Trump’s Plan for Forced Displacement

After the ceasefire agreement adopted in January 2025, Muslims and the international community took action to halt Israeli attacks and to open the door to humanitarian aid for Gaza. As humanitarian aid convoys moved from Egypt towards Gaza, Israeli forces began a limited withdrawal from residential areas. At the very hours when Palestinians, setting out towards the north of Gaza to search the ruins of their destroyed homes for the bodies of their children and loved ones, were showing the world that Gaza is an inseparable part of the independent Palestinian State to be established in the future, US President Donald Trump was hosting at the White House the war criminal Netanyahu, for whom an arrest warrant has been issued.

In a press statement with Netanyahu, Trump said that he saw the US holding a long-term ownership position in Gaza and stated that the Palestinians in Gaza should be permanently resettled in neighbouring countries (Jordan and Egypt). Reacting to Trump’s statements, Jordan and Egypt made clear their opposition to this decision. Yet although Trump acknowledged that the two Arab countries had rejected the plan to send Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip, he insisted that Egypt and Jordan would accept the displaced Gazans. When asked at a press conference whether he would consider imposing tariffs on Egypt and Jordan to force the two countries to comply if they rejected the plan, Trump said: “They will do it. We do a lot for them, and they’re going to do it.”

A PRESIDENT FROM THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

After the ceasefire came into force, Trump presented the details of his plan to empty the Gaza Strip of people and to expel Palestinians to countries such as Egypt and Jordan. According to Trump, funds from Arab countries and American companies will play an important role in the plan for the reconstruction of Gaza. Drawing attention to the reconstruction of Gaza, Trump announced that the US would take over Gaza and, going further still, stated that the Palestinians would be forcibly displaced. Advocating the forced displacement of Palestinians, Trump also signed an executive order providing for sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC) because of the arrest warrant concerning Netanyahu.

At a time when the reality of the rhetoric of forced displacement from Gaza was being debated, Trump shared details of his Gaza plan on his Truth Social account. According to the plan, “the Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting, and the Palestinians would be resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.” He went on: “The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the world, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind.”

It may be thought that, in advocating the policy of displacing Palestinians that the Israeli right has voiced for decades, Trump is in fact focused on projects worth billions of dollars. According to UN damage assessment reports, clearing the more than approximately 50 million tonnes of rubble left by Israel’s bombardment could take 21 years and cost up to 1.2 billion dollars. More important still, however, is the reconstruction budget. The cost of rebuilding Gaza is estimated at around 2 trillion dollars, and its completion at between 7 and 15 years.

Coming from the construction sector, Trump may be planning for American companies, with Gulf capital, to win major tenders in Gaza. The Trump administration, focused on billion-dollar construction projects, needs to foresee that the Gaza plan will lead to greater conflict and upheaval rather than bringing stability to the region and to Gaza. Should American troops move to force Palestinians to migrate through the use of force, it is clear that Israel will put into practice a policy of expansion in the West Bank as well, causing great destruction and loss of life. It would also not be wrong to say that forced migration would give rise to a dynamic of great chaos and conflict in Egypt and Jordan.

OUR RED LINE

Beyond all this, the religious, social, political and military reactions that the forced displacement of the Palestinians, the bleeding wound of the Ummah, would provoke could lead to larger conflicts in the Middle East. It is impossible that the Republicans in the American administration do not also know that there is no possibility of Trump’s displacement policy being carried out without war. Attempts to lay hands on Jerusalem, and in particular on Al-Aqsa Mosque, and to trample on the sanctity of the Haram al-Sharif are a red line for us. It is clearly understood that the American administration, which deems exile and forced displacement fitting for the Palestinians who have defended their homeland at the cost of their lives for 15 months, will bring not stability but instability to the region. Consequently, to believe that the Muslims and Palestinians who have resisted 15 months of occupation and genocide will abandon their homeland because Trump wants them to is, to put it in the simplest terms, to fail to grasp the religious, historical and political significance of the Palestinian Cause.

What is more, the statement by Trump, President of a state founded little more than 250 years ago, that he will displace from their ancestral lands the Palestinians, whose history goes back more than 4 thousand years, contains nothing worth considering or discussing from our point of view. As President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan underlined: “These are utterly futile endeavours. They are efforts to beat water in a mortar. No one has the power to remove the people of Gaza from their eternal homeland of thousands of years. Palestine, with Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, belongs to the Palestinians.”

Note: This article was first published at https://www.yenisafak.com/dusunce-gunlugu/trumpin-tehcir-plani-4678519.

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