Gaza is a Palestinian homeland, not Trump’s luxury resort

“People are moving north to get back to their homes and see what happened, and turn around and leave … there is no water and no electricity.”

Steve Witkoff, billionaire real estate developer and US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, spoke these words to Axios as if he were describing an unfortunate inconvenience. But look closer, and you’ll see the blueprint.

This is the outcome Trump wants, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already set it in motion. Gaza was never meant to be rebuilt. It was meant to be emptied, flattened, erased.

And who better to oversee this clearing-out than real estate tycoons? To Trump and Witkoff, Gaza is not a people’s homeland; it is a development opportunity, a prime stretch of Mediterranean coastline waiting to be “repurposed” once its inhabitants have been removed.

Trump has made no secret of how he views Gaza as prime real estate, marvelling at its “phenomenal location” on the sea and its “best weather”, as though he were surveying land for a luxury resort.

He does not see Gaza as part of Palestine. He does not see it as a homeland belonging to its people. He sees it as an untapped opportunity for the wealthy, a playground for investors, a future resort for tourists and foreigners – everyone except the Palestinians of Gaza.

But Gaza is not real estate for sale. It is not a development project. It is not a resort for outsiders. Gaza is part of Palestine.

‘They will do it’

The US did not spend billions of dollars, deploy thousands of tons of bombs, and oversee the obliteration of 70 percent of Gaza’s buildings so that the territory could be reconstructed. 

The bombs were never meant to make way for rebuilding. They were meant to ensure there was nothing left. The idea that Gaza’s surviving population, those who the bombs did not manage to kill, would be allowed to reclaim their land, was never part of the plan.

And Trump has made it clear: there is no alternative. During a recent news conference, a journalist challenged him on his suggestion that Palestinians from Gaza could be sent to Jordan or Egypt, noting that both states had refused, and asking whether pressure such as tariffs may be used to force their hand.

Trump’s response, dripping with arrogance, was chilling in its certainty: “They will do it. They will do it. They’re gonna do it.”

It was not a suggestion or a negotiation, but a declaration – an assumption that power, pressure and sheer force of will can move nations, like pieces on a chessboard. That people can be transferred, displaced, erased – all because he says so.

Trump has built his entire political legacy on combatting migration, sealing borders, building walls, banning refugees, and treating migration as an existential threat to the US. He speaks of asylum seekers in his country as an invasion of criminals who must be stopped and deported.

Yet, when it comes to Palestinians, he is the architect of forced migration.

This is not just hypocrisy; it is also a reversal of Trump’s own “deal of the century”. That plan, despite being overwhelmingly skewed in Israel’s favour, nominally included the establishment of a Palestinian state. It recognised Gaza as part of that future state – a weak, fragmented entity designed to exist under Israel’s thumb.

Even this illusion of statehood was too much for Trump to uphold. By endorsing the forced removal of Gaza’s population, he is not just modifying his plan; he is abandoning it altogether.

The two-state solution, weak and illusory as it was under his vision, has now been erased entirely, in favour of the doctrine advocated by Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: permanent displacement and ethnic cleansing.

Religious justification

Back in January 2024, at a far-right conference attended by Israeli government ministers, the future of Gaza was discussed in the most explicit of terms: not reconstruction, not occupation, but removal.

The mass transfer of Palestinians from the territory was framed as a divine mandate, with the Book of Numbers invoked: “But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that ye let remain of them be as thorns in your eyes, and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein ye dwell.” 

This is not a political strategy; it is biblical warfare. It is a declaration that Palestinians in Gaza must not merely be controlled, contained or occupied, but rather expelled – a continuation of the same ideology that drove the Nakba, and the logic that justified decades of colonisation, dispossession and massacres.

In addition to meeting Israeli officials during his recent visit, Witkoff met Israeli hostages and their families, offering sympathy and solidarity. No such meetings were held with Palestinian families – not even for show. He offered no gestures of concern for the families of thousands of civilians who died in Israel’s relentless bombardments, nor for those being starved, displaced and systematically wiped out.

