DC Edit | Trump’s plan to evict 2m to ‘develop’ Gaza outrageous

US President Donald Trump’s suggestion that two million Palestinians in Gaza should be forced out of the Gaza Strip and resettled in neighbouring Arab countries is preposterous. Such shepherding of people out of their domain is totally against international law and is nothing but ethnic cleansing the world cannot even countenance.

The Gaza Strip is no land parcel though where Trump’s idea springs from is made apparent by his background as a real estate mogul. His family business is now being run by his son-in-law Jarred Kushner who might relish the prospect of building what Trump believes could be akin to the Riviera on Gaza’s waterfront.

Consider what a great literary figure said of the original Riviera — “A sunny place for shady people.” The very idea is preposterous as it assumes the Palestinians are a people who can be pushed anywhere at the will of nations with powerful military forces like the United States or Israel even if they have been subjugated already to the worst of modern depredation with around 40,000 of them killed, their homes, schools, hospitals and mosques razed to the ground by bombing.

The problem with such an outlandish assertion of one man’s fancy notion is that there are no takers, not in Egypt or Jordan which do not wish to receive any more refugees from Israeli military action which was triggered by the Hamas’ savage attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. Nor would the Arab world accept such a proposal while it sneers at the underlying suggestion that morality does not count when it comes to making a real estate deal possible for the Trumps.

The Palestinians may have had their land bombed out of shape to the extent that most urban living spaces are rubble with the infrastructure pounded out of shape as it bore the brunt of around 15 months of relentless bombing and other military action. But no man breathes with his soul so dead that he would not say with pride that “this is my own, my native land!”, as a famous novelist and poet put it.

Closer home, action on a Trump policy has caused much heartburn as the first batch of Indians, who had tried to settle in the US by illegal means, were sent back on a military plane with their feet manacled and hands cuffed. No one can defend anybody who tries to stay as an illegal alien in any country and the US does not differentiate between nations, be they in Latin America or elsewhere, from where people may have crossed its borders illegally.

Even so, it was only a bit of compassion that Indians may be asking for as the first 104 of them — after spending a fortune in selling away their houses and travelling to the US as a land of opportunity only to have it shattered upon their deception being unearthed — may have expected to be treated in a humane way while being deported. This is not to question the right of a sovereign nation to do as it wishes with illegal aliens on its soil; only an appeal to their instincts higher than basic to be a bit humane.

Trump may have come back to the White House on the back of a campaign against rising inflation and an unprecedented wave of immigrants slipping into the US. He aims to serve an ‘America First’ policy which is his right, but it does seem that he is unable to differentiate between friends and foes when it comes to trade tariffs, illegal immigration, or even proposing making a real estate parcel of land of the Gaza Strip though there is no chance in a million that this will ever happen.