Trump’s Gaza solution betrays his ignorance of history – and could make the conflict worse | World News

For a man ignorant in the history and ways of the Middle East, it makes perfect sense.

The people of Gaza do not have homes to go back to, their land is a living hell and has brought them nothing but suffering.

Surely the world can get together and build them somewhere nice where they can live instead.

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Donald Trump should know better than that you might say. He is after all the leader of the free world and has at his disposal as many foreign policy advisers as he cares to listen to.

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If he had asked them they would have told him there are a few issues with his proposal that the people of Gaza leave and don’t go back.

Firstly they regard Gaza as their home. They are fiercely proud of their heritage and their history of being there. Ask anyone who has ever been to Gaza.

Secondly, contrary to the US president’s claim that many countries have offered to help take them in, none have done so publicly.

In fact Israel’s immediate neighbours Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia have all dismissed the idea out of hand.

But thirdly, and more to the point, there is a long and dark history of Palestinians being encouraged one way or another to leave their homes never to return.

Many of those living in Gaza’s ‘refugee camps’ are descendants of the victims of the Nakba, as they call it, or the catastrophe when during Israel’s first war of independence, they had to flee homes on land that is now in Israel.

They believe they should be allowed to return to that land which they say Israelis wrongly took from them. Any acquiescence with another mass displacement would be a betrayal of their forefathers’ rights of return, they believe.

In the early days of the Gaza war, Israeli right wing politicians quietly pushed the idea that maybe the world could take Gazans in, give them a better life etc.

They don’t really want to live there anyway we were told, they’d be much better off in Michigan, or the emptier bits of Europe, or maybe Jordan, and Egypt might be persuaded to take in more in return for the huge amounts of American aid they receive.

Those politicians and diplomats understand their neighbours more than Donald Trump, or should do and should have known better. But the idea never went away.

Donald Trump it seems was listening and is now advocating the idea despite all its obvious shortcomings.

That will embolden far right Jewish extremists in the Netanyahu government who openly advocate the return of Israeli settlers to occupy Gaza.

But it will do nothing to bring a solution to the conflict – quite the opposite.