Palestinians gather to receive aid, Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, March 2025. REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
According to the Palestinian narrative, Jews are not indigenous to the region but are colonial settler interlopers, squatting where they have no right to be. The actual indigenous people are the Palestinians, who can date their history back to the time of the Canaanites. Israel’s creation is the original sin, taking away their eternal land while the world has allowed an ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people.
“According to an interview in Israel Hayom with Prof. Yoav Geller, an expert on Palestinian refugees, there “is a consciousness that lives with the Palestinians and goes with them everywhere. From their perspective, leaving Gaza is another Nakba … They prefer to preserve refugee status as a weapon against Israel and reject any plan for their rehabilitation and resettlement.”
According to Samir al-Barghouti, a Palestinian writing in Al-Watan, a daily newspaper in Saudi Arabia, “Gaza was Palestinian before and after the Common Era, and it will remain Palestinian after October 7 as it was before October 6… The solution in Palestine lies in returning those expelled in 1948 … to Beersheba, to Ashkelon, to Jaffa, to Lod, and to Ramla, from which they were expelled in 1948, and then you will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”
The Palestinian victims are, by this account, forced to pay the price for the European crime of the Holocaust by having a non-native population thrust into Islamic land. Descendants of refugees have been brainwashed to believe that the Land of Israel should be theirs when, in reality, the truth is much more complex. Until that narrative is challenged, demanding that Israel hand over territory captured in defensive wars to create a sovereign Palestinian state, that path will only make a Hamas-stan in the West Bank as well as Gaza, while threatening the stability of Jordan, a bulwark against Islamist expansion.
Historical claims and misinformation
After Trump’s bombshell remark concerning Gaza’s future, the next logical step for President Trump is to confront the half-truths and outright falsehoods of the Palestinian narrative. It wouldn’t be out of character for him to take the initiative, to be unafraid of challenging conventions, and upend a long-standing failed paradigm.
I want the president and his secretary of state to say that the Palestinians who live in Gaza and the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) are overwhelmingly descendants of refugees of the genocidal wars they and their ancestors initiated against the Jewish state. They should not be afforded the eternal badge of honor for victimhood because if they, like the Jewish people in 1948, accepted UN General Assembly Resolution 181 calling for an Arab and a Jewish state, they too could have lived in their own state for the last 77 years. Not to mention their choice of violence over statehood over and over in 1948, 1967, 2000, 2001, and 2007, which the anti-Israel international community conveniently ignores.
Have the Palestinian Arabs, if they are to be considered on the whole – after rejecting two states for two peoples many times, electing Hamas in a fair and free election, opting for violence again and again – forfeited the right to live on the doorstep of the Jewish state?
I know quite a few Palestinians who would embrace living in peace with Israel, but they are cowed, intimidated, or worse. One in particular, who was the head of a think tank, told me he could not rise higher in the Palestinian leadership because he had never been arrested or killed a Jew.
As Lee Smith, writing in the online magazine Tablet, said, “The Arabs chose the catastrophe (Nakba); they chose war, based on the premise that they would inevitably win and exterminate the Jews.“
The Nakba, which they blame on the Jews, is their responsibility, and they should own up to it. This is not a popular opinion among Arabs, Western elites, and students on Ivy League campuses. However, attacking another people in wars of annihilation and losing should not make you the underdog and victim but the one who should bear the consequences of your own behavior, which repeatedly included the targeting of children, women, and Americans (Taylor Force), and civilians.
Rewriting history: The two-state fallacy
1948 was not a one-off, as the Arabs attacked Israel again and again, only to be defeated in wars of Jewish survival. The idea that the Palestinians’ apologists have thrust on the West of desiring two states was always a fabrication. Jordan controlled the West Bank, and Egypt controlled Gaza for 19 years between 1948 and 67, and never was there a call for an independent Palestinian state next to Israel because the goal was the expulsion of the Jews, not compromise or accommodation. Two states became popular among Palestinians only when they decided that they would need a staged plan to eventually eradicate Israel.
Population transfers after wars historically are, unfortunately, the norm, not the exception. This occurred for the Jews of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) pre-1948 Israel from Muslim and Arab lands where Jews lived for up to 2,500 years in numbers exceeding the population shift of Palestinian Arabs from what would become the State of Israel after 1948. It happened to Pakistanis and Indians in South Asia and to the ethnic Germans expelled from the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia after WW II.
As any objective historian knows, Jews are indigenous to the Levant with a continuous presence for over 3,000 years, including since the destruction of the Second Temple, while the great Arab migration into the region occurred with the jihad conquest from the Arabian Peninsula beginning in the 7th century.
As Jonathan Tobin of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate) wrote, Trump “has made it clear that a different solution has to be found for the Palestinians. The people who cheered the orgy of mass murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and wanton destruction on October 7 will not be rewarded for this with more pressure on Jerusalem to do something the overwhelming majority of Israelis oppose as suicidal.”
When the Arabs and their European allies, with their shared animus toward Israel and Jews, realized that Israel was unlikely to be conquered, they transitioned to the claim that they wanted two states; but they never called for two states for two peoples. “Two states” to Palestinians means a Jewish-free state in the West Bank and Gaza and a binational state in Israel with an unlimited right of return of descendants of Palestinian Arabs, which would demographically turn Israel into another Arab state, forcing the Jews once again to die or be pushed into the Diaspora. Tellingly, Israeli Arabs (Palestinian citizens of Israel) who have full citizenship in the Jewish state are overwhelmingly against being under the thumb of an authoritarian, non-democratic Palestinian government.
