Are the Palestinian Arabs natives in their land, or refugees from elsewhere? We are yet to learn if President Trump’s Gaza grand plan is doable, but it is already surfacing a contradiction that underlines widely accepted dogma about Arab-Israeli wars. We are told that Gazans will never leave the Strip, as their attachment to their land and their roots is too strong. Then again, according to the United Nations, Gaza residents are refugees from elsewhere.  

Mr. Trump’s proposal to grant Gaza residents safety and happiness elsewhere while Gaza is being rebuilt and turned into a “Riviera” on the Mediterranean has raised a global outcry, including allegations that his plan is an “ethnic cleansing” that amounts to a war crime. The Strip’s Hamas supporters declare to Al Jazeera’s cameras that they would never leave their homes and that their attachment to Gaza’s soil is sacred. 

“Our country, our home is the Gaza Strip, it’s part of Palestine,” the Palestinian Authority’s ambassador at the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said Tuesday. Yet “to those who want to send them to a happy, nice place, let them go back to their original homes inside Israel. There are nice places there, and they will be happy to return to these places.” As Dorothy never said at Oz, there’s no place like home — other than nearby Jewish homes. 

Mr. Mansour is far from alone. “The Palestinian people are not illegal immigrants to be deported to other lands,” a former Saudi intelligence chief, Turki al Faisal, wrote in an open letter to Mr. Trump. If they’re to leave Gaza, he added, “they should be allowed to return to their homes and to their orange and olive groves in Haifa, Jaffa and other towns and villages from which they fled or were forcibly driven out by the Israelis.”

This contradictory position — Gazans are attached to their land, which they will gladly leave if they can end the successful democracy next door — is the crux of the Arab-Israeli war. In 1948 Gaza absorbed UN-run refugee camps for Palestine’s Arabs that all Arab countries refused to take in. The UN rejected Israel’s plan in the 1970s to end the refugee status. President Sadat refused to retake the Strip as part of Egypt’s 1977  peace treaty with Israel.  

The Arab world’s strategy is to nourish endlessly Palestinian dreams of overwhelming Israel. A third, fourth, and now a fifth Palestinian generation cherish their refugee status, holding on to an imaginary “right of return.” The Soviets were first to adopt that idea, which later became the received wisdom of global diplomacy. Then a new paradigm — a “two state solution” — was born. Following October 7, 2023, that too has faded away. 

“There are two million Hamas people in Gaza,” a recently freed hostage, Liri Elbag, told her father after her release. That observation is why we doubt any of them will be prepared to accept an offer of a peaceful life. Before October 7 Gaza, flush with international aid, was like an upper middle class Arab city. It turns out that the action was in the tunnels underneath. There, the Strip’s overlords built a military force to obliterate Israel. 

What all this marks is that the problem of Gaza is deeper than turning its sandy beaches into a tourist resort. Many Gazans might take Mr. Trump’s offer to leave a “demolition site” while the Strip is rebuilt. It’s a start. Even if that effort begets the shiniest city that the hills of Gaza ever knew, it would eventually go to naught — unless its underground tunnels, which are the essence of the Palestinian national ethos, are eliminated once and for all.