Middle East Press on: Saudi Normalization, Gaza, Trump, Netanyahu: New Age Islam's Selection, 4 February 2025
By New Age Islam Edit Desk
4 February 2025
At A Critical Crossroad: We Need a Saudi Normalization Deal Now At a Critical Crossroad: We Need a Saudi Normalization Deal Now
Israel’s Enemy Need to realize that there’s A New Middle East
Khamenei’s Nightmare: A Trump-Netanyahu Union
Palestinians Write Their Own History by Reclaiming Gaza’s North
Gaza Defies Trump
Gaza Rejects Displacement, But What If It’s Imposed?
The Great March Of Hope: Gaza’s Defiance against Erasure
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At A Critical Crossroad: We Need A Saudi Normalization Deal Now At A Critical Crossroad: We Need A Saudi Normalization Deal Now
By Jpost Editorial
February 4, 2025
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump meet later today, among many topics of discussion should be one that could change the face of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia. The possibility of a historic accord between the kingdom and the Jewish state under the dynamic leadership of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has never been more promising.
For decades, Saudi Arabia, which has refused to recognize Israel since 1948, championed a rejectionist stance toward the Jewish state, aligning with the broader sentiment of Arab unity against Zionism.
Despite this official posture, quiet cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel has existed for years, particularly as both nations share a common adversary in Iran. Intelligence sharing and tacit coordination have grown, driven by shared concerns over Tehran’s regional ambitions and nuclear program.
There were whispers post-Abraham Accords that Saudi Arabia would be next to formalize ties with Israel, but October 7 put paid to that idea. Now, the timing could be ripe to push for Saudi-Israel relations and dent a further blow to Iran and its proxies across the region.
Israel is “closer than ever” to normalization with the Saudis, Israel’s newly appointed ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter revealed in an exclusive interview last week with The Jerusalem Post. The development will be a “game changer for the region and beyond,” he said.
The ambassador described normalization with Riyadh as part of a broader strategic realignment following the decline of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Iranian proxies. “We’re closer to Saudi Arabia because we’ve degraded Hamas,” he said. “The fall of [former Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad] and the weakening of Iran’s influence have brought us to a moment of opportunity.”
A critical crossroad
The fall of Assad is also a critical juncture for the post-October 7 Middle East. Long an Iran bastion sitting on Israel’s borders, Assad’s fall and the rise of Syria’s transitional President Ahmed al-Shaara has also changed the region’s landscape. Al-Shaara met with MBS in Riyadh on Sunday in his first foreign trip as Syrian leader.
The potential benefits of any Saudi deal could hold the key to redefining the Arab-Israeli conflict and finally creating a solution to the Palestinian issue that has dogged Israel for seven decades.
MBS’s leadership has already redrawn the Middle East’s balance of power, allowing Saudi Arabia to surpass Egypt as the dominant Arab voice. His pragmatic approach to foreign policy has signaled that Riyadh is no longer beholden to outdated and medieval ideological battles and is instead attempting to chart a new course toward modernization.
Netanyahu, known for his ability to seize geopolitical opportunities, understands that this historic moment must not be wasted. With the US actively backing normalization efforts, the window for achieving a deal has never been wider.
Any deal could also force the Palestinians to return to negotiations rather than rely on continued international condemnation of Israel as their only strategy. By making the Saudis an active player in the peace process, Israel gains an Arab partner that has real influence over Palestinian decision-making – something the UAE and Bahrain, despite their Abraham Accords agreements, could never achieve alone.
Of course, a deal like this will not be without opposition. Some hardline factions in Israel will oppose any concessions to the Palestinians, while elements within Saudi Arabia’s conservative religious establishment may resist official ties with the Jewish state.
The Palestinians themselves may reject what they view as an Arab betrayal but the reality is that the Arab world has moved on from the failed attempts at peace. Nations like Saudi Arabia are no longer willing to hold their own national interests hostage in the name of a Palestinian leadership that has repeatedly rejected and squandered past opportunities.
If Bibi and MBS are serious, they must find a way to navigate these challenges and act swiftly, before regional tensions or political instability derail progress.
