Intended to eradicate the nakba—the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” that is the establishment of modern-day Israel—Hamas’s barbarism in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has, by its own account, hatched its restoration in the form of the prerequisite for U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal for reconstructing Gaza: removing the population. Trying to undo history has evidently brought an allegedly sordid history roaring back to life.
A more ironic outcome of the Oct. 7 savagery could not be invented. In fact, the regional disorder generated by Hamas atrocities has given the term “irony” a wide berth in the Middle East. The war that Hamas started has essentially destroyed any possibility for the terrorist organization to follow its well-trodden trajectory of losing wars but winning peace. The scale of the attacks and the violence erupting against Israel from land, sea and air has, in its wake, dramatically changed the region and rendered the conventional thinking, which is hard-wired into customary ways of stopping violence, outdated.
Israel has had to pay a heavy price. Oct. 7 initiated a multifront war against the Jewish state, emptying its southern and northern towns and villages; threatening its commerce; and eventually subjecting almost every city and town to missile, drone and terror attacks. The country has lost soldiers, and civilians kidnapped, tortured and killed—young and old—by Hamas and other terrorist entities. But Israel did halt what initially appeared to be a dynamic working against its interests and its capacity to sustain its defenses. Its operations not only dismantled Hamas’s military capacity—killing many of its well-known leaders—but also demolished Hezbollah and destroyed Iranian air defenses. A weakened Hezbollah and Iran could not prop up the Bashar Assad regime in Syria. Nor could Hamas control the cascade of economic and political chaos that shattered the moorings the terrorists had always exploited to devastating effect.
But while Israel had proclaimed its own war aims—defeating Hamas, eliminating Gaza as a staging ground for further attacks and returning the hostages—the country has not produced a plan for how all of this would be achieved. Of all the ideas put forward thus far, only Trump’s proposal has a grip on these new economic and political realities.
But as a president adorned with the aura of a pop star and disposed to violating norms, his plan has become fodder for condemnation because he has challenged the consensus of experts that peace and stability in the Middle East depend on meeting what are deemed legitimate Palestinian demands and needs, while always acknowledging the special status of this people as perpetual victims.
A string of platitudes indicts the president with rupturing respect for a set of sacred political principles, but the charges they contain simply radiate magical thinking. Coiling its attacks around the recurring fantasy that turning southern Israel into an abattoir can deliver Palestinians from their past defeats and displacement, Hamas thrives on the death and destruction its own actions produce.
While resetting history is not an achievable political objective, it impels the existential urgency of the actions repeatedly taken by Hamas to spill blood, regardless of the massive numbers of Palestinian lives destroyed and material devastation in Gaza. Hamas counts on the wreckage to secure international intervention for a ceasefire that leaves its infrastructure intact and channels the customary payoffs to its leaders, who bury their weapons until exhumed for the next round. Not this time. There is too much destruction for aid to make much of a difference, and Palestinians face serious competition from Syria and Lebanon for funds for humanitarian purposes and restoring a functioning economy. There may not be many donors prepared to finance rebuilding Gaza when the behavioral pattern is more than likely to turn the Strip back into piles of rubble after the next round.
If remaking Palestine “from the river to the sea” was never achievable, its pursuit in cycles of rage and retribution did reinforce the image of Palestinians as the living embodiment of a historic injustice. They are regularly pictured among desolate heaps of garbage and layers of human waste. Keyed to one or another current issue constantly gives Hamas forces a reason to break one after another ceasefire agreement whose attacks are watermarked by the nakba. That is the reason that the year 1948 has become associated less with a military defeat than a torment defining Palestinian identity by its displacement, alienation and indignity.
Palestine is more a cause than a place on a map, and it’s presumably that incarnation enabling the masses—wherever they live or whatever the source of their oppression—to see in the barbarism displayed in its name as the only righteous pathway for emancipatory impulses.
Trump has jostled the Gaza war by confronting these ideas encrusted in so many clichés. However incomplete his plan, it is an announcement that the battlelines in the region have been redrawn. Palestinians can no longer claim their place as the single metaphor for the perpetual innocent victim. The foundation of agony no longer belongs only to Palestinians. Unfortunately, they have many rivals in the Middle East who can legitimately claim to be victims of prolonged abuse and injustice.
Trump’s plan is a requiem both for global actions that have become too costly to sustain and for the people who have succumbed to the unwise and destructive thinking that oppression is a legitimate foundation for rage and barbarism.