As President Trump calls for the US to "take over" Gaza, Dr Anne Irfan (UCL Arts & Sciences) shows the similarities with America’s original intention for the United Nations Relief & Works Agency and the historical resistance of the Palestinian people in the face of displacement.
Donald Trump shocked much of the world when he announced plans for the US to "take over" Gaza. Speaking at a press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the US president outlined a plan to "resettle" Gaza’s population of nearly 2.2 million Palestinians elsewhere in the Arab world. Several officials later added that this resettlement would be temporary while Gaza was rebuilt.
Governments around the world were quick to condemn the plan - with politicians and human rights advocates pointing out that it would amount to ethnic cleansing.
Conversely, Netanyahu praised Trump for "thinking outside the box with fresh ideas". Yet while there is no question that this plan violates international law , it is not as unprecedented as these responses suggest.
Successive Israeli governments, often with clandestine US support, have long sought a similar "solution" for Gaza’s Palestinians, 66% of whom are already refugees from the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 . At that time, Zionist militias and the Israeli army displaced and expelled 750,000 Palestinians before and during the First Arab-Israeli war.
In fact, that’s the very reason the US supported the creation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East ( Unrwa ) in 1949. Though its purpose today is very different, it was originally intended as a tool to permanently resettle the Palestinians outside Palestine.
The idea for Unrwa was inspired by the experience of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a US government agency established during the Great Depression. It promoted resource development through large public works programmes in the deep south.
US officials considered the TVA a prototype for managing the Palestinian refugee crisis and pushed the newly established United Nations to set up an agency that would similarly create jobs and economic development.
This was the "works" in Unrwa’s title. As they saw it, employment opportunities would encourage the Palestinians to integrate into their places of exile. Meanwhile, the resulting economic development would lessen resistance in the host state to the refugees’ permanent resettlement.
In four of the five territories where Unrwa operates - Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and the West Bank - it spent its first few years designing large public works projects. But in Gaza, the large concentration of refugees in a tiny territory with limited natural resources did not lend itself to public works projects.
Instead US officials pushed Unrwa to resettle Palestinians outside of the Strip, in Sinai , Libya and further afield.
Yet Unrwa’s efforts on this front quickly ran into a major obstacle: the Palestinians themselves. The refugees clearly understood that the "integration" projects and jobs schemes were intended to make their exile permanent - despite the UN having officially recognised their right to return home.
By the late 1950s, the refugees’ persistent refusal participate in these programmes led Unrwa to shift its focus to education.
Repeated expulsions
The desire to forcibly transfer Gaza’s population never really disappeared. Gaza has been home to Palestinian refugees from across the country, with a huge political significance as a result, and its demographics have repeatedly been deemed unacceptable by elements of the Israeli state.
Soon after it began occupying Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, the Israeli military forcibly expelled 200,000 Palestinians from Gaza to Jordan. Four year later, Shimon Peres, then the Israeli minister of transport and communications, sought to forcibly transfer more Palestinians into the Sinai. And around the same time, the Israeli government looked into relocating Gaza’s population to sites as far away as Iraq, Canada and Brazil.
Such ideas persist in Israel. Shortly after Israel began its war on Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023, there was also evidence in the form of a leaked intelligence report that the government was considering forcibly transferring Palestinians to Sinai.
More recently, the White House administration floated the possibility of transferring Gaza’s population to Indonesia. And Trump spoke in alarming terms shortly after his inauguration of "cleaning out" the Strip.
There’s no connection between the US president’s plan, as outlined this week, and the early US-backed idea to found Unrwa as an agency to oversee resettlement of Gaza’s population. Unrwa had abandoned its resettlement policy by the mid-1950s - and, in any case, Trump has long been one of Unrwa’s most virulent opponents.
In 2018, he became the first US president to fully defund the agency. More recently he has been a vocal supporter of the Israeli Knesset’s on its operations.
In the same press conference where Trump announced his plans for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, he also confirmed that he will extend the Biden administration’s ban on funding Unrwa.
Yet Trump’s current plan is not a million miles away from the US government’s original intention for Unrwa. His apparent ignorance of this history suggests he is also unaware of the biggest likely obstacle to "permanent resettlement".
But he cannot ignore the historical resistance of the Palestinian people themselves to the seemingly endless plans to displace, dispossess and deny them their homeland.
As Unrwa officials learned decades ago, the only "solution" for the question of the future of the Gaza Strip is a just and durable political process that accounts for the Palestinian people’s rights as well as ensuring the security of all.
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