The moment for a Saudi-Israeli deal is now. The world has changed.
MBS has already redefined Saudi Arabia’s role on the global stage, and Israel has proven that peace with the Arab world is no longer a fantasy. The Abraham Accords laid the foundation, but a Saudi-Israeli deal would be the crown jewel of Middle Eastern diplomacy.
The opportunity is here. The only question is: Will they seize it?
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840526
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Israel’s Enemy Need To Realize That There's A New Middle East
By Yisrael Medad
February 4, 2025
To be in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoes this week is not a position to envy.
On the one hand, he needs to assure the future security of the State of Israel. He seeks to buttress an already pro-Israel administration that, in US President Donald Trump’s previous term of office, proved itself understanding and supportive, in word and deed. He must cover multiple issues, each one with subsidiary concerns. He must also assure a mutual alignment of purpose and policy achievement.
The reports are that Trump seeks to pressure Netanyahu to continue with stage two of the Israel-Hamas deal, despite the dangers. In fact, the negotiations on the second stage of the hostage deal began Monday at the meeting in Washington between Netanyahu and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, on the 16th day of the agreement, and will resume in the context of Tuesday’s encounter between the prime minister and the president. Meanwhile, Netanyahu must also be prepared to outline what a stage three should look like and how better to get there.
As bothersome as it can be, he will be discussing a century-long conflict that has been complex and complicated, the elements of its making difficult and frustrating to grasp. In the summer of 1977, Menachem Begin and Shmuel Katz experienced presidential short temper with Jimmy Carter, if not his exasperation, and Netanyahu himself did so with Barack Obama. Will he be meeting an impatient president with little concern for details, one who presumes he has already solved all the existing problems as well as those that could develop?
One unknown factor is whether Trump is more interested in the short-term possibilities and focusing more on Saudi Arabia than on Israel, or truly recognizes the intrinsic essence of the Islamist ideology that drives the anti-Israel agenda of most of the Middle East and beyond. There could also be a commercial stake involved, if we take into consideration Qatar’s role.
Necessarily, we can only factor into the possibilities what we do know. And what we know is that the first Trump administration was considerably favorable to Israel. We also know that significant and prominent appointments to critical government positions, including some of the most senior, are close friends and admirers of Israel. Moreover, we know that Trump depends in no small measure on the camp of Christian pro-Israel friends.
On this basis, Netanyahu must seek to present to Trump a picture of what could go wrong if the policies the US president is contemplating go awry. He must outline for him that, unfortunately, more has gone wrong with American plans and initiatives than have succeeded. In the overwhelming cases, it has been the behavior of the Arabs in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria that has brought about the collapse of well-meaning American diplomacy, not to mention ill-intended diplomacy.
Reframing and restating
IT NEEDS to be made clear to the president that Israel does not oppose a resolution of the so-called Palestinian-Israel conflict. What needs to be done is a concise restatement of what that conflict is.
Multiple times the Arabs residing in historic Palestine and then under Israel’s territorial administration have been offered a path to statehood.
In 1923, it was a Legislative Council, but they boycotted the elections. The Arabs continued their policy of rejection, and the 1937 Peel Commission partition as well as the United Nations 1947 partition plan were additional opportunities lost to them. After 1967, despite UN Security Council resolution 242 not even mentioning the term “Palestinians,” they continued refusals of diplomatic arrangements. There was the Allon Plan, Moshe Dayan’s policy, Menachem Begin’s autonomy proposal, and more.
The PLO signed on to the Oslo Accords with no intention of fulfilling their terms but, rather, using it as a springboard for its continued terrorism. In 1996, prior to Netanyahu being elected, there were four massive suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem early in the year, which killed 65 civilians. The overall number of anti-Israeli terrorist attacks were 14 in 1996. Netanyahu was not the cause of the breakdown of Oslo; rather, it was, and always was and will be, the pattern of the “cause of Palestine.”