This is because in Trump’s world, some lives matter, and others are disposable. When Witkoff sat down with Israeli officials, one thing stood out: his meeting with Smotrich, the far-right minister who had been boycotted by the previous US administration for his openly racist, eliminationist views.

Following Trump’s announcement that he was asking Egypt and Jordan to take Palestinians from Gaza, Smotrich issued a statement praising “out of the box” solutions. Smotrich used the same phrase after meeting Witkoff.

In other words, prepare for ethnic cleansing. Trump’s team are no longer just tolerating the Israeli far right; they are actively aligning with it. The idea of depopulating Gaza – of making life so unbearable that its people have no choice but to leave – has been embedded in Israeli policy for decades.

Echoes of history

After 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza, then-Prime Minister Levi Eshkol – leader of the so-called left-wing moderates – spoke of “emptying out Gaza” and working “quietly, calmly and secretly” to achieve this goal.

Eshkol was not alone in this thinking. Former Defence Minister Moshe Dayan suggested that only a quarter of Gaza’s population should remain, while the rest “must be removed from there under any arrangement that’s made”. He was blunt about his ambitions: “If we can evict 300,000 refugees from Gaza to other places … we can annex Gaza without a problem.”

Eshkol took this even further, believing that deliberate suffering would push Palestinians to leave. He laid out his plan in chillingly practical terms: “It’s possible that if we don’t give them enough water they won’t have any choice, because the orchards will turn yellow and wither.”

Other ministers at the time, such as Yosef Sapir, were even more explicit about their intentions. He proposed: “We should take them to the East Bank [of Jordan] by the scruff of their necks and throw them there, and I don’t know who will accept them, especially the Gaza refugees.”

Another minister, Yigal Allon, was equally blunt about the need for mass displacement: “We have to handle [overseas migration] as seriously as possible.” He went on to argue that Sinai could absorb Gaza’s entire population: “The entire area of Sinai, and not only El Arish, allows for the settlement of all the Gaza refugees, and in my opinion we shouldn’t wait. We have to begin to settle them.”

These words, spoken in 1967, are now being echoed – almost word for word – by Israel’s far-right politicians, Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the latter of whom has called to promote the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza; forced transfer repackaged as a humanitarian solution.

The language has changed. The goal remains the same.

Push them into the sea, into the desert – anywhere but here. In 1948, 1967 or today, the policy remains the same: eliminate, displace, erase.

Returning home

And yet, despite everything – the bombs, the starvation, the devastation – the people of Gaza are returning.

Hundreds of thousands have marched northwards, across the Netzarim axis, asserting their right of return to the ruins of their homes. They march not towards shelter, but to craters of dust; not towards safety, but to the graves of their loved ones, still buried beneath the wreckage. They march into what was designed to be their graveyard.

And yet, they march – because history does not belong to the occupier. As Nizar Noman, a Palestinian returning to what remains of his home, declared: “As I belong to my homeland, my homeland belongs to me. I didn’t want to waste a moment away from my home again … President Trump is delusional to think that the people of Gaza can leave, even if it is a mess as he described.”

Just as Eshkol’s attempt to force Palestinians out collapsed under the weight of reality, so too will Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan. Half a century ago, when Eshkol devised his scheme, Gaza’s population stood at 400,000. He failed. Today, it is more than two million – and Trump will fail too.

In 1971, after the killing of Palestinian resistance leader Ziad al-Husseini, poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “Gaza is no longer a city. It is a burning battlefield in which the adversary’s victories, hopes and values are tested… The illusory facts on the ground he is trying to create, thinking that time is on his side, will be mocked by that very same time, as well as by the trail of crushing defeats past invaders suffered in the alleyways of Gaza at the hands of its sons and daughters.”

Indeed, Husseini’s death was not the end of Gaza’s liberation struggle. Its resistance did not die; it only grew.

Trump may repeat it 100 times: “Take the people. Take the people. Take the people.”

But the people of Gaza have answered, with their bodies, with their voices, with their march through the ruins, with their refusal to flee the land that is theirs: “We are not leaving.”