“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things… can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.”
—Orwell, G. (2003). Politics and the English Language.
In Animal Farm and Other Essays (pp. 76–84). London
As world leaders queue up for their turn on Trump’s reality TV fireside chats, the insults fly, secrets spill, and true agendas blaze. This isn’t diplomacy; it’s a spectacle, and Gaza is the latest casualty.
With the visit of Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Trump’s premature victory lap on Saudi-Israeli normalization sans Palestine, blows up in face. Promptly, rather in middle of the night, Mohammed bin Salman issued a statement followed by another — a blistering condemnation of Israel’s actions in Gaza, sending Saudi foreign policy hurtling back to the era of Arab nationalism.
The ceasefire offers little assurance, its fragility palpable.
The US media is busy sanitizing the reality of Gaza. The story of Gaza: Riviera? Tell that to the ghosts.
Gaza: prime beachfront property, or the last stand of a people? In this world of commodified faith, the lines are blurred – and that’s precisely the problem.
But to reduce Gaza to mere property is to commit a grave error: to mistake sovereignty for a title deed, to confuse the visceral essence of land with the sterile abstractions of ownership. This is no mere land dispute—it is an existential struggle against a grotesque logic of occupation that now seeks to mask ethnic cleansing as “redevelopment.”
Lipstick on a Pig
With an air of smug detachment, a recent commentary posed the question: If Indians and Pakistanis Can Relocate, Why Can’t Gazans? The op-ed cited other historical examples—the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia, the Soviet deportation of Germans from Königsberg—invoking them as precedents for prospective Palestinian displacement. To frame a “population transfer,” whether voluntary or forced, as a minor historical footnote is an act of intellectual and moral depravity, especially given the scale of human suffering involved. That op-ed wasn’t just pearl-clutching; it was a deliberate erasure disguised as rational policy.
Here is a rejoinder that seeks to unravel that false equivalence and expose the grotesque logic of population transfer—a modern-day forced exodus designed to clear the stage for redevelopment.
But this op-ed wasn’t just intellectual laziness—it was a brazen act of historical vandalism, a distortion wielded to justify the unjustifiable. The partition of India and Pakistan was a seismic rupture, a catastrophe of human suffering that no rational mind would wish to replicate. Yet, the suggestion that Palestinians should be “relocated” follows a sinister logic: disperse them across the Arab world, erase their presence, and remake Gaza as a Riviera. This is not merely an affront to history—it is an obscenity, a vision of progress built on the rubble of an uprooted people. Advocates of so-called “population transfer” speak in euphemisms, cloaking their intentions in bureaucratic jargon. They frame displacement as a matter of logistics as if erasing an entire people was akin to rearranging a cityscape. But beneath this calculated vagueness lies a brutal truth: the land must first be “cleansed” of its inconvenient inhabitants before it can be repurposed for profit. This is not urban renewal—an erasure, the systematic rewriting of history with steel and concrete.
Consider the rhetoric of those who champion “transfer of population” as a benign measure to facilitate urban renewal. They speak in sanitized terms as if relocating thousands of human beings were akin to shifting furniture in a well-appointed apartment. Yet, such language betrays a fundamental insensitivity to the lived reality of displacement. It is a crude and cunning tactic—a form of modern-day cultural amnesia designed to make a travesty appear as mere administrative tidying. In this logic, the land is cleansed of its inconvenient inhabitants, and a pristine, profit-maximizing development is erected in its place. The irony is as bitter as it is sharp: The false equivalence between land as real estate and land as the cornerstone of sovereignty is laid bare by the brutal reality of forced transfers.
On February 5, historian Jairus Banaji laid bare the brutal reality:
“Netanyahu looks baffled and even pained by the thought because this real estate fantasy transforms the Israeli state into a mercenary that has unwittingly helped the builder clear a slum (as both the U.S. and Israel see Gaza) for what developers call ‘redevelopment.’ The subtext here is that Netanyahu has to agree to this as payback for the Americans’ assistance in genocide. This seals his fate if Israel goes into an election later this year. There’s no way the Israeli middle class is going to be happy with the idea that 5,942 IDF personnel had been killed (by the end of 2024) just to hand Gaza over to a U.S. builder (Trump), who never knows where to draw the line between public and private and has a tendency to plunge the world into shock and awe with crass stupidities dressed up as ‘policy.'”