If Trump seeks to be the one to bring peace, he needs not only to know the history of the conflict but to realize that peace can only be achieved if Israel is finally permitted to gain a victory on the battlefield. He must hear, in David Weinberg’s formulation, the “basic restatement of the Jewish people’s profound historic and national rights in Israel and Jerusalem.”
Moreover, that battlefield victory must be followed by an admission from the Arab side. A century ago, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in his famous “Iron Wall” essay that “it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realize a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.” President Trump should be aware of that historical truth and press, finally, the other side to yield.
The admission required must be done by a leadership that openly declares that for the past 100 years the Arabs fought Israel, have not recognized Zionism, have not recognized the Jewish state, and have not sought to make peace with Israel. That was a wrong policy. They must reset their national goals to best serve their own people.
Perhaps at this time, with Trump’s initiative to relocate Gazans, even if temporarily, looming, Israel’s enemy will come to realize there is, this time, a real new Middle East.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840513
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Khamenei’s Nightmare: A Trump-Netanyahu Union
By Erfan Fard
February 4, 2025
Forty-six years ago, a man arrived in Tehran by a French plane and drove in an American car to a cemetery. In terms of personality and intellect, Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini was the essence of villainy and malevolence.
A month before Khomeini’s arrival, Robert Ernest Huyser – on a special mission – came to Tehran to assist the US government in making subsequent decisions and keeping informed about the situation in Iran. He wanted to prevent Iranian army and SAVAK (pre-revolution secret police) officials from staging a coup with the departure of the late Shah from Iran.
This four-star general left Tehran on February 3, 1979, after a month of a destructive mission. Of course, with his departure, Khomeini executed those senior army officials and SAVAK’s patriotic commanders.
Later, this general confessed in a hospital in Washington to Robert Armao that he felt guilty about what transpired, but what good was it now? Iran had been thrown into the graveyard of history. It seems as though the behind-the-scenes decision was that a backward and criminal mullah like Ruhollah Khomeini should merely witness the transfer of power and take control in Iran.
Tehran’s regime propaganda machine has called this turmoil of 1979 an Islamic revolution ever since and has deafened the world’s ears, but the fruit of this turmoil was the destruction of the country and a bloodbath.
Israel and the US lost their biggest friend and ally in the Middle East – the late shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – and from that day, the nightmare of American and Israeli forces in the Middle East began, and the word terrorism became associated with Iran, with Marxist and Islamic terrorist groups celebrating the rise of political Islam in Iran.
The same Islamic Republic grew like a cancerous tumor, and today, the world faces a serious threat from Islamic terrorism. After Iran’s first dictator’s death, Ali Khamenei, 36 years on, has added to Khomeinism’s “Great Terror” in Iran and the Middle East. He is a criminal dictator who, for years, has committed atrocities against Israel and America on the one hand and repressed the Iranian people on the other, sparing no crime.
Uniting against Islamism
TODAY, NETANYAHU and Trump’s meeting takes place in Washington. At the National Press Club in the same Washington, a few days ago, the well-regarded and democratic son of the late shah, by accepting responsibility for the leadership of the transition period after the eventual collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran, struck fear into the Islamic Republic and the terrorists linked to 1979’s revolt.
Secessionists, pro-regime reformists, Islamic and Marxist terrorist groups, and the core power always have a common enemy, and that is Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. They know he believes in democracy and human rights, and many of the apparent Iranian opposition do not want the collapse of the Islamic Republic as the Pahlavi name becomes more prominent.
However, the meeting between Trump and Netanyahu adds to Khamenei’s fears. Trump and Netanyahu will discuss issues related to the Islamic Republic, hostages, and developing relations with Saudi Arabia. But their meeting has special significance that will have various effects on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
From the moment Khomeini took power, Israel opposed diplomatic relations between the US and the Islamic Republic, and in the devastating war between two Islamic dictators – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Khomeini – both the US and Israel tried to arm them so they would destroy each other, and the Middle East would be rid of both.
From a security and intelligence perspective, such meetings in Washington are usually seen as opportunities for coordinating international policies and strengthening common positions against regional challenges. New CIA director John Ratcliffe and the new managers of the American intelligence community will gradually focus on their work in coordination with the Mossad and the IDF.
