Trump’s Game Plan for Occupied Palestine: Forced Dispossession and Annexation

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 31 Mar 2025

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

27 Mar 2025 – This post was published in a modified form as an opinion piece by the Anadolu Agency in Turkey on 27 Feb with the title Trump’s Riviera Proposal for Gaza’s ‘Day After.Trump’s brazen imperial outreach is articulated with neither qualifications, embarrassment, nor some claim of benevolence. In similar evasions of  the sovereign rights of Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Mexico Trump early in his second term as the US President has shaken the stability of the Westphalian world order, at least as it emerged from World War II.

This rebirth of overt Western imperial expansionism seems part of a geopolitical shakeup that looks also to bypass the long Atlanticist partnership with  Europe, denigrates alliance diplomacy, implements anti-immigrant exclusionary policies, as well as pursues a regressive form of economic nationalism that wields tariffs as a weapon and tacitly aspires to be a market-driven economic superpower that either challenges or eclipses a state-guided Chinese economic superpower, while these rivals each engage openly in anti-democratic patterns of domestic governance.

Against this background, the removal of the rubble and the people of Gaza and in their place  create a new fantasy playground for affluent (and insensitive) tourists is a metaphor for the crassest imaginable human sensibility that avows banishing a people decimated by genocide from their homeland, a shock display of human cruelty when empathy is absent and greed takes over. However enacted, Trump’s plan inflicts a permanent punishment on the survivors of the Gaza death camp in collaboration with the main perpetrator of a transparent genocide.

The wider Trump plan for Palestine can be summed up in a single word: erasure. it was recently signified by the mandatory US adoption of the biblical name for the West Bank long in use in Hebrew discourse within Israel–Judea and Samaria. This together with other signals from Washington suggesting that Israel’s annexation of part or even all of the West Bank would be endorsed by the US Government in defiance of the international and UN understanding of the legal and political status of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).]

The US President, Donald Trump, surprised the world with his proposal for the reconstruction and development of Gaza after the Israeli genocide subsides. The main features of the plan were forced transfer of the surviving Palestinian population to foreign countries and the takeover of the Gaza Strip by the United States to manage the formidable reconstruction effort, with financing mainly extracted from the Arab governments in the region, especially the rich Gulf countries, as the price of sustaining the geopolitical protection services provided for decades for regimes isolated from their own citizenry. As the Saudi ruler, Mohamed bin Salman put it succinctly some months ago, “I don’t care about the Palestinians, but my people do.”

Since its issuance on February 4, 2025 at a White House press conference at which Trump was standing next to the visiting Israel Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the global response to the plan was largely one of shock unaccompanied by awe. Even the Israelis seemed initially puzzled by how to respond, Netanyahu displaying a soft form of support, likely pragmatically driven, for the general contours of the proposal, but with an explicit endorsement only of its most objectionable feature–the clear commitment  to the ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, which currently numbers over two million severely traumatized Palestinians. How could it be otherwise? To date, Israel has officially refrained from responding to the real estate and imperial aspects of the plan, that is, this bizarre vision of a Middle Eastern Riviera and an imperial US grab of land over which they had neither a prior claim nor a present connection.

From the perspective of human rights and international law population transfer was the characteristic of the plan that unsurprisingly generated the most opposition, first of all from the Palestinians, but also from persons and governments of minimal conscience all over the world. A weak form of justification was offered by Trump and his most loyal supporters, mainly in the US, in the form of insisting that no approach to Israel’s Gaza problem has previously had worked, so it was time to try something different. Yet an outlandish, one-sided proposal that serves Israel’s interests by depopulating the Occupied Palestinian territory in a manner that would exceed the largest and most dramatic previous forced removal of Palestinians since the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 when upwards of 750,000 Palestinians were coerced and terrorized to leave their homes, many soon to discover that their villages were being demolished, and learn that their right of return bestowed by international law and human decency was to be forever denied.

These days Palestinians disagree about whether this phase of massive ethnic cleansing should be treated as a second Nakba or the Nakba be viewed as a continuous process of the denial of the most basic rights of the Palestinian people and is continuing. It commenced in 1948 (or earlier) and continues into the present, denominated by Ilan Pappé as ‘incremental genocide.’ Both perspectives have merit. A focus on the most traumatic events is illuminates the high points of oppression and abuse while giving attention to the continuity of abusive denial of rights in apartheid structures and genocidal policies and practices of the Israel occupation also captures the essence of the Palestinian narrative of ethnic repression, exploitation, and resistance in their own homeland.

