Trump has never stopped talking about his plan to displace Gazans from their lands, never competing with each other in absurdity. 

Afrasianet - Essam Abd El , Shafi - At the end of January, days after his official inauguration, US President Donald Trump laid out  a controversial vision to address the plight of Palestinians in  the devastated Gaza Strip after 15 months of Israel's genocidal war, by displacing Gazans from their land – arguing that it had become destructive and unlivable – to more suitable land in neighboring Arab countries led by Egypt and Jordan, claiming that his plan would be welcomed by Gazans who would be "very happy" to leave the Strip. besieged and demolished towards other places, if given a proper opportunity to do so.

Trump has not stopped talking about his plan on an almost daily basis, unleashing lines that compete with each other in absurdity and show limited understanding of the complexities of the scene on the ground.

Trump ignored Egypt and Jordan's objection to the plan, hinting that he would use his influence to pressure them to accept, and stressed that America would not spend a single dollar to finance the plan, which in his view will be implemented with the money of wealthy Arab countries in the region that "have a lot of money," as he described.

In this context, Trump stressed that the Palestinians who leave Gaza will not be able to return to it again, and that America will seize the Strip to turn it into a real estate resort similar to a "new riviera" in the Middle East, stressing that he does not mind sending American soldiers if necessary, before reneging on that promise, saying that Israel will take over the security part of the plan. 

Trump's proposal provoked widespread official and popular rejection in Arab countries, especially Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which Trump mentioned by name as potential hosts of the Palestinians and proposed financiers of the US displacement project. 

But the surprise is that this American plan is not new or unprecedented, but it has been put forward before in different formats over the past decades, and it has also been met with rejection and resistance, the only difference being that Trump had enough frankness and clarity to present it in its naked image without embellishment.

This report reviews the history of plans and projects to displace Palestinians from their lands from the pre-Nakba  era until after the Al-Aqsa flood operation and the recent Israeli war on Gaza. If there is a fact confirmed by this history, it is that the Palestinian people's adherence to their land and their attachment to it as part of their identity thwarted successive attempts and plans of displacement, and if we add to that the widespread Arab rejection, we expect that the fate of these plans is to push them to the margins of history, and it is not expected that the Trump plan will be an exception to that. Historical line.

The Trump plan and the Blandford plan

This view roughly aligns with what was believed by John Blandford, the second director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), who took charge of the agency in early July 1951 and was succeeded by the US government under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

At the time, UNRWA introduced a new program to treat the issue of Palestinian refugees – led by more than 200,000 refugees who fled to the Gaza Strip during the Nakba – as a technical-economic problem rather than a political one. The solution that came to mind at the time was the so-called "Sinai Project," which aspired to settle at least 60,000 Palestinian refugees in the Egyptian Sinai desert  by mobilizing them around a major agricultural development project.

The idea essentially envisaged planting 50,000 feddans (about 210 square kilometers) within more than 250,000 feddans (about 1,050 square kilometers) in northwest Sinai, which the United States asked the Egyptian government at the time to allocate to settle refugees in the Gaza Strip, which has been under Egyptian control since the armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1949. 

In parallel with those negotiations on the settlement project, Israel restricted the Gaza Strip and launched raids on refugee camps in it, to pressure them to accept the settlement project, and to limit the operations carried out by the Palestinians of the Strip against the Israeli settlements adjacent to them at the time.

The implementation of this project has allocated $30 million in US funds, a large part of which has been allocated to the plan to lay freshwater pipes from the Nile River to Sinai under the Suez Canal, as well as the launch of a tight mechanism to control refugees that includes police and guard stations to prevent the sabotage of irrigation systems.

Overall, the Sinai project was a bargain to trade the political identity of Palestinians for economic benefit, exploiting the exhaustion caused by the Nakba, just like Trump's plan to exploit the suffering of Gazans after 15 months of war.

But the reaction of the Palestinians to the Sinai plan proved the strength of the Palestinian identity, and the size of its connection to the land at the same time, and the Palestinians realized from the first moment that this plan means the elimination of their right to return to their homes, so they rushed to resist the project in every possible way, pointing to the clear "biblical" paradox in the fact that the return of the Jews to the land of Palestine and the end of the "biblical" wandering stage. It will not be complete without the expulsion of Palestinians and condemning them to be lost in the Sinai desert, according to what researcher Jonathan Adler observed in an article in the American magazine "New Lines".