From a security and intelligence perspective, meetings like the Netanyahu-Trump summit to discuss Iran not only indicate the coordination of international policies but also provide opportunities to strengthen common strategic positions against challenges mostly created by the Islamic Republic.
These important meetings allow the new US and Israeli governments to have better and deeper insights into each other’s movements and intentions through the exchange of information and intelligence data. In this way, they can jointly plan more precise responses and quicker reactions to potential threats from the Iranian regime. Yet notably, the presence of Israel supporters in Trump’s new cabinet will align with Israel’s movements.
FOR EXAMPLE, regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, intelligence coordination could include exchanging information about military capabilities, nuclear activities for building an atomic bomb, and the Iranian regime’s support for proxy terrorist groups in the region like the Houthis, Popular Mobilization Forces, Islamic Jihad, etc.
This information could help create a unified and integrated perspective that ultimately leads to stronger and more effective preventive or responsive measures. But certainly, Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, etc., know Israel must, by any means possible, remove the nuclear card from the mullahs’ hands in Tehran.
In addition to the Trump-Netanyahu meeting, joint meetings between high-ranking Israeli and American intelligence and military officials act as opportunities for joint assessment and analysis of regional security threats and upcoming challenges.
These assessments include long-term consequences of military actions and sanctions, not empty diplomacy, all of which help strengthen intelligence and defense strategies and further isolate the collapsing regime of the Shi’ite mullahs in Tehran.
These meetings play an important role in strengthening bilateral security and intelligence cooperation between Israel and the US, and these collaborations are considered an essential part of the defense and national security strategy in dealing with complex global challenges.
Perhaps agreement on military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, providing advanced military equipment like bunker buster bombs, or agreeing on the cessation of fruitless diplomatic relations with the terrorist-loving ayatollahs in Tehran can all impact the aggressive approach of the Islamic Republic of Iran and change the grounds for maximum pressure.
The world’s collective memory is not so weak as not to know that the Tehran dictator has repeatedly issued and even praised the assassination orders against Trump and Netanyahu. Now, he witnesses the meeting of these two strong leaders at the White House, and the same terror in Khamenei brings joy to the Iranian people who are counting the moments for regime change.
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-840507
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Palestinians Write Their Own History By Reclaiming Gaza’s North
Ramzy Baroud
February 03, 2025
The return of 1 million Palestinians from southern Gaza to the north last week felt as if history was choreographing one of the most earth-shattering events in recent memory.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched along a single road, the coastal Rashid Street, in the far west of Gaza. Though these displaced masses had been cut off from each other in massive displacement camps in central Gaza and the Mawasi region further south, they sang the same songs, chanted the same chants and used the same talking points.
During their forced displacement, they had no electricity and no means of communicating, let alone coordinating, with each other. They were ordinary people, hauling a few items of clothing and whatever tools for survival they had left following the unprecedented Israeli genocide. They headed north to homes they knew were likely destroyed by the Israeli army.
But they remained committed to their march back to their annihilated cities and refugee camps. Many smiled, others sang hymns and some recited national songs and poems.
A little girl offered a news reporter a poem she had composed. “I am a Palestinian girl, and I am proud,” her voice blared. She recited simple but emotional verses about identifying as a “strong, resilient Palestinian girl.” She spoke of her relationship with her family and community as the “daughter of heroes, the daughter of Gaza,” declaring that Gazans “prefer death over shame.” Her return to her destroyed home was a “day of victory.”
“Victory” was a word repeated by virtually everyone interviewed by the media and mentioned countless times on social media. Although many, including some sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, openly challenged the Gazans’ view of their perceived victory, they failed to appreciate the history of Palestine — indeed, the history of all colonized people who have wrested their freedom from the claws of brutal foreign enemies.
“Difficulties break some men but make others. No ax is sharp enough to cut the soul of (someone) … armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end,” iconic South African anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela wrote in a 1975 letter to his wife from his prison cell. His words, written in the context of South Africa’s struggle, feel as if they were written for Palestinians, especially Gaza’s latest triumph against erasure — both physical and psychological.
