Two weeks ago, the case for the 1948 parallel suddenly grew stronger, by virtue of Donald Trump’s startling new Gaza plan

Photo: IDF Spokesperson

IF Bibi had his way, the Gaza war would no longer be the clunky-sounding Swords of Iron — it would be known grandiosely as the War of Resurrection, no less.

That’s the name change that the prime minister proposed in a cabinet meeting last October. The renaming, Netanyahu explained, would reflect the fact that the conflict was in fact a full-fledged war, not just a military operation.

The quiet part of the rebranding exercise was the attempt to inject some historic resonance into the perception of the war. If 1948 had given the country its War of Independence, Bibi’s thinking goes, then 2024 was the year of disaster and then rebirth.

While it’s undeniable that Israel’s struggle over the past year has been existential, Netanyahu’s relabeling attempt last year failed. It merely elicited sneers from the usual suspects in the media and the new name didn’t catch on.

But two weeks ago, the case for the 1948 parallel suddenly grew stronger, by virtue of Donald Trump’s startling new Gaza plan.

With all the global apoplexy triggered by the idea of shipping out the Palestinians to create a Gazan Riviera, the full import of Trump’s plan has actually gone under the radar. Such is the shock that weeks later commentators are still struggling for a frame of reference.

Here’s what they’re missing: Trump’s program doesn’t just rip up the hoary two-state consensus that has reigned unchallenged since 1967 — it sets the clock back all the way to 1948.

At the heart of Trump’s plan are two assumptions: that the Palestinians can’t remain in Gaza, and that going forward, the Arab world must pick up the pieces.

Attention so far has focused on the first element, with the left foaming at the mouth about ethnic cleansing. But the second part is equally revolutionary, because for the first time in a century, it takes a blowtorch to the real source of the conflict.

The Palestinian victim narrative was born as soon as Israel’s puny forces drove out the armies of six Arab states in 1948. The Nakba — or catastrophe, as the Palestinians refer to their defeat — proved a convenient tool for the Arab world in general.

Keeping the losers and their descendants in refugee camps — as opposed to absorbing them as Israel did for the Jews forced to flee their homes in Arab countries — was great policy as far as generations of Arab leaders were concerned.

Not only were they spared the bother of looking after their supposed brethren — those selfsame leaders soon discovered that Palestinians festering in refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon pressured Israel to make concessions. So they created the world’s only perma-refugees — a tool with which to bludgeon Israel.

What wasn’t to love about Palestinian misery? If the Arabs couldn’t win on the battlefield, they could win at the (non)-peace table.

Of course, that great con would never have worked without Western connivance. The chattering-class consensus that the only acceptable outcome was further Israeli concessions ultimately enabled Palestinian obduracy.

Along the way there were the rare pro-Israel thinkers who identified the central problem as the Arab refusal to pay the price of defeat. Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, called the result a decades-long “war process.” In 2018, the Israel Victory Caucus was founded in Congress to push the novel idea that peace could only come about by recognition that the Palestinians had lost.

But until just a month ago, that sounded like crazy talk — the US remained officially wedded to the pieties of two states for two peoples. Even the great disruptor Donald Trump had presided over a traditional peace plan of his own, which proposed linking Gaza to the West Bank as part of a Palestinian state.

Then came the Gaza Riviera bombshell. Trump’s new plan rips up the post-1948 consensus. Not only will the Palestinians have to leave the ruins of Gaza — the Arab states will be forced to pick up the tab. For some, like Jordan and Egypt, that means absorbing people. For others, like Hamas-loving Qatar, it means footing the bill.

In other words, the fate that the Arab world avoided in 1948 has finally caught up with them. They lost the war, and they’ll now need to pay the price.

For two weeks after Trump stunned the world with his new plan, the Arab world mounted a rerun of their notorious “Three Noes” of rejectionism in Khartoum in 1967. The first crack in that wall of opposition appeared last week when the Emirati ambassador to Washington, Yousef Al-Othaiba, admitted that there was “no alternative” to the plan.

We still have no idea whether Trump actually intends to follow through on his audacious plan, and part of the reason is his ideology-free language.

The president himself touts his Gaza idea as being all about empathy for the Palestinians, to afford them a decent life away from the ruins. There’s no talk of Israeli victory, or good versus evil, or any of the language native to the conservative pro-Israel world. Instead, he talks real estate and redevelopment.

If Palestinians refuse to up sticks, or Egypt can’t be persuaded to open the borders, will Trump simply reverse course? What about the West Bank — is a rump state still on the Trump cards? Will the grandiose new vision be able to compete for Trumpian headspace with the Ukraine conflict, trade wars, and the sound and fury of domestic politics? No one has the foggiest idea — perhaps not even Trump himself.

But what’s clear is that the very act of tabling the plan has fundamentally changed the conversation about Gaza, breaking up decades of ideological pack ice.

Such was the entrenched narrative around a two-state solution that until a month ago, even the most swivel-eyed conservative outlet would have rejected an op-ed about emptying Gaza as too far-fetched to be worth publishing.

Last week, eminent British historian Andrew Roberts published just such an op-ed arguing that the plan actually followed historical norms.

“Again and again in the past,” he wrote, “peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated — as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric — lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both. It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend.”

It seems likely then that Trump’s intervention has killed off the old framework that put the onus on Israel to solve the problem called the Palestinians. Instead, he’s placed the burden where it always belonged: squarely in the loving arms of the other Arab states.

In effect, he’s said to the Arab world: You lost, now take your refugees — and pay for the privilege.

So even if Egypt never takes a single Gazan, dayeinu. Because with his typical audacity, Trump the developer has rezoned the world’s most stubborn conflict. Ding dong, the two-state nonsense is dead.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1050)