At last, some Gazan pragmatism—but no one wants to know

Let’s get one thing straight: Donald Trump’s seemingly impulsive suggestion, when meeting Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this week, that the USA (i.e. his own property empire) should take over Gaza and turn it into the Riviera of the Middle East is a fantasy. Everyone knows it’s a fantasy. And none of the unnamed world leaders who he claims have welcomed it have welcomed it. That’s a fantasy too.

What’s interesting, though, is how people have actually responded to it. According to the press, the common reaction in political circles is somewhere between bewilderment and outrage, with the usual lobbyists pouring on fuel, and the media eagerly stoking the fire, the BBC’s Lyse Doucet calling it a “bombshell” that had been “shocking capitals the world over” and the Economist calling it “eye-popping”.

Thus António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, quickly waded in during an address to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (described by the BBC’s Joe Inwood merely as “a meeting in New York”), accusing Trump of calling for ethnic cleansing, being in violation of international law and carrying out war crimes. 

Guterres commented that “the world has seen a chilling systematic dehumanisation and demonisation of an entire people.” Hossam Zaki of the Arab League added that Trump’s words would further destabilise the situation in the Middle East, and understandably only make the Palestinians more violent. (Understandably. Of course.)

In short, every commentator who went on the record spoke to reinforce the status quo, which is that there is no alternative but to implement the two-state solution that everyone in the world has signed up to.

That’s fascinating. We know, of course, what the agreed mechanism for peace is, and so it is quite legitimate for the Great and the Good to reiterate it. The formula has the odour of sanctity; there is no legal basis for questioning it. But we also know that it has been talked about for thirty years, without anything having been achieved. What that tells us is that the overwhelming consensus, in the corridors of power, is that it is better to sound virtuous than to be effective.

That sense of comfort with discomfort is, presumably, exactly what America’s new president wanted to torpedo: his modus operandi is clearly that outcomes are more important than rhetoric—so I give him the benefit of the doubt when he said he wanted to “own” Gaza: I’m sure he meant to own the problem and the solution, not to own the land; and I give him the benefit of the doubt about wanting a better reality for the Palestinians “who only want to hold on to Gaza because they have no alternative”, rather than seeking to humiliate them by forcibly removing them. I’m also pretty sure I heard him talk about Egypt and Jordan “accepting” Palestinians; I’m sure I did not hear him say anything about expulsion.

(The Guardian, in London, thinks the opposite. Forced dispossession is what Israel’s Zionist government has always wanted, it shrieked, and ran a story quoting Gazans as apparently saying of Trump’s plan: “We would rather die here than leave.”)

We become used to words, and we like those that sound good to us. People in diplomatic and NGO circles casually unload references to legal frameworks; people who presume to represent those with skin in the game use the language of moral authority. And the attack on Trump has largely been an attack on his language rather than an attempt to examine his vision, blurry though it obviously is. That, in terms of reportage and response, is a distraction that does us all a disservice.

The big issue, as I have argued all week, is that if the current fantasy about a Palestinian state is to stand any chance of becoming a reality, or even of simply redirecting the current conversation in a more creative direction, Palestinians have to want it—and the first step is that they themselves would have to be willing to leave what they endlessly complain are the miseries of Gaza in favour of a new location and a fresh start.

Why should we live in this suffering?

In support of that imaginative volte-face, Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, this morning said he had told the IDF to help Gazans leave the Strip voluntarily—a very different step from the forced evacuation that the world has been accusing Trump and Netanyahu of trying to accomplish—but that wasn’t good enough for anyone. When Katz added that countries that have falsely accused Israel of genocide should now absorb Gazans or have their hypocrisy exposed, that was ridiculed as well, with at least two BBC reporters indicating, not in words but by their tone of voice, that opening the gates of Gaza to let people out was merely ethnic cleansing in disguise, and that this should be obvious to us all.

In this miserable soup of accusation and negativity, it therefore came as an astonishing and very welcome corrective to hear the words of Ghada Al Kord, a Gazan woman, aged thirty-eight, whom the BBC has been interviewing on-and-off during the sixteen months since the October 7 massacre.

Speaking from Gaza City, she said that Gazans would prefer to reconstruct their beloved Gaza with their hands, 

“but if this does not happen soon, like in the upcoming few months, I think most of the people here will rethink again and will try to leave Gaza, because no one can bear this difficult life; and we are in the twenty-first century: so how can we live inside this, with the technology, with the progress, that the world has? And even Gaza, which is very small, comparing to any cities around the world, why should we live in this poverty? Why should we live in this suffering? We should have a good or decent life. I think most of us, if we don’t have a decent life as soon as possible, and we don’t have a decent government or a responsible official that will take care of the life of these people, as soon as possible, I think most of the Gazans here will think to leave, and live abroad and a better life.”

That must be the first time in sixteen months—and longer—that the BBC has broadcast a flat-out attack on the incompetence and incapacity of the Hamas authority, and it completely changes the perspective that all the media I have seen have contrived to reinforce. Here is the voice of a regular Palestinian citizen saying, very reasonably, that she’d rather have a better life elsewhere than hang on to the inadequacies of The Strip.

That’s a remarkable eye-opener. It tells us that the usual overheated falsehood—that the Palestinians would rather die than give up this miserable 141-square-mile patch of land—is not in fact a matter of doctrine, and that, in the viewer of this interviewee at least, the majority of Palestinians are much more pragmatic than the world’s media has wanted to present them as.

That really matters, because it is the first hint that for all the confrontational and pious rhetoric spouted by highly salaried onlookers elsewhere in the world, people on the ground do have a flexibility of mind, and a sense of political critique, that we had not been given any evidence of hitherto. 

It’s an extraordinarily positive and encouraging thing to have heard—and I desperately hope that Mrs Al Kord does not suffer for it. In one sense, she already has. The authenticity of her words was immediately misrepresented by the reporter who interviewed her, who said merely that “she told us about her fears for the future of life in Gaza”. No, Nick Robinson: she said something far more important—but you chose not to hear it. I expect the same will be true for many other listeners.