 1948, that is, to return to our towns and cities from which we were violently expelled in historic Palestine, which the world today calls “Israel””. Eighty percent of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees.
Trump’s obscene proposal has provoked a wave of international condemnation, even from states historically complicit in the ongoing Nakba. Trump had no qualms about trying to humiliate Arab regimes under imperialist tutelage, such as Egypt and Jordan, to make his proposal valid: they owe us a lot, they will accept it. Yet, there was an immediate rejection of the proposal in the Arab world, including by Saudi Arabia, which is once again at the negotiaing table with Trump and his project to lead the resumption of normalization with Israel.
They know that the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is the most important cause for all oppressed and exploited Arab peoples. And they are aware that supporting the ethnic cleansing of two million Palestinians would create instability with a high probability for uprisings and revolutions. Trump threw his words to the wind in the logic of the deal.
However, this project is not new. During his first term, he even considered sending Palestinians to the Congo or another African country. Although this ultimately came to nothing, he has made progress in trying to bury the Palestinian cause in the infamous Abraham Accords, that is, the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab regimes.
The coordinated action of the Palestinian resistance in October 2023 interrupted this project. It was a consequence of the ongoing Nakba, with its ever deeper colonization and ethnic cleansing, far from the eyes of the world, while its leaders continued to shake hands with the Zionists, stained with Palestinian blood, without feeling guilty. By now everyone knows that the next great success would be Saudi Arabia. Trump, on his “Monopoly” board, is eager to move into the house where imperialism was forced to stop.
Inspired by the steadfastness and perseverance of the resilient Palestinian people (sumud in Arabic), it is up to international solidarity to strengthen the mobilization to thwart Trump’s plans for cemetery peace and prosperity (as a lucrative business for his billionaires and puppets).
For him, the message of the Palestinian girl Maria Hammoun, a survivor of the genocide in Gaza, puts him in his place: “If I asked you to leave your home and your country and live in China or Egypt, would you accept? I’m really sorry that I laughed, but the truth is that I would not accept. If you refuse, how can I accept being forced out of my home and country? Don’t you represent the land of freedom? What freedom are you talking about if you want to restrict us in our homeland and in the diaspora? A word of advice to the president of the world: you control the whole world except Gaza, because Gaza is the world.”
Palestine is not and never has been for sale! As passed down from generation to generation by our parents and grandparents who were expelled in 1948: our land and our freedom are priceless. In the words of the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadeh, “Palestinians teach life, sir.