The Palestinians of Gaza began to protest against the Sinai project, and these protests culminated in March 1955, within what became known as the "March Uprising" that took place in response to the Israeli army's invasion of an Egyptian military post behind the armistice line, killing 38 Egyptian soldiers and two Palestinians, and provoking a wave of massive demonstrations that began from the "Palestine Public School" in Gaza City, where slogans were chanted such as:  "Write the Sinai project with ink and we will erase the Sinai project with blood." 

Within weeks, the Sinai project, along with other settlement projects, was officially canceled, and its reports, surveys and studies moved to their natural place in the list of colonial projects doomed to failure and demise, and most importantly, it drew firm features for the Egyptian state's policy of rejecting the displacement of Palestinians and refusing to establish any Palestinian refugee camps on its territory.

More than 100 years of displacement

The Sinai project was only one link in a larger series of plans, events, and massacres designed to push Palestinians to forcibly abandon their land. Paradoxically, these displacement plans date back decades before the establishment of the Israeli occupation state, and their roots go back to the Basel Conference in 1897, which laid the first building blocks for the idea of establishing a Jewish state on the Palestinian territories belonging to the Ottoman Empire at the time, so that the outputs and recommendations of this conference entered into force in earnest in 1917 with the promise issued by British Foreign Secretary Arthur. Balfour for the Jews by settling them in Palestine.

In order to fulfil that promise, Britain declared the imposition of the Mandate on the Palestinian territories with the ratification of the League of Nations, effective since September 1922. Article II of the British Mandate Resolution stipulates that "the Mandatory shall be responsible for the creation of political, administrative and economic conditions that guarantee the establishment of the Jewish national home, as stated in the preamble to this instrument, and for the promotion of the institutions of self-government, and for the maintenance of the civil and religious rights of all inhabitants of Palestine irrespective of Sex and religion."

Between the Basel Conference, the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, Britain unleashed the hand of Jewish gangs to do whatever it wanted and practice the most heinous crimes against the Palestinians, crimes that culminated during the Nakba of 1948, the most vicious episode in the series of displacement, during which more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee the lands of historic Palestine due to the criminal massacres practiced by Zionist gangs. 

Of these, about 280,000 were displaced to the west bank of the Jordan River, 70,000 to its east bank, 190,000 to the Gaza Strip, 100,000 to Lebanon, 75,000 to Syria, 7,000 to Egypt, 4,000 to Iraq, and the rest to other Arab countries. 

The deportations and displacement operations were carried out in several stages, the first of which was after the issuance of the United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine on November 29, 1947, where it was estimated that the population of the Jewish state - which the plan approved - would reach approximately one million people, 42% of whom were Arabs, and the Zionist leadership saw that the only solution to this dilemma lies in their displacement, so terrorist operations carried out by members of the Haganah ,Irgun andPalmach  organizations escalated.Arab villages, towns and cities to force their people to flee.

The second phase began on March 10, 1948, with the adoption of a purge plan known as the "Dalet Plan", on the basis of which the activity of Zionist gangs shifted from sporadic attacks on the Palestinian population to large-scale organized operations aimed at controlling as much territory as possible before the end of the British Mandate.

The first of these operations took place on the first of April 1948 – and bore the name "Operation Nahshon" – in the rural plateaus on the western slopes of the Jerusalem Mountains, and was carried out by units of the Palmach militias, occupying the village of Qastal and entering the village  of Deir Yassin,  committing one of the most brutal massacres, as well as occupying four other neighboring villages and expelling their inhabitants. This was followed by attacks by Haganah militias in April and May on Palestinian urban centers, starting with Tiberias, which was home to some 5,000 Arabs, and Haifa,  where the remaining 55,000 residents were displaced by sea to Lebanon.

The gangs continued to advance on Safed, and then the assault on Jerusalem began on April 26, and Zionist gangs occupied eight neighborhoods in the Greater Jerusalem Area and 39 Palestinian villages, expelling their residents to the eastern part of the city. It then occupied Beit She'an and nearby villages on May 12, Jaffa fell  on May 13 and expelled more than 50,000 of its residents. 

The third phase began on May 15, 1948, after the declaration of the "State of Israel," the entry of Arab armies into Palestine, and the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war, on May 22 Israeli forces committed a massacre in  the village of Tantura, occupying villages in  the Lower and Eastern Galilee and expelling their inhabitants.

Before the second truce took effect on July 18, Jewish forces occupied the cities of Lod andRamle, forcing their residents to walk without food or drink to the west bank of the Jordan River, and the assault on Nazareth began  on July 9 and continued until the 16th day of the same month.