To understand this better, one needs to examine what Israeli leaders said about northern Gaza immediately after the start of the genocidal war in October 2023.
Israel will maintain “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip “for an indefinite period,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in November 2023. A year later, the Israeli army reiterated the same sentiment. Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that there would be “no return” for any residents of northern Gaza.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich went further. “It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,” he said, adding that Israel should reoccupy Gaza and “encourage” the migration of its inhabitants.
Many other Israeli officials and experts, like a predictable chorus, repeated the same notion. Settler groups held a conference last June to assess real estate opportunities in Gaza. In their minds, they were the only ones with a say over Gaza’s future. Palestinians seemed inconsequential to the wheel of history, controlled, as the powerful arrogantly believed, by Tel Aviv alone.
But the endless mass of people sang, “Do you think you can measure up to the free, measure up to the Palestinians? We will die before we surrender our home; they call us the freedom fighters.”
Many media outlets, including Israeli ones, reported a sense of shock in Israel as the population returned en masse to a fully destroyed region. The shock does not end there. Israel failed to occupy the north, ethnically cleanse Palestinians from the Strip or break their collective spirit. Instead, Palestinians emerged stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for Israel, with a new objective: returning to historic Palestine.
For decades, Israel invested in a singular discourse regarding the internationally recognized Palestinian right of return to their homes in historic Palestine. Almost every Israeli leader or top official since the 1948 Nakba (the “catastrophe” resulting from the destruction of the Palestinian homeland) has echoed this. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak summarized it in 2000 during the Camp David negotiations, when he drew his “bottom line” in any peace deal with the Palestinians: there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees.
As Gaza has proven, Palestinians do not take their cues from Israel or even those who claim to represent them. As they marched north, four generations of Palestinians walked together, at times holding hands, singing for freedom and return — not only to the north of Gaza, but further north to historic Palestine itself.
Since the Nakba, Israel has insisted it will write the history of the land between the Jordan River and the sea. But Palestinians continue to prove Israel wrong. They survived in Gaza despite Israel’s genocide. They remained. They returned. They emerged with a sense of victory. They are writing their own history, which, despite immeasurable and unimaginable losses, is also a history of hope and victory.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2588868
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Gaza Defies Trump
February 3, 2025
By Dr Amira Abo El-Fetouh
There is no doubt that the sight of Palestinians returning on foot to Gaza City and the north of the enclave with their humble belongings amazed the world. The march was the best possible response to US President Donald Trump who wants to displace the people from Gaza to Egypt and Jordan; he wants ethnic cleansing in all but name. Gaza has defied Trump. The Palestinians are committed to their land, which has been watered with their blood, sweat and tears for thousands of years. Their roots are so deep that they cannot be cut out.
The people of Gaza have returned to their towns and villages but they no longer have homes to live in or shelters. Gaza has become uninhabitable as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, but the Palestinians have returned anyway and thus defied the powers that be in the world.
The so-called international community conspired against Gaza, which may be small in area, but is big in dignity and steadfastness. It did not wave a white flag; it stood tall against all odds, and taught the whole world the meaning of being connected to the land, even if everything is destroyed. They have paid the price with Palestinian blood, which has soaked into the land and will make it green again. The Palestinians didn’t need the Zionists to make the desert bloom; they were already doing so for centuries.
Gaza will rise from the ashes and rubble, as it always has and always will as long as the Zionist enemy continues to occupy Palestinian land. The Palestinian people will never be defeated. Their extraordinary heroism exemplifies a nation defending their land and freedom, arguably the most heroic in modern history.
Those who believe that the Gaza Strip only expresses the will of those who live there, and that it is merely a part of the historic land of Palestine from the river to the sea, are mistaken.
The majority of its people were ethnically cleansed from the rest of Palestine in 1948. The armies of the British Mandate occupation authorities and the Arab armies that were defeated told them, “Flee from the fighting and you’ll be back in a week.” The Palestinians believed this lie and left their land carrying the keys to their homes, but they never returned. This hard lesson has been learnt well by the Palestinian people. They understand that steadfastness on their land is the way to victory in this long struggle across the generations, with each handing over the keys and the torch of freedom to the next.
