Mohsen al Attar
12 February 2025•Update: 12 February 2025
The author is a professor of international law and associate dean for Learning and Teaching at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.
ISTANBUL
Colonial fantasies thrive on illusion. Past and present, imperial powers imagine emptying lands, redrawing borders, and erasing histories to achieve their ambitions. Whether in the cartographic imaginations of Europe at the Berlin Conference or in the resource-driven invasions of the Third World during the 20th century, such colonial fantasies consistently view indigenous peoples as disposable. US President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Palestinians could be displaced to Jordan, Egypt, or Saudi Arabia is the latest iteration of this delusion.
Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, it has killed more than 47,000 Palestinians, maimed and buried tens of thousands more, and made hundreds of thousands homeless. Israel has obliterated Gaza’s infrastructure using weaponry manufactured in the US (and Germany), reducing it to dust and producing the humanitarian catastrophe that Trump now exploits. Cloaked in his rhetoric of pragmatism and benevolence, Trump’s intervention revives the colonial logic of dispossession. It ignores the violence that produced the chaos to begin with, while disregarding the brutal consequences of his “21st-century version of final solution,” as Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN special rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, has called it.
Cloaked colonial rhetoric
Academics and pundits have debated whether Trump’s proposal constitutes ethnic cleansing, a war crime, or a crime against humanity. Despite the chauvinism intrinsic to ethnic cleansing, it is not recognized as a standalone crime. Instead, we must classify Trump’s statements within the broader framework of violations of the Rome Statute. But legal debates over definitions cannot obscure the core truth: he has called for ethnic cleansing. As he is known to do, Trump went further, declaring that Israel should give Gaza to the United States, promising to turn it into a Mediterranean Riviera. Of course, rivieras were never built for the natives, meaning the expulsion of Palestinians is a precondition for his vision. Trump assured the world that Egypt and Jordan would “give us the kind of land that we need to get this done,” as if their sovereignty—and the lives of the Palestinians—were simple puzzle pieces.
Colonial history is littered with such world-making fantasies, just as it is scorched with the flames of the white man’s burden. Since its inception, Israel has operated as a colonial power, fragmenting, dominating, and erasing the indigenous population. From the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were violently cleansed, to the ongoing annihilation of Gaza, Israel’s actions mirror the extractive, exploitative logic of European colonial regimes. Like the First Nations in Canada or the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, Palestinians are treated as obstacles to progress—“progress” that envisions Gaza as Dubai, another capitalist playground.
Yet, just as colonial fantasies endure, so too does anti-colonial resistance. Even under horrific conditions, Palestinians refuse to surrender, defying imperial violence through survival itself. As Vincent Lloyd observes, “dignity also comes from living in a world committed to your destruction.” Like the Algerians who fought against the French, the Mau Mau who rose against the British, and South Africans who dismantled apartheid, Palestinian resistance is, above all, a rejection of erasure.
Legal framework
Trump’s desire to impose a colonial solution ignores the reality that Palestinians are not passive subjects. Their resistance has taken many forms—protesting in streets worldwide, advocating at the Hague, and, today, rebuilding Gaza. Each act of defiance undermines the Zionist fantasy that Palestine was ever “a land without a people” or will ever be. As Israel has learned, untold violence may wreak havoc, but it will not produce submission, shattering the fantasy of colonial control. As is typical for him, Trump voices every impulsive idea without restraint. Last week, it was a Mediterranean Riviera; next week, he will offer Palestinians tickets on Elon Musk’s starship to Mars. Each proposal is as fantastical and unworkable as it is morally abhorrent. Ethnic cleansing on this scale would exacerbate social tensions, collapse governments, and ignite a cauldron of rage that would spill across the region.
This is also the nature of anti-colonial resistance: it refuses to remain confined to the lands where colonial violence occurs. Solidarity spreads across borders, igniting movements that defy imperial logics of division and control. Today, there are protests in the streets and in newspapers; tomorrow, there will be global mobilization around a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign.
Ultimately, Gaza’s story is not only one of rubble or colonial violence but of enduring defiance. Palestinian resistance, like that of colonized peoples before them, reminds us that the colonial fantasy is doomed to fail. Tragically, this failure always comes at an unbearable human cost for which we must struggle to ensure that the perpetrators are finally held accountable.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu's editorial policy.
