Telling them to get lost: Why talk of mass Palestinian deportation hinders conflict resolution

RU

Palestine is perhaps the greatest geopolitical paradox of our time. It is recognized as an independent state by most countries worldwide, with diplomatic missions in Rome, Kyiv, and Kuala Lumpur. Several million people identify as Palestinian — even holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority. Palestine has its own history, culture, political parties, and even traditions of governance. And yet, a sovereign Palestinian state has still not come into existence on the ground.

Typically, international recognition, embassies in foreign capitals, and other diplomatic privileges are built upon fundamental state institutions — the bureaucracy, a judicial system, security forces, and so on. These institutions may function well or poorly, but without them, a state simply cannot exist. They are the essential foundations for any political entity seeking sovereignty.

One can analyze the political and economic structures of the West Bank and Gaza in search of proof of Palestine’s statehood, but a complete checklist of the prerequisites still cannot be found. Pro-Palestinian politicians and commentators in the West often claim that they are merely in a transitional phase, that the state of Palestine is still in the process of formation. They are not necessarily wrong, even if they often omit a crucial detail: this process has been ongoing for decades, with no resolution in sight.

The primary reason Palestine remains in limbo, unable to achieve full statehood or secure real civil rights for its people, is that doing so conflicts with the interests of another, already established state — Israel. Ultimately, Israel holds the power to decide whether Palestine will become sovereign. For decades, beginning with Golda Meir, Israel’s political leadership has leaned toward ensuring that it does not. After all, Israel has no interest in creating, with its own hands, a state that would either be hostile from the outset or else inevitably become so.

Israel, which controls most of the legal Palestinian economy, directly intervenes in the administration of Palestinian lands. It allows its army to operate freely in Arab cities and villages without regard for Palestinian officials or security forces, funds the construction of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories from its own budget, arms settlers from its own stockpiles, and remains unwilling to allow Palestinians develop any real autonomy.

This is because the Palestinian and Israeli state-building projects are not just in conflict — they are directly opposed to one another. First and foremost, this is due to the fact that Israel’s existing borders encroach deeply into the territories where Palestinians are trying to establish their statehood, often completely overlapping with the land Palestinians would like to call their own.

Crucially, Israel is not alone in opposing the emergence of a fully sovereign Palestinian state. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and several of their neighbors and allies still have not joined the nearly 150 countries that have recognized Palestine’s statehood. Many Western governments issue endless statements of support for the Palestinians, spend billions on aid programs, and condemn Israeli actions in Arab territories, yet they do not pressure Israel to allow Palestinians to establish a state, nor do they take concrete steps toward recognizing one themselves.

They have many reasons for this. One is the highly influential ideology of Christian Zionism in the U.S., whose adherents believe that restoring a Jewish state within its biblical borders — including present-day Palestinian territories — is not only divinely ordained, but essential for the salvation of humanity. Another is the fear that an independent Palestine, with control over its own borders and a real army, could become a second Iran — revolutionary, militant, and unpredictable. There is also the concern that separatist movements, including those in Europe, might seek independence through the same methods used by the Palestinians — including terrorism.

Ultimately, the West sees the current unstable status quo as an acceptable reality, while any deviation from it provokes genuine fear. The existing situation in the Middle East threatens further intifadas and regular military operations, potentially on a large scale. But any change is entirely unpredictable. No one can say what role radical Iranian ayatollahs might play in an independent Palestine, how many seats Hamas and Islamic Jihad would control in its parliament, or which of the world’s rogue regimes might try to pull it into its sphere of influence — and for what purpose.

Progressive professors at prestigious universities and commentators in influential media can endlessly argue that the popularity of radical ideas and movements among Palestinians is a direct consequence of Israeli occupation — and that the longer it continues, the more radicalized Palestinians will become. But this does not change reality.