No abuse is more continuous  in this tragic history of the Palestinian people than is the denial of their most basic right of all, the right of self-determination, a legal entitlement of all peoples, enshrined as common Article 1 in both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights that both entered into force in 1966, and were preceded by expressions of international consensus that stressed the affirmation of a right of resistance against colonial rule that included armed struggle.

It is also significant that the UN, often the target of Israel’s defamation due to its record of symbolic support of Palestinian rights over the years, was itself responsible for a crucial denial of Palestinian human rights by its proposed solution of the emergent struggle for the future of Palestinian in 1947 by way of decreeing partition of mandate Palestine, which amounted to a continuation of British colonizing tactics of  ‘divide and conquer.’ The Zionist movement accepted the partition proposal, as set forth in General Assembly Resolution 181, while the Arab governments and the representatives of the Palestinian people rejected it leading to the 1948 War. Such a division was to be expected as all along the Zionist Project was opportunistic in taking what it could get in various political climates but never abandoning its ambition to have all of Palestine. The Palestinian refused to go along with a sequel to the quasi-colonial administration of Palestine after World War I that was couple with the British pledge in the Balfour Declaration to support the Zionist Project at least to the extent of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It is important to recognize that this encroachment on Palestinian basic rights preceded by more than a decade the rise of Hitler in Germany.

This tactical ploy by the leadership of the International Zionist Movement of pretending to be satisfied by an improvement of their position in relation to their goals was a master stroke of international public relations. In this sense ‘partition’ was an improvement on the UK colonialist Balfour Declaration that pledged support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine but not a state, while partition offered the Jewish people a state of their own. From a Palestinian perspective the UN was furthering the colonialist goals of Britain, which sought to neutralize Palestinian nationalism by the counterweight of Jewish immigration, and its competing nationalist vision, which indeed backfired by producing a Zionist phase of anti-colonial struggle seeking the removal of British hegemonic presence in Palestine under the guise of being the mandatory power with a supposed ‘sacred trust’ from the League of Nations to promote the wellbeing of the people under its protective control.

Trump’s proposal is an extremist version of this practice of denying Palestinians any agency over their own future as a people or a nation. The initiative issuing from the White House presumes an imperial prerogative and a reminder that Orientalism persists in the 21^st Century here taking the form of self-proclaimed superior Western civilizational management and entrepreneurial skill when if comes to global problem-solving. As if to be unashamed of such an approach Trump makes not the slightest claim that he has consulted with respected Palestinian leaders or even sought genuine Arab or Turkish advice, much less their overt endorsement, although he did claim with evidence or concrete references enthusiasm for the plan among those had previously discussed these intentions.

The only possible saving grace is to suggest that this is an application of Trump’s preoccupation with deal-making in international relations. Seen in this transactional light, he purpose of the Riviera proposals is to agitate other political actors to put forward alternative plans of their own. It was not so implausible as it might at first seemed. The Gulf governments held a meeting prior to an Arab Summit in Cairo with Gaza on the top of the agenda, both in relation to assuming some economic responsibility for restoring viability to the social existence in the Gaza Strip and offering to allow substantial number of Gazans to be transferred to their respective countries. Even if this dynamic produces a more plausible plan for Gaza its evolution seems to exclude Palestinian participation or consent, and if anything, will likely stir a new cycle of militant resistance. The Palestinian people, more generally, have suffered too severely and too long to swallow an arrangement devised by others that does away with its long deferred legal and moral entitlement to self-determination, although it is wrong to be too sure, given the deep trauma, the extension of genocidal tactics to the West Bank and several of Israel’s neighbors, and an undoubted Palestinian ‘realism’ in adjusting to the obstacles standing in the way of liberation.

Subtly embedded in the Trump proposal are valuable ‘get out of jail’ cards for Israel. It is notable that Israel is not even held accountable for reparations or bearing  any of the economic or ecological burdens of the multiple challenges of social reconstruction in Gaza, much less are Israeli leaders made accountable for the commission of genocide and related crimes. Instead, the core perverse idea prevails in the West that the victims should pay for the crimes of the perpetrators, yet again prolonging the underlying injustice inflicted for more than a century on the Palestinian people, and certainly not acting in accord with the moral imperatives of law. human dignity, and justice, or even the prudential virtues of regional stability. If anything resembling the Trump Riviera Plan becomes the sequel to the Gaza Genocide, it will most likely produce a range of Palestinian resistance strategies, including forms of armed struggle. Despite the dark shadows hovering over the current situation of the Palestinian people, either long confined to refugee camps or now traumatized by genocidal agendas of forced dispossession, including in the West Bank, the future of Israel is not assured, nor is the Palestinian struggle for liberation and self-determination foreclosed.

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Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

Go to Original – richardfalk.org

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