US President Donald Trump's proposal for the US to take over 'ownership' of the Gaza Strip, while Palestinians are resettled elsewhere, has ignited widespread concern among Palestinians, who view it as a direct assault on their national identity and right to return.
US President Donald Trump ’s proposal that the US take over ‘ownership’ of the Gaza strip while Palestinians are resettled elsewhere has struck at the core of their national struggle. Palestinians refer to their 1948 expulsion from what is now Israel as the Nakba , Arabic for catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians — a majority of the prewar population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some six million, with most living in urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. In Gaza, the refugees and their descendants make up around three-quarters of the population. Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right to return to their 1948 homes has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago. Now, many Palestinians fear a repeat of their painful history on an even more cataclysmic scale. All across Gaza, Palestinians in recent days have been loading up cars and donkey carts or setting out on foot to visit their destroyed homes after a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war took hold on January 19. The images from several rounds of mass evacuations throughout the war — and their march back north on foot — are strikingly similar to black-and-white photographs from 1948. The war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, has killed over 47,000 Palestinians, according to local health officials, making it by far the deadliest round of fighting in the history of the conflict. The initial Hamas attack killed some 1,200 Israelis. The war has forced some 1.7 million Palestinians — around three-quarters of the territory’s population — to flee their homes, often multiple times. That is well over twice the number that fled before and during the 1948 war. Israel has sealed its border. Egypt has only allowed a small number of Palestinians to leave, in part because it fears a mass influx of Palestinians could generate another long-term refugee crisis. The international community is strongly opposed to any mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza — an idea embraced by far-right members of the Israeli government, who refer to it as “voluntary emigration.” Israel has long called for the refugees of 1948 to be absorbed into host countries, saying that calls for their return are unrealistic and would endanger its existence as a Jewish-majority state. Even if Palestinians are not expelled from Gaza en masse, many fear that they will never be able to return to their homes or that the destruction wreaked on the territory will make it impossible to live there. One UN estimate said it would take until 2040 to rebuild destroyed homes. Yara Asi, a Palestinian assistant professor at the University of Central Florida who has done research on the damage to civilian infrastructure in the war, says it’s “extremely difficult” to imagine the kind of international effort that would be necessary to rebuild Gaza. Asi and others fear that if another genuine Nakba occurs, it will be in the form of a gradual departure. “It won’t be called forcible displacement in some cases. It will be called emigration, it will be called something else,” Asi said. “But in essence, it is people who wish to stay, who have done everything in their power to stay for generations in impossible conditions, finally reaching a point where life is just not livable.
GAZA STRIPE PALESTINIAN REFUGEES NAKBA DONALD TRUMP ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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