In Donald Trump’s first term, his administration rode roughshod over Palestinians, reversing decades of US policy by recognising the contested city of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and saying the US would no longer deem Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank a violation of international law.
Yet even that record had not prepared Palestinians for Trump’s proposal this week that the US should take over Gaza — if needed by force — and transfer the 2mn people living in the shattered Palestinian enclave abroad.
“Trump doesn’t know people in Gaza. Trump doesn’t know people in the West Bank. People here would rather die in their homeland than leave their homeland. There is only one homeland,” said Abed, a 21-year-old student from Ramallah. “I laughed [when I heard the plan]. Because it is impossible, it is not going to happen.”
Alongside the mood of defiance and disbelief, however, there was also a sense of unease as locals in Ramallah — a city that forms the administrative centre of the West Bank — digested Trump’s gambit, and what it meant for them and the Palestinian cause.
At a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, Trump portrayed his idea as a way to end the brutal war triggered by Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack on Israel, which has morphed into the bloodiest round of fighting in the history of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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But for Palestinians, the outlandish vision underscored the very real danger that Trump will embolden a government widely seen as the most rightwing in Israeli history, and give a green light to the ultranationalists bent on annexing the West Bank and re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza.
“Our experience of Trump in his previous presidency was terrible, and it seems that this one is going to be even more terrible,” said Ghassan Khatib, a lecturer at Birzeit University. “He wasn’t speaking off the cuff. He was reading a written statement. I think we need to take seriously what he said.”
As international condemnation of Trump’s plan rolled in, administration officials sought to walk back the idea that the US would deploy troops to Gaza. But Israeli officials welcomed his proposal enthusiastically, with defence minister Israel Katz on Thursday directing the military to prepare a plan to allow Gazans to leave the enclave “voluntarily”.
Few threats have deeper resonance for Palestinians than that of displacement. In 1948, during the war that accompanied Israel’s founding, 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes by Israeli forces. Almost none were ever allowed to return. Palestinians refer to the experience as the Nakba, or catastrophe, and determination to avoid a repeat is deeply rooted in the national psyche.
“Those who left in 1948 couldn’t come back. They don’t have easy lives in exile. Many of them don’t have passports. They don’t have the same rights as the people in the countries they live in,” said Nardeen Kawaa, a teacher from Nablus. “We see them suffering. We learned from the past, and we won’t do it again.”
Even the devastation that Israel has wrought in Gaza, most of which now lies in ruins, has not changed this determination, according to Sami Karaeen, a 44-year-old computer engineer from Jerusalem. “This new generation is not like our fathers,” he said. “They have a different mentality. They are more attached to the land.”
But the risk of displacement from Gaza was not the only threat in Trump’s press conference. Asked whether he would support Israel annexing West Bank “areas”, Trump said while his administration had not taken a position yet, “people do like the idea” and he would “probably” make an announcement on the topic in the next four weeks. Annexation would be far simpler for Trump — who recognised Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights in his first term — to approve than taking over Gaza.
For many in the West Bank, particularly in more rural areas, annexation feels like it has already happened. For decades, Israeli settlements — considered illegal under international law — have expanded relentlessly, while the new roads linking them have scythed through the territory, leaving Palestinian communities severed from each other.
Since October 7, locals say the situation has become even more suffocating, with settler violence rising, and the Israeli military killing hundreds of people in raids against militants in cities such as Jenin and Nablus, and imposing a web of checkpoints that have turned once short journeys into unpredictable odysseys.
With Trump back in the White House, many fear the situation could become tougher still. Even before his announcement, Trump had bolstered Israel’s far right by appointing staunch backers of Israel to senior administration positions and removing sanctions imposed by the Joe Biden administration on settlers who carried out attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
“I think there will be more checkpoints, more people will die for no reason, more people will leave, because it’s not a safe place for children to grow up,” said Abdelrahman Wahdan, a 19-year-old student from Ramallah, whose courses had been suspended because the difficulty of moving around the West Bank meant not enough students could attend.
“The Israelis will feel more powerful because they have the US behind them. None of the US presidents were good for us . . . they were always against the Arabs.”
Others said they hoped that international pressure could yet soften Trump’s impact — at least as far as his plans for Gaza were concerned. Arab nations have rejected the US president’s call for them to take in Gazans, with countries such as Jordan and Egypt arguing doing so would undermine both Palestinians’ hopes of establishing their own state, and the security of their own countries.
But Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center for Political Studies in Ramallah, said that even if a refusal by Arab states to take in Palestinians ultimately thwarted Trump’s resettlement idea, his proposal could still have far-reaching consequences, not least if it helped derail attempts to extend the fragile, three-week-old ceasefire in Gaza.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu, who is under pressure from his far-right allies to resume the fighting, vowed while standing alongside Trump that Israel would go back to war to ensure total victory over Hamas.
“I don’t think it’s implementable. But whether it is implementable or not it will lead to a very serious deepening of the conflict,” Dalalsha said. “Not only does it make the situation here more complicated, it also has implications for regional stability. It is planting the seed for a more bitter conflict.”
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