Peloni: The call to keep the Pals of Gaza in Gaza is simply the desire to maintain them as a weaponized vehicle against Israel. This was the purpose and effect of the creation of UNRWA and also the reason why there has been so much advocacy for the preservation of Hamas and Hezbollah. This is both intolerable and unacceptable. Of course, the weaponization of the Gazans against Israel has been quite successful over the years, which is why the rogues which still support holding these well designed tools of Jewish destruction in place where they might effect the long sought prospect of eliminating the Jewish State once and for all.
By | Feb 10, 2025
President Trump has expressed his hope to improve the lives of the Palestinians in Gaza, once the rubble has been removed and the infrastructure rebuilt, with the money for both that rubble removal and that rebuilding coming from the rich Arab states of the Gulf. He envisions turning the Strip, with its long beachfront of golden sands on the Mediterranean coast, into a future “Riviera.” This trial balloon has been greeted with ridicule in the West, and with condemnation from the Arabs. But the British historian Andrew Roberts thinks Trump’s plan, which would require the displacement of most of the Gazans, who should not have to endure living in what would become a huge construction site, has historical precedents, and should not be dismissed out of hand. More of Andrew Roberts’ history lesson can be found here: “The Historical Case for Trump’s Riviera,” by Andrew Roberts, Washington Free Beacon, February 8, 2025:
Much of the international condemnation of Donald Trump’s “Riviera” plan for Gaza rests on the assumption that the Palestinians retain sovereignty over the territory, despite all the events that have taken place since their incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and that they also continue to have the right to choose their own government.
In fact, historical precedent suggests that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel that day, and its condign punishment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), have severe implications for whether the Gazans still have the right to decide their own destiny, and who governs them.
For again and again in the past, 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….
Konrad Henlein was the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia 1938, who invited Adolf Hitler to invade the Czech state in March 1939. He had much the same kind of willing-acolyte relationship with the Führer that Yahya Sinwar had with Iran. When the Second World War was lost in May 1945, Henlein committed suicide and his people were moved out of the Sudetenland, some 800,000 to the Soviet zone and the rest to West Germany. The Sudetenland was then entirely repopulated with ethnic Czechs.
In all, more than three million Germans were forced to leave their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and other lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, where their ancestors had lived for centuries, indeed for much longer than most Palestinian families have lived in Gaza. They embarked on the 300-mile journey westwards under conditions of extreme deprivation, carrying only what they could carry. Once they reached Germany—whose new borders were drawn by the victorious Allies as they had lost all sovereignty—they settled and made the best of it.
Today, they and their descendants are among some of the most successful people in Germany, and however powerful modern Germany is, she makes no territorial claims on either Poland or the Czech Republic. The Palestinians could learn a great lesson from the catastrophe that overcame the Sudeten Germans almost contemporaneously as the “Nakba” (catastrophe) that overcame them. Yet will they learn from it? Almost certainly not….
After North Korea launched its vicious unprovoked attack on South Korea in June 1950 it was punished so severely by the American-led United Nations force that it lost over a million dead. (In those happier days, the United Nations supported countries that were invaded rather than the invaders.) North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.
The percentage of North Koreans who died in that war was 16.5 percent. The Gazan health ministry is an arm of Hamas propaganda and routinely lies about the statistics of killed and wounded there, but even if we take its numbers as accurate, the total number of Gazans killed in this war has been 2.04 percent, which is not a figure that in any way aligns with accusations of genocide. If the IDF had wished to commit genocide, it would have killed far more than 2.04 percent of Gazans. By total contrast, Adolf Hitler killed over 50 percent of all of Europe’s Jews in what was a genuine genocide….
In the collapsing former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Serb leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, General Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic took the cold-blooded decision to invade neighboring Bosnia and conduct an appalling program of what came to be known as “ethnic cleansing.” Those critics of Donald Trump who tritely refer to the population transfers under his Gaza plan as ethnic cleansing ought to revisit what the phrase actually means in terms of horror, violence, and bloodshed.
Roberts could also remind readers that Trump was proposing to make the program voluntary for Gazans; only those who so desired would leave the Strip to settle elsewhere in the Arab world. There would be no “forcible” transfer of a population, which would violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Roberts offers many instances from recent history in which parties engaged in aggression have been defeated by their intended victim, and lost territory, or even their sovereignty, as a result. He suggests that the 2.2 million people now in Gaza could be parceled out among the 22 existing Arab states, while Gaza was being reconstructed, is worth considering. It would lighten the burden that would be felt if just one or two states were expected to accept the Gazans. The poorer Arab states taking in their allotment of 100,000 Gazans could have all of the expense of their resettlement, and upkeep, underwritten by the rich Arab states. It’s worth serious consideration. It’s not Trump, let’s remember, but the Arabs, who want to force the Gazans to live among the rubble.
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