The fourth phase began on October 21, 1948, when Israeli forces occupied the town  of Beersheba , with a population of 5,000, expelled its residents at gunpoint to Hebron, committed on October 29 a massacre of 455 people in the village of Dwaymeh between Beersheba and Hebron,  occupied Ashdod and al-Majdal in November and the Negev in December.

By the end of the war, more than 400 villages had been demolished and emptied by Zionist gangs, who now control about 77% of Palestine, having displaced nearly 90% of their indigenous Arab population.

Displacement and displacement between the absent present and the absent present

Unlike those Palestinians who were completely displaced from the territories swallowed up by the Zionists, there is the plight of another category of Palestinians who have been forced to leave their homes but have become internally displaced (i.e., within what has come to be known as the State of Israel) and are called "present absentees" or "internally displaced persons."

In 1950, the number of these people was about 46,000 displaced out of 156,000 Palestinians who remained inside the areas on which the occupation state was founded. Absentees present are not allowed to live in their homes from which they were expelled, even if they live in the same area and still have contracts proving their ownership of the houses or lands from which they were expelled.   Under the pretext that they left it, even if they did so against their will and not by their own will and choice. 

In addition to the number of "absentee present" are about 110,000 Bedouins who were forced to flee their areas in the Negev desert in 1949, in addition to the Arabs who were displaced inside Israel due to the continuous demolition of homes that the Israeli government argues are unlicensed or located in villages not recognized by it, and in total the number of internally displaced people is believed to be between 250,000 and 420,000 Palestinians.

In addition to these "old" absentees, Palestinians displaced by the construction  of Israel's apartheid wall in the West Bank, which began construction in 2002, are now referred to as "internally displaced," estimated to number between 245,000 and 570,000. While "absent present" are supposed to be granted citizenship in Israel under the 1952 law, this law does not cover any Palestinian who was internally displaced after 1952 without having acquired citizenship before that date.

Today, therefore, internally displaced Bedouins live in some 50 unrecognized villages in the Negev and Galilee, while the rest of the remaining Palestinians who remain internally displaced live in some 80 towns and villages in the Galilee and Jerusalem, and half of the population of Nazareth andum al-Fahm are internally displaced people who came to the cities from neighboring cities and villages destroyed in 1948. 

After displacement. Resettlement and further displacement

In the aftermath of the Nakba, the issue of Palestinian refugees who are committed to returning to their lands turned into a headache that threatens the legitimacy of the nascent Zionist state and the efforts of its Western sponsors to rehabilitate it internationally and beautify its face. To this end, many projects and plans have emerged, mainly aimed at suppressing the crime of displacement and settling the issue of refugees by integrating them into the countries to which they were displaced. One of the first of these attempts was the George Mack Project, named after the US Secretary of State's adviser on the Middle East, who put forward a plan in 1949 aimed at The settlement of Palestinian refugees in their places of residence with US funding, while allowing the return of only 100,000 refugees to the occupied territories, in exchange for Arab recognition of Israel, but the project quickly failed. 

Later, in 1951, former UNRWA Commissioner-General John Blandford put forward the controversial "Sinai Project" to which we had already mentioned, before popular Palestinian and Egyptian rejection caused it to be frozen altogether. The attempt was repeated again with the draft put forward by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1955, proposing the option of "symbolic return" for a limited number of Palestinian refugees, and compensating the rest financially to settle them in Arab countries, with American promises to finance agricultural projects to absorb them.

Around the same time, US envoy to the Middle East Eric Johnston proposed settling Palestinians on the east bank of the Jordan River, but the Palestinians rejected the plan just as they rejected the project put forward by US President John F. Kennedy in 1957 before he came to the presidency, which stipulates that refugees would choose between returning under the umbrella of the Israeli occupation government under the slogan of "loyal friendship", or obtaining financial compensation while accepting settlement abroad.

Meanwhile, Congressman Hubert Humphrey offered his perspective on the issue during a documentary study he conducted during his 1957 Middle East tour of a number of refugee camps, concluding a vision that places the "right of compensation" as an alternative to the "right of return" for the new generations of Palestinians. Humphrey's study claimed that the new generation, which makes up a large proportion of refugees, weakens Palestinian belonging, making "compensation" and "resettlement" plans a realistic solution from his point of view. This vision intersects with the project presented by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1959, proposing to dispense with UNRWA aid completely and divert its funds to settlement and economic integration projects for Palestinians in the countries to which they have sought refuge, but this project has been rejected by host countries that refused to cooperate with the UN plan. 