Israel will continue to control Palestinian borders, keep its troops on Arab lands, conduct searches and arrests, and maintain the settlements. It has no other effective means of ensuring its own security. Its Western partners, though they voice outrage over the systematic violations of Palestinian rights, recognize that they are powerless to change the situation. They have no viable means of bringing about an independent Palestine that would not pose a threat to Israel.

As a result, millions of people — namely, the Palestinian Arabs themselves — are left without statehood and, therefore, without the rights enjoyed by citizens of established countries. In other words, not only Palestine but also its people lack real political agency. In many of the countries that have recognized Palestine, its passports are not considered valid documents, and their holders are classified as stateless persons. This is simply because it remains unclear how and with whom to engage if a Palestinian citizen faces legal trouble abroad. Palestine has no real statehood and, consequently, no administrative institutions capable of handling such matters independently.

On an emotional level, a stateless person is someone without a homeland, without a country to call their own — an almost complete outcast. A Syrian displaced by war or an Afghan fleeing the Taliban is seen as a victim of circumstances. They are accepted in Europe largely because both the Syrian and the Afghan crises offer at least the possibility of de-escalation — an end to the war, the Taliban repealing their most draconian laws, or a shift to a less radical government. In other words, these are still somewhat functioning countries, with ongoing political processes, meaning change remains possible.

Palestinians, on the other hand, have no country, no real political processes, and no prospects for an improvement in their fate. To outsiders, they are not victims of sudden misfortune — they have always been this way. Yes, they were bombed yesterday, and today there are plans to relocate them en masse for a few years to Jordan, Egypt, or even Indonesia — but that’s just their reality. They have lived like this their entire lives.

When Donald Trump talks about simply uprooting people from Gaza temporarily, supposedly to allow for the reconstruction of the war-torn region, he makes it abundantly clear that he does not see Palestine as a political entity. He has no intention of asking Palestinians for their permission, or even of negotiating with them about the conditions of expelling two million people. The only ones he considers worth talking to are the governments of the countries where the Palestinians would be sent.

But the problem is that, to these governments, Palestinians are also outsiders — unfamiliar and unsettling. Even Egypt, the only country besides Israel that shares a border with Gaza, was reluctant to admit the strip’s residents — even those with European passports — after the war began, allowing entry only on the condition that they leave within 24 hours. As for those without such documents, their chances of entry are even slimmer.

The current Egyptian leadership emerged from the military junta that overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, after the Islamist movement won the country’s first democratic elections. The Muslim Brotherhood had established several foreign branches, the most successful of which is now known as Hamas, which controlled all power in Gaza before the war began following the terrorist attack of October 7.

Cairo fully understands that among the two million Palestinians they are being asked to accept, there are many Hamas members and sympathizers who have not forgotten or forgiven the persecution of their Egyptian counterparts. For Egypt’s central authorities, these are not just refugees — they are potential enemies. Two million militants and their families, who would have to be fed and treated at Egypt’s expense, while possibly plotting against the government.

Jordan is also in no hurry to open its borders to those whom Donald Trump intends to expel from Gaza, even if only temporarily. And it’s not just about logistical challenges — although moving two million people across Israeli territory to the Jordanian border is indeed difficult to imagine. Jordan was one of the countries that took in the largest number of Palestinian refugees after the wars of the mid-20th century.

Many of those refugees were unhappy with Jordanian rule, leading them first to attempt to assassinate the king and then to wage an outright war — now known as Black September. In the early 1970s, Jordanian authorities barely managed to defeat them, forcing the refugees to relocate to Lebanon or Syria. And now, Trump is suggesting that Jordan step into the same river once again.

More exotic proposals, such as relocating people from Gaza to Indonesia — more than six thousand kilometers away — are little more than background noise, the kind of over-the-top rhetorical excess the current U.S. administration produces on just about any issue.

But the key point is not the final destination of the Palestinians — it is the normalization of the very idea of forcibly displacing a massive population, even under the seemingly noble pretext of rebuilding their destroyed homes. And this normalization is a direct consequence of Palestine’s still-unrealized statehood.

