Palestinians have long resisted resettlement – Trump’s plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza won’t change that

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Maha Nassar, University of Arizona

(THE CONVERSATION) President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. should “take over” Gaza, displace its current population and turn the enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” is unsettling – in both a literal and, to Palestinians, a very personal sense.

The remarks, which followed earlier comments in which the president expressed a desire to “clean out” Gaza, have been taken by some Middle East experts as a call to “ethnically cleanse” the strip of its 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants. They worry that such talk will bolster the hopes of Israel’s far-right settlers and their supporters in government, who want to remove Palestinians from Gaza and build Jewish-only settlements on the enclave’s beachfront property.

Following Trump’s remarks, Riyad Mansour, Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, stated: “Our homeland is our...