I would often correct members of Congress who called for two states to change their wording, asking them to call for two states for two peoples as UN General Assembly Resolution 181 called for. A Jewish state is something the Muslim world, at best, can tolerate for a short period because of the concept of Dar al-Islam, to never accept the loss of any land that has been under Islamic rule. Bide your time, make temporary agreements, and then, when you are in a position of strength, conquer it again.
President Trump has been disparaged by the legacy media and intellectual coastal elites for suggesting that Palestinian Arabs of Gaza be given the option to leave a terrorist state that has abused, tortured, and killed any Palestinian who does not fall in line with the Muslim Brotherhood jihadists of Gaza.
International agencies have been complicit, as well as the Europeans, in not demanding accountability for the billions of dollars donated to Gaza that build one of the world‘s most complex underground terror tunnel labyrinths. Their condemnations have been overwhelmingly reserved for Israel for decades, even when Israel is responding defensively. Their sick moral equivalence, especially evident in equating kidnapped hostages who were raped and starved with the Palestinian terrorists released who killed scores of innocent Israelis, including children, is especially sickening and should make the EU and the UN personae non gratae in weighing in on the conflict. President Trump should say to them, “Thanks but no thanks for your help,” which they have used to boycott, sanction, and delegitimize Israel well before October 7.
The Trump administration acknowledges that unless Gaza is entirely free of Hamas as a military and governing entity, Gaza will return to being a terror state in short order. Rebuilding with both Hamas and the Gazan population present guarantees this inevitable existential outcome.
President Trump has come up with an out of-the-box – and to many, an outrageous – idea. But it is one that actually deals with the problem and sets a path forward for Israel to defend itself in the future against the ever- present threat of both Sunni and Shi’ite jihadists, who often work together, like Iran and Hamas, which will return again and again because of their ideological radical desire to slaughter the Jews.
Trump’s opportunity to shift policy
A good start would be a temporary relocation of the Palestinian population of Gaza. Enemies like Iran and frenemies like Qatar and Turkey will send funds to rebuild Hamas. America needs a policy of new sticks and carrots for Qatar and Turkey to be dissuaded from supporting a jihadist enemy on the doorstep of America’s most important ally in the region. As for Iran, it will also try to repair its proxy forces, including Hamas. Only regime change combined with massive sanctions and kinetic actions against its nuclear program will stop Iran from continuing to foster hatred, misogyny, torture, repression, intimidation, and a cult of death throughout the Middle East.
What should the Trump administration do?
The administration should officially change the US position on the status of Palestinian refugees from the UNWRA definition to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) definition, whereby descendants of refugees, now in their fifth generation, are not designated as refugees but as people who should be helped find a new home, free from terror, as citizens of another nation. That is what UNHCR facilitates for every refugee in the world and their descendants, except for Palestinians, who are used as pawns to perpetuate the never-ending war on Israel. Unfortunately, wherever the Palestinians go, they will likely radicalize and destabilize their new home as they did in Jordan in the 1970s, Lebanon in the 1980s, supporting Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait in the 1990s, and as leaders of anarchist and anti-American student movements in America post-October 7.
Secondly, US dollars must not facilitate terror. The Palestinian Authority incentivized terror with its “Pay for Slay” program, paying surviving terrorists and their families an annuity in perpetuity for terror attacks against Jewish Israelis. The more brutal the terror, the more money they paid. President Mahmoud Abbas has now claimed that the PA is ending Pay for Slay, and the families of terrorists will receive funds based on their socio-economic needs. This sounds like a program to be abused, changing the names of the agencies in charge but still under the leadership that facilitates social security for terrorists and their families. Until this vile practice of incentivizing terror is totally ended and verified, no US dollars should go to the PA. Sounds like it is right in line with DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency). Third, there should be no US dollars used to rebuild Gaza until Hamas as a governing and military entity is verifiably removed. It may take years, but let’s not rebuild a terror state again.
Following the same playbook, rewarding and rationalizing Palestinian terror with a path to two states should be off the table until the Palestinians themselves, with the encouragement of Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf states, take responsibility for themselves, building a transparent economic and governing administrative state that can responsibly receive funds and take care of the needs of the people, without propagating Muslim Brotherhood ideology. Just as the nascent Jewish state built institutions before its birth, Palestinians need to build the foundation for a future, creating institutions and organizations dedicated to helping the people economically before any guaranteed political horizon can be contemplated.
Victimhood and a revisionist narrative are not plans for success or peace.
As Yardena Schwartz, author of the new book Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict, wrote in The Forward, “Considering the last century of failed efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict – with every two-state solution rejected by Palestinian leaders, as far back as 1937 – President Trump’s shock to the system might be precisely what that system needs.”
Next is challenging the narrative. ■
This article originally appeared in the March 25, 2025 edition of The Jerusalem Report.
Dr. Mandel is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network, and senior security editor of The Jerusalem Report. He briefs members of Congress and their foreign policy aides on both sides of the aisle.