It once seemed that this was all in the past. That the bloody episodes of World War I, when Ottoman Assyrians and Armenians were driven out of Anatolia at bayonet point into Syria and Iraq, would never be repeated. That the Nazis’ unrealized “Madagascar Plan” to relocate all European Jews to an island off the coast of Africa would remain a sinister historical curiosity. But no.

What unites all these deportations — whether carried out, abandoned, or still in the works — is that the displaced peoples lacked political sovereignty. They either did not have, or still do not have, states of their own — no government willing and able to defend them.

A state is not just a coat of arms, a national anthem, and a president’s portrait hanging in a government office. First and foremost, it is a system of collective protection for people who see themselves as one nation — who share common values and are willing to sacrifice some of their rights to preserve those values. Non-state systems of national protection either do not work or barely function. Nominal states that exist only on paper or fail to extend their authority beyond government offices are just as powerless.

When Norway or other countries recognize an independent Palestine in the midst of the war in Gaza, they bring joy only to the officials sitting in the Palestinian government complex in Ramallah — ninety percent of whom have never even been to Gaza. These officials can report another diplomatic victory, receive a bonus, or even take a trip to Oslo to personally thank the Norwegians for their stance. But for the people in Gaza itself, none of these political maneuvers make any real difference.

The recognition of Palestine's de facto non-existent statehood, along with boycotts, protests, and mass demonstrations, does not save people in conflict zones. It does not stop bombs and bullets, heal wounds, or feed the hungry. These pro forma actions merely allow people in peaceful, prosperous countries to feel connected to something important, giving them the opportunity to convince themselves that they did not stand aside while blood was being shed. Some may consider this a significant achievement, but it is not.

Human tragedies — whether in the Middle East or elsewhere — are devalued when populists and opportunists use them as “tools” to propel themselves into the political mainstream. In Europe, the third generation of politicians — all of whom, in their youth, promised to do everything possible to end the bloodshed in the Middle East — will soon retire. It is unlikely they feel any deep remorse for failing to fulfill that promise.

For the world, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become the norm, persisting for decades, with flare-ups and periods of calm. It is only exceptional events, such as the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, that force Americans and Europeans to take notice of this distant conflict. And this cycle is likely to continue.

It is clear that the creation of an independent Palestine recognized by Israel is not forthcoming in the foreseeable future — Israel and its partners are now almost openly acknowledging this. However, this is not the only way to address the issue of protecting Palestinian rights. In addition to the currently unattainable plan to divide historical Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states (known as the two-state solution), there is also the one-state solution, which proposes the unification of these peoples into a single state.

This plan has many drawbacks, and it is unclear even what such a state would be called. One wouldn't want to adopt the fictional term “Israeltina,” coined by Muammar Gaddafi. Furthermore, the history of attempts to unite different ethnic or religious groups within the same borders shows that such efforts rarely yield positive outcomes in the Middle East. Iraq and Syria serve as prime examples of this.

However, Israel possesses assets that many of its Arab neighbors have always lacked — democracy and a robust civil society. Thanks to these factors, and to functioning laws, Israel has successfully integrated hundreds of thousands of Arab citizens into a state that was originally founded as a mono-ethnic Jewish entity. The experience of this integration shows that there are no insurmountable divisions between Jews and Arabs in the Holy Land. Extending the rights of Israeli citizens to the residents of Gaza and the West Bank could resolve many of their issues, end the hostility, and marginalize radicals like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

This plan is, of course, opposed by numerous parties: the radicals mentioned above, the thousands of Palestinian officials who earn salaries for pretending to work for a state that still does not exist, and Israeli right-wingers who are committed to maintaining their country’s Jewish character. However, the one-state solution currently seems to be the only one whose implementation could end the endless Middle Eastern conflict. It may be the only way to put a stop to “peace” plans that involve mass deportations — or to any other other ideas that bear a disturbing resemblance to outright genocide.