Half-Truths and Legal Realities
The argument for Palestinian displacement is not only morally bankrupt but also legally untenable. What was once tolerated under the grim pragmatism of postwar realpolitik is now explicitly condemned. The post-World War II order marked a turning point: the forced movements of populations, once viewed as regrettable but necessary, were redefined as crimes against humanity.
The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 enshrined this shift. Article 49 categorically prohibits the forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons from occupied territories. It forbids not only mass expulsions but also the settlement of an occupying power’s population into those lands—actions that now stand as clear violations of international law.
This transformation was not just legal but philosophical. The Nuremberg Trials had already codified forced displacement as a war crime. The world had learned, at immense cost, that the rights of individuals must supersede the ambitions of states. The Potsdam communiqué of 1945, which once sought to manage the chaotic aftermath of war, was eclipsed by an emerging consensus: no longer could mass expulsions be excused as a geopolitical necessity. Instead, they became a moral and legal aberration.
Yet, despite this unequivocal legal framework, proponents of Palestinian displacement invoke history’s darkest chapters to justify their ambitions. They distort precedent, conveniently ignoring that today’s world no longer tolerates the demographic engineering that once shaped postwar Europe.
The Land as the Locus of Sovereignty
Since the earliest articulations of political order, the land has been more than a passive stage upon which the drama of human society unfolds—it is the very repository of sovereignty itself. In classical political philosophy, the relationship between land and sovereignty is sacrosanct, a bond imbued with historical, cultural, and existential significance that defies commodification.
From Jean Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty to John Locke’s reflections on land as liberty’s guarantor, the bond between people and their soil has been recognized as sacrosanct. It is not just terrain but memory, culture, and belonging.
Against this complexity of meaning, the reductive calculus of modern redevelopment projects reveals itself as both naïve and contemptuously philistine.
To uproot a people from their land is to sever them from their history. It is an existential rupture, not an administrative inconvenience. Yet, the proponents of Palestinian expulsion treat it as a logistical problem, a matter of shifting populations as one would shuffle numbers on a balance sheet. This is not policy—it is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.
Dhume’s commentary exemplifies this myopic reductionism. He doesn’t frame the forced displacement of Palestinians as the cultural and historical erasure it is; instead, he presents it as an opportunity—a chance for economic development, a way to “reclaim” Gaza from those who have called it home for generations. This isn’t simply ignorance; it’s a chilling echo of colonial rationalizations.
Such arguments belong to a long and sordid tradition of historical revisionism. They are no different from the grotesque reframing of slavery as “trade school,” as Ron DeSantis once suggested. In both cases, history is sanitized, suffering is erased, and a new narrative that serves power takes place.
But the land is not a blank slate for redevelopment. It is a living archive of struggle, survival, and sovereignty. The Palestinian claim to Gaza is not merely about property rights or territorial control; it is an assertion of historical continuity, a resistance to an imposed erasure of cultural memory. In this context, Dhume’s remarks are not just a matter of ill-informed opinion—they are emblematic of a broader intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
The Palestinian claim to Gaza is not about real estate—it is about existence. To dismiss it as an impediment to progress is to deny the very humanity of a people who have fought to retain their place in the world.
A Final Word
Thus, the critique of Dhume’s commentary must be understood not merely as a rebuttal to a particular political opinion, but as a defense of a central tenet of political philosophy. The relationship between land and sovereignty is not a negotiable element of modern governance—it is a sacred trust, one that anchors a people’s past and secures their future. To treat this bond as merely a variable in an economic equation is to strip away the layers of meaning that have sustained human communities through the ages.
To speak of “population transfer” in the context of Palestine is to talk in euphemisms—to mask ethnic cleansing with the language of logistics, to reduce dispossession to an exercise in administration. But no amount of rhetorical sleight of hand can conceal the truth: this is an act of erasure, a calculated attempt to strip people of their land, their history, and their future.
Mahmoud Darwish once wrote:
“The land of my poem is the womb of my mother. The land of my poem is my grave.”
For Palestinians, the land is both cradle and crypt. It is the soil that bears their history and the ground they are buried in. No amount of euphemism can change that.
The fight for their narrative is far from over.
Let us see what the Arab Summit on February 21 results in. The Riyadh conclave will “include the leaders of the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, along with Egypt and Jordan, to discuss Arab alternatives to Trump’s plans in the Gaza Strip”.