While the international community that supports the Zionist entity weeps over its people, the Palestinians returned to their towns and villages in Gaza, but the invading settlers did not return to the Gaza envelope. This is the difference between the Palestinians, the indigenous people, and the settlers who came from around the world to usurp a land that is not theirs. These invaders fear the Palestinians, as opinion polls testify. Jewish immigration to occupied Palestine has apparently declined significantly. The latest Israeli statistics show that the number of Jews who migrated to the occupation entity dwindled to 24,000 throughout 2024, while the number of those who left reached 700,000 in the first year of the war, according to estimates by Professor Ilan Pappe, the prominent Israeli historian.
Despite everything, what the Palestinians in Gaza have done is miraculous. They have exhausted the Zionist enemy militarily, economically and morally in the longest war that it has fought since the establishment of the illegitimate entity in the middle of our Arab homeland. Benjamin Netanyahu had to accept Hamas’s conditions to end the war and hand over the captives, whose locations he could not find, despite his military might and strong intelligence. Even the way they were handed over as part of the ceasefire deal was humiliating for Israel and its leaders. One Israeli soldier came out of Jabalia, which was completely destroyed; another came out of the rubble in Khan Younis; and another came from in front of the house of the martyr Yahya Sinwar. Some powerful symbols and messages were sent when handing over the captives, such as the Israeli rifle that the resistance seized from one of the soldiers and which was placed on the table where the Red Cross delegate and a representative of the resistance were sitting to sign that they had received the captives. There were also the Merkava tanks left behind by the Israeli army that filled the square.
The delusion pushed by Trump and Netanyahu that the Palestinian people will accept an “alternative homeland” in Egypt and Jordan in order to liquidate the Palestinian cause will shatter against the steadfastness of the Palestinians and their legitimate resistance against occupation. No worldly incentives or inducements will be accepted, no matter the circumstances. The Palestinian people are the people of sacrifices and heroism. They have taught the whole world the meaning of a homeland and how to preserve it with blood in a way that always defeats the sword.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250203-gaza-defies-trump/
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Gaza Rejects Displacement, But What If It’s Imposed?
February 3, 2025
By Adnan Hmidan
For decades, the Israeli occupation, backed by Western powers, has sought to liquidate the Palestinian cause through various means, foremost among them forced displacement. Today, these attempts resurface under the framework of the “alternative homeland” project, aiming to empty the Gaza Strip of its population and impose a new demographic reality. Despite the unequivocal Palestinian rejection of this plan and Egypt and Jordan’s efforts to avoid its repercussions, US and Israeli pressures – especially under the policies of US President Donald Trump – persist, offering a glimmer of hope to those seeking to implement it.
But what if forced displacement is imposed on Gaza’s population? Will Tel Aviv achieve its goals of ending the resistance, or will the outcomes be entirely counterproductive?
The geographic expansion of resistance
Sinai: A new front for resistance
While the idea of resettling Palestinians in Sinai is not new, it has resurfaced with renewed vigor amid the escalating Israeli aggression on Gaza. Despite Egypt’s official rejection of this scenario, the imposition of displacement could have severe consequences, including:
Turning Sinai into a new battleground: With seasoned Palestinian fighters whose combat experience has been honed through successive wars, relocating the resistance to Sinai could become a viable option, especially if refugees face repression or harsh conditions there.
Potential coordination with local armed groups: Despite ideological and operational differences between Palestinian resistance factions and armed groups in Sinai, a shared hostility towards Israel could lead to temporary understandings or limited coordination.
Drawing Egypt directly into the conflict: Israeli operations targeting Palestinians in Sinai could place Cairo in a politically and security-sensitive position, potentially threatening Egypt’s internal stability and compelling it to adopt a firmer stance against Tel Aviv.
