A Palestinian homeland beckons

The most surprising thing about reaction to Donald Trump’s proposals for the redevelopment of the Gaza Strip was the surprise it engendered, from heads of state through to lowly reporters. On the BBC World Service, the host of an overnight news discussion program asked a guest whether his jaw hadn’t hit the ground when he heard what Trump was suggesting. Yes, said the guest, and it’s still there.

That’s a real insight. The apparently impromptu plan for America to take over the ruins of Gaza and rebuild it goes against international law and violates the rights of the Palestinians: that much is obvious. But in the world of politics and conflict, as in any aspect of life, does no one play around with ideas?

Sinai Wasteland (8283327458).jpg / Alexander Annenkov from Moscow, Russia / Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

It sounds as if they don’t: it sounds as if the people we rely on for workarounds when confronted with logjams are mentally immobile. The pros and cons of what Trump suggested yesterday should have been the meat and potatoes of political discussion for years; that they caught everyone off guard tells us one big thing: we are being served very badly by those most responsible for moving the story on.

No wonder there’s never been any progress in the dreadful, destructive Israel-Palestine saga: there’s no capacity for imaginative thinking among politicians, diplomats, civil servants, human rights negotiators or media analysts whose job it should be to use the tools of communication to challenge assumptions and explore new perspectives, not whine on about the deadlock.

The big question that the Gaza proposal throws up has to do with Palestinian identity and statehood. For decade after decade, all we have heard from the Palestinians and the United Nations is that Gaza is one of the most hyper-populated regions in the world (not the product of genocide, then)—an overcrowded collection of eight refugee camps, so hopelessly under-provisioned as to need over $1 billion of relief every year.

Palestinians themselves have referred to it as their prison. 

Now that a blueprint comes along for taking it away from them, it suddenly becomes a paradise—the place they long to live in and stay in: their homeland.

It is clearly not a homeland to anyone. Arabs who fled during the fighting that broke out when Israel came into existence flocked to Gaza as a haven. At the time, no more than 100,000 people lived there. Those residents were joined by 200,000 to 250,000 refugees from, mostly, cities and villages in the South, such as Jaffa, Beersheba, Ashkelon and Hebron. 

So the idea that, like Mecca and Medina, Gaza has some sort of sacral quality, which is how pro-Palestinian activists the world over like to put it, is a nonsense.

Nor is it true, of course, that the population that went to live in Gaza ever had an identity defined by Gaza; they became “Gazans” by virtue of having been trapped there. But equally, if they “became” Gazans, it is also not true that they are “Palestinians”, because modern-day Gazans have never lived in “Palestine”, only in the refugee camps by the sea. 

One needs to step back and recognize—in spite of the propaganda designed to further their case against Israel—that, like many people, the two million souls who live in Gaza today are a diverse collection of Arabs with no obvious connection to any specific place. Many have only ever known life in Gaza but they have no historic basis for calling it a homeland, a word that suggests ancient heritage; the very fact of referring to it as one large dysfunctional detention centre reinforces that.

But language is slippery. Edward Said used to call himself a Palestinian and for many years preferred not to talk about his early years; but the fact is that he was born in Jerusalem under the British Mandate (and so could have been a British Mandate citizen), was brought up in Cairo (and so could have become an Egyptian), moved to the USA (and was eligible for American citizenship) but actually had a Jordanian passport.

The truth is, the notion of Palestinian identity is a chimera. 

That said, it is vital that Gazans and West Bankers now acquire a national identity—not least because it is what they desperately want. And it is vital, also, that the identity they acquire means something. The idea of becoming citizens of one of two separate blocs—Gaza or the West Bank—not only will not do that, it will continue to keep them disunified and politically at odds with themselves. 

They need a single identity and a single bloc of land.

Shaded relief map of the Sinai Peninsula, 1992, produced by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

I wrote yesterday that the most obvious destination for this group of 5.5 million is Sinai, an otherwise unpopulated territory that has everything that Gaza has, not least a Mediterranean seafront of twice the length, and a land mass 170 times larger. Better still, it also looks southwards and therefore can act as a bridge leading from Europe to East Africa and the Indian Ocean. Not only does that make it a region that is physically self contained, it’s also almost completely unbounded—and three times the area of Israel. Wow.

The economic opportunities are stratospheric: how could anyone not want this to become the homeland they crave? What a future stands waiting for them: it goes way beyond what Israel, and the displacement (or annihilation) of the Jews, has to offer.

And if the residents of Gaza and the West Bank have called themselves Gazans and West Bankers and Palestinians, let them take a new name too: “Sinaians”. It’s as good as any.

Egypt would oppose it, of course; but there has to be a deal by which Egypt sees the value of giving it up. As we know from Bible history, Sinai was not always Egyptian either; when the Children of Israel were released from their own captivity in a regional refugee camp, they crossed the Red Sea and were no longer in Egypt but in an undefined extension of Midian. 

The sedrah of Yitro will remind us of that in a week’s time. There’s material there for framing discussions with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and his pragmatic government. I want to see talks start. I also want to see jaws hit the floor—and stay there—when an agreement is announced.