The battered people of Gaza have only begun to return to their destroyed homes in parts of the enclave that Israel had effectively forced them out from but another power is already eyeing their land. Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, who helped broker the tenuous ceasefire currently in place between Israel and Hamas, has in recent days repeatedly made clear that he wants to expel all Palestinians from Gaza, have the US take it over, own it, and rebuild it as a real estate developer would. In Mr Trump’s own words, he wants to turn Gaza into a “Riviera for the Middle East” — just that this would not be so for the people who actually belong to Gaza. He wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from Gaza and has threatened these countries with aid cuts after they both rejected his idea. As he revs up his bulldozers, what the Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians want is inconsequential for Mr Trump.

Given the law-of-the-jungle mindset that Mr Trump embodies, the US takeover makes perfect real estate sense. As the president has pointed out on more than one occasion, Gaza has a beautiful seaside view. Israel has already completed the demolition job, so fancy villas can be built quickly on the corpses of tens of thousands of men, women and children. In some ways, the US, it appears, wants to turn Gaza into Israel’s Hawaii —taken from an indigenous population and turned into a holiday resort. Still, if the sheer brazenness of Mr Trump’s imperial dreams does not force the world into a joint bloc to stop him, the leaders of so-called democracies, who claim to swear by the rule of law, can give up that pretence, once and for all. Not since World War II has a country
so openly asserted its right to occupy and own a land that is thousands of miles away despite no historical connection or claim. Of course, what Mr Trump wants to do is a violation of the UN charter and would be tantamount to an act of ethnic displacement. It would also implode the Middle East, which is already aflame, leading to unfathomable bloodshed, death and destruction that will impact every part of the world.

No Middle Eastern regime, no matter how close to the US or Israel, will be able to accept the expulsion of Gaza’s people. Nor will the people of the Global South, for whom Palestine has long stood as a final emblem of unfinished decolonisation, accept the might-is-right logic of Mr Trump’s plans. Not even if some of their leaders pander to Mr Trump’s ego sitting next to him in the White House as he throws breadcrumbs at them and plunges the world into chaos. Mr Trump and his cohorts should remember that there can be no space for 19th-century imperial projects in the 21st century.