Jordan: The return of armed resistance scenarios
If large numbers of Palestinians are forcibly displaced to Jordan, conditions could ripen for the revival of resistance activities within a new context shaped by current dynamics, especially considering Hamas’s significant popularity in Jordan.
Escalation of popular protests: Forced displacement could spark widespread protests across Jordan, not only among Palestinians but also among Jordanians who oppose such a project.
Revisiting the Wadi Araba Agreement: Any resurgence of resistance activities within Jordan could put the peace treaty with Israel under mounting public and governmental pressure, potentially leading the Jordanian government to reconsider its ties with Tel Aviv.
Revival of armed struggle: Displaced Palestinians may view armed resistance as their sole means of reclaiming their rights, reminiscent of the resistance era that shaped Jordan’s landscape in the 1960s and 70s.
Resistance will grow
The forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza – after their legendary resilience – will ignite a wave of outrage both within Palestine and among the diaspora, boosting popular support for armed resistance.
This will in turn increase recruitment to military factions. Palestinian refugees facing harsh living conditions in host countries may view resistance as their only option, leading to heightened recruitment rates.
Any new wave of displacement will galvanise extensive support from Palestinians abroad, both financially and politically, as part of the ongoing narrative of ethnic cleansing that began in 1948.
Displacement: A new phase of confrontation
When the plan to displace Palestinians to Sinai was proposed, Hamas leader Osama Hamdan firmly rejected it, stressing that the resistance would not stand idle in the face of such attempts. His key remarks include:
Gaza is not for sale: Palestinians categorically reject displacement under any circumstances.
Fierce resistance: Any attempt to impose displacement will be met with violent resistance, both inside and outside Gaza.
Catastrophic repercussions: The Sinai proposal is part of Israel’s broader scheme to liquidate the Palestinian cause, but it will fail and have dangerous consequences for the entire region.
Expanding the battlefield: Resistance will not remain confined to Gaza; confrontations will spread elsewhere, signaling the start of a more complex and widespread phase of conflict.
These statements affirm that forced displacement will not mark the end of resistance but rather the beginning of an even more defiant phase, as Palestinians refuse to become refugees once again.
Why do Gazans return despite the devastation?
Despite displacement attempts, Palestinians in Gaza demonstrate that leaving the Strip equates to uprooting themselves from their identity. We’ve witnessed long lines of displaced individuals returning northward, even though their homes have been reduced to rubble. Nothing awaited them but ruins, yet they insist on returning because they understand that staying on their land – even amid destruction – is the most powerful response to efforts aimed at erasing them.
These scenes reflect the Palestinians’ determination to endure, no matter how harsh the circumstances. Their connection to the land is not merely geographical; it’s deeply woven into their identity and dignity. A people who confront adversity with unyielding resolve cannot choose exile, for homeland – to them – embodies hope, resistance and history.
Will Palestinians surrender?
Even if the occupation succeeds in imposing displacement, will this mark the end of the Palestinian cause? Absolutely not. Just as the Nakba did not erase Palestine but instead birthed generations that carried the torch of resistance, any new wave of displacement will fuel an even more determined phase.
Palestinians do not forget, and every displaced person will pass down the story of return. The keys to homes lost in 1948 remain in the hands of descendants, and today’s images of destruction and displacement will inspire future generations.
Those who believed Palestinians would vanish into exile have discovered that their roots are too deep to be uprooted. Every attempt to eliminate them has produced generations even more committed to their rights.
While forced displacement will trigger unpredictable consequences, potentially becoming a political and security nightmare for the occupation, especially as Palestinians establish themselves in new environments that reshape the nature of the conflict.
one where resistance becomes more widespread and harder to contain, posing unprecedented challenges to the Israeli occupation.
The illusions of Trump and Netanyahu regarding the liquidation of the Palestinian cause will shatter against the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, who will never allow displacement schemes to pass, no matter the circumstances.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250203-gaza-rejects-displacement-but-what-if-its-imposed/
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The Great March Of Hope: Gaza’s Defiance Against Erasure
February 3, 2025
The return of one million Palestinians from southern Gaza to the north on 27 January felt as if history was choreographing one of its most earth-shattering events in recent memory.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched along a single street, the coastal Rashid Street, at the furthest western stretch of Gaza. Though these displaced masses were cut off from each other in massive displacement camps in central Gaza and the Mawasi region further south, they sang the same songs, chanted the same chants and used the same talking points.