That rejection, however, did not stop the flow of Western proposals. By 1962, Carnegie Endowment for Peace President Joseph Johnson presented a project to address the refugee issue formally mandated by the government and the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine, which provided that each refugee family would be given the opportunity to choose between return or substantial compensation if they chose to remain as they were. This time, Israel explicitly rejected the project, asserting the "impossibility" of the return of Palestinian refugees, and that the solution to their crisis was to settle them in Host countries. In 1965, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol proposed a project to redirect part of the regional resources to settle Palestinian refugees and integrate them into Arab countries, with the occupation declaring its readiness to contribute financially to the process alongside the United States and the West.

 The 1967 Six-Day War was the actual proof of Israel's true intentions toward the Palestinians. At a time when the West was searching for a suitable "cosmetic powder" to obliterate the effects of the Nakba embodied in hundreds of thousands of refugees, Israel decided to put ashes on the issue through further displacement. During that war, Israel displaced an additional 325,000 Palestinians from their land, almost half of whom had already been refugees since 1948. Over the next few years, an average of 21 were displaced.A thousand Palestinians a year from Israeli-controlled areas, while Israel has rejected demands for their return as part of any possible peace agreement.

Decades of illusions

After the Six-Day War, Israel became bolder in expressing its intentions regarding the Palestinians, and instead of discussing the right of return, it began to propose projects and advance plans to depopulate the rest of the Palestinian territories under the pretext that it was a "historical right" of the people of Israel. 

It began with the plan put forward by Israeli military commander Yigal Allon in July 1967, immediately after the end of the war, to achieve three main goals: establishing Israel's security border with Jordan, ending Israel's control over an Arab population to preserve the Jewish character of the state, and establishing the alleged historical right of the Israeli people to the "Land of Israel."

The project identified  the Jordan Valley area  stretching from the Jordan River to the eastern slopes of the Nablus and Jenin mountains as a target for Israeli sovereignty, along with Jerusalem and its suburbs, and the Hebron area. As for the rest of the West Bank, the plan proposed that it be returned to the Jordanian authority while ensuring complete separation, and the establishment of a crossing between these territories and Jordan on the outskirts of the city of Jericho, through which Palestinians would be transferred to Jordan.

The plan also provided for the annexation of the entire Gaza Strip to Israel and the displacement of refugees outside the Strip to neighboring Arab territories, especially the "then occupied" Sinai after its return to Egypt, cutting off the southeastern coast extending from Eilat to Sharm el-Sheikh, which is to remain under Israeli control.

Allon's plan was short-lived, and was quickly turned on by the anti-Israel momentum of Arab states after they occupied more of their neighbors' territory, but that did not stop other displacement proposals from pursuing. In 1969, the Israeli government headed by Golda Meir approved a  plan to push 60,000 Palestinians to leave Gaza for Paraguay in South America, then governed by the military regime of Alfredo Stroessner, which did not object to the proposal.

Under the plan, Palestinians in Gaza were supposed to be tempted to move to Paraguay through "travel agencies" established especially in the Strip for this purpose, and it was then talked about granting those who moved to Paraguay a lump sum of $100 once, and the Paraguayan government would pay $33 to each Palestinian it accepted, and after five years of residency they would become eligible for citizenship.

The Paraguay plan was not worth even considering, so the proposals were in Egypt's orbit again, this time the brainchild of the army commander and later Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose plan included granting permits to Palestinians who wished to leave Gaza to study and work in Egypt and providing financial incentives to encourage them to do so. The aim of the plan was to bring about a change in the population distribution in Gaza with the aim of eliminating resistance and reducing overcrowding. At that time there were 400,000 people, and the schemes failed, as usual. 

Over the following decades, Israeli leaders and think tanks continued to publish papers and broadcast proposals, all of which revolve around the "displacement of Palestinians." One of the most prominent of these proposals was submitted by the head of the Israeli National Security Council, Giora Eiland, entitled "Regional Alternatives to the Idea of Two States for Two People," published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in 2000.

The draft stipulated that Egypt would cede to the Gaza Strip areas of Sinai with an area of 720 square kilometers, which is a 24-kilometer rectangle on the Mediterranean coast from Rafah in the west to Al-Arish, and a width of 30 kilometers inside Sinai, in addition to a strip west of Kerem Shalom in the south, which extends along the border between Israel and Egypt. Under the plan, the size of the Gaza Strip, which currently stands at 365 square kilometers, was to be tripled.

In exchange for this increase in Gaza's territory to be cut from Egypt, the Palestinians would have to cede 12 percent of the West Bank land to be annexed by Israel, with Egypt receiving from Israel an area southwest of the Negev roughly equal to the area it would cede, after which Israel would allow Egypt a land link between it and Jordan by digging a canal between them about 10 kilometers from east to west 5 kilometers from Eilat, and would be subject to Egyptian sovereignty.

The same offer was later repeated by the former president of the Hebrew University, Joshua Ben-Aryeh, in a plan entitled "The Project of Establishing an Alternative Homeland for Palestinians in Sinai", based on the principle of land exchange between Egypt, Israel and Palestine, and Ben-Aryeh's proposal included allocating land in Sinai to the Palestinian state, specifically the Al-Arish area, with the construction of a seaport, an international railway line, a large city that embraces the population, strong infrastructure, a power plant, and a desalination project. 

In return, Egypt would get about 700 square kilometers of land in the Negev desert in southern Israel as it would give Palestinians in Sinai.

More than a decade after the Island Plan, it was the turn  of the 2013 Prawer Begin Plan , which came in the form of a law passed by the Israeli Knesset in June of that year, based on the recommendations of a government committee headed by former National Security Council Vice President Ehud Prawer in 2011 to displace the residents of dozens of Palestinian villages from the Negev desert in southern Palestine, and group them into so-called "concentration municipalities" under the supervision of a special committee formed for this purpose.

In fact, the project was a proposal for a new Nakba, whereby Israel would seize more than 800,000 dunums of Negev land, displace 40,000 Bedouins, and destroy 38 villages that are not recognized by Israel.

Almost a decade later, in October 2023, days after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, new details were presented in a 10-page Israeli Ministry of Intelligence document on scenarios for military engagement with the Gaza Strip to ensure the security of settlers in its cover.

The document, revealed by the website "Siha Makumit", stipulates in its fifth article 3 alternatives to dealing with the Gaza Strip:

•    The first is to maintain the population in Gaza and restore the rule of the Palestinian Authority.

•    The second is to maintain the population in Gaza and establish local Arab rule.

•    Third, the evacuation of residents from Gaza to Sinai.

The authors of the document believe that the third alternative can be implemented, but it needs a firm stance by the political echelon against international pressure, while stressing the need to ensure the support of the United States and other pro-Israel countries.

The document stipulates three phases to achieve this purpose: the establishment of tent towns in Sinai in the southwestern Gaza Strip, the establishment of a humanitarian corridor to help the population, as well as the establishment of a fortified area from which evacuated residents cannot return to the Strip. 

Return keys

This lengthy historical review confirms the fact that we have issued this report, which is that Donald Trump is not a novelty from his predecessors in his call for the displacement of Palestinians from their lands, and that today's Palestinians are no less loyal to their land than yesterday's Palestinians, and the difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he did so openly and unequivocally.

This is at the same time that the Trump plan and others like it explicitly contradict international law represented by the Fourth Geneva Convention – Article 49 – which prohibits "the collective or individual forcible transfer of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying state or to any other country, regardless of motives."

It also contradicts the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court , which states that "the exile or forcible transfer of a population constitutes a crime against humanity if directed against civilians as part of a systematic attack, and that forcible transfer during armed conflict is classified as war crimes."

But America, which talks about punishing the ICC for  its "audacity" to condemn Israel and punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has decided to openly repudiate international law, a behavior that will have dire consequences beyond Gaza and the Palestinian cause.

In any case, the Palestinians never bet on international law, which has never done them justice in the face of massacres and plans for cleansing and displacement, but only on their steadfastness and steadfastness in defending their cause and their attachment to their land.

If in just 15 months between October 2023 and January 2025, the Palestinian people lost about 50,000 martyrs and more than 150,000 injured, and about two million people were displaced from it, the entire population of Gaza during the war of extermination launched by the Israeli occupation forces on the Strip, as soon as the ceasefire agreement entered into force on January 19, 2025, hundreds of thousands returned in the first days after the agreement to their cities. and their villages from which they were displaced. 

Palestinians who have been driven from their homes since the 1948 Nakba and in the decades that followed, have taken the keys to their homes, convinced that they will one day return to them, and the Palestinians pass those keys from generation to generation, reminding them of their stolen homes.

The keys remain a symbol of hope and resilience for Palestine refugees, as well as a lingering symbol of the right of return. Similarly, the 2024 Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes have returned to live on the rubble to affirm resilience and defiance.

But this steadfastness needs the elements, capabilities and capabilities to enhance it, the least of which is – today before tomorrow – official and popular Arab and Islamic support for reconstruction efforts, and confronting with all possible tools the new Balfour Declaration that US President Donald Trump seeks to impose on everyone at a moment when the balances are disturbed, all customary rules collapse, and the region and the world as we know it completely change irrevocably.