During their forced displacement, they had no electricity and no means of communication, let alone coordination. They were ordinary people, hauling a few items of clothing and whatever survival tools they had, following the unprecedented Israeli genocide. They headed north to homes they knew were likely destroyed by the Israeli army.
Yet, they remained committed to their march back to their annihilated cities and refugee camps. Many smiled, others sang religious hymns and some recited national songs and poems.
A little girl offered a news reporter a poem she composed. “I am a Palestinian girl, and I am proud,” her voice blared. She recited simple but emotional verses about identifying as a “strong, resilient Palestinian girl.” She spoke of her relationship with her family and community as the “daughter of heroes, the daughter of Gaza”, declaring that Gazans “prefer death over shame”. Her return to her destroyed home was a “day of victory.”
“Victory” was a word repeated by virtually everyone interviewed by the media and countless times on social media. While many, including some sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, openly challenged the Gazans’ view of their perceived ‘victory’, they failed to appreciate the history of Palestine—indeed, the history of all colonised people who wrested their freedom from the claws of foreign, brutal enemies.
“Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of (someone) armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end,” iconic anti-apartheid South African leader, Nelson Mandela, wrote in a letter to his wife in 1975 from his prison cell. His words, written in the context of South Africa’s struggle, feel as if they were written for Palestinians, especially Gaza’s latest triumph against erasure—both physical and psychological.
To understand this better, examine what Israeli political and military leaders said about northern Gaza immediately after the start of the genocidal war on 7 October, 2023:
Israel will maintain “overall security responsibility” for the Gaza Strip “for an indefinite period,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an interview with the ABC News network in November 2023.
One year later, the Israeli army reiterated the same sentiment. In a statement, Israeli Brigadier General Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that there would be “no return” for any residents of northern Gaza.
Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, went further. “It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,” he said on 26 November, stating that Israel should re-occupy Gaza and “encourage” the migration of its inhabitants.
Many other Israeli officials and experts repeated the same notion like a predictable chorus. Settler groups held a conference last June to assess real estate opportunities in Gaza. In their minds, they were the only ones with a say over Gaza’s future. Palestinians seemed inconsequential to the wheel of history, controlled, as the powerful arrogantly believed, by Tel Aviv alone.
But the endless mass of people sang, “Do you think you can measure up to the free, measure up to the Palestinians?… We will die before we surrender our home; they call us the freedom fighters.”
Many media outlets, including Israeli ones, reported a sense of shock in Israel as the population returned en masse to a fully destroyed region. The shock does not end there. Israel failed to occupy the north, ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza or break their collective spirit. Instead, Palestinians emerged stronger, more determined and, equally frightening for Israel, with a new objective: returning to historic Palestine.
For decades, Israel invested in a singular discourse regarding the internationally recognized Palestinian Right of Return to their homes in historic Palestine. Almost every Israeli leader or top official since the 1948 Nakba (the ‘Catastrophe’ resulting from the destruction of the Palestinian homeland) echoed this. Former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, summarized it in 2000 during the Camp David negotiations, when he drew his “bottom line” in any peace deal with the Palestinians: there would be no right of return for Palestinian refugees.
As Gaza has proven, Palestinians do not take their cues from Israel or even those who claim to represent them. As they marched north, four generations of Palestinians walked together, at times holding hands, singing for freedom and return—not only to the north but further north to historic Palestine itself.
Since the Nakba, Israel has insisted it will write the history of the land between the Jordan River and the sea. But Palestinians continue to prove Israel wrong. They survived in Gaza, despite genocide. They remained. They returned. They emerged with a sense of victory. They are writing their own history, which, despite immeasurable and unimaginable losses, is also a history of hope and victory.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250203-the-great-march-of-hope-gazas-defiance-against-erasure/
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