The infamous Gaza “Riviera” plan continues to make news. On Sept. 1 London’s The Guardian quoted a number of critics of the plan, who blasted it as, among other things, a textbook case of ethnic cleansing. Philip Grant, the executive director of Trial International, a human rights group based in Switzerland, said about the leaked prospectus: “This is a blueprint for mass deportation, marketed as development. The outcome? A textbook case of international crimes on an unimaginable scale: forcible population transfer, demographic engineering, and collective punishment.”
Examination of the map in the prospectus exposed by the Washington Post appears to suggest the plan would also involve the expropriation for an Israeli security buffer zone of much of Gaza’s agricultural land, which tends to be located at Gaza’s periphery close to the border with Israel, The Guardian notes. The small print is most damning, however, in making no distinction in terms of sovereignty between Gaza, Israel and Egypt, suggesting no consideration has been made for Palestinian self-determination. Under the plan, Israel would maintain vaguely defined “overarching rights” over Gaza “to meet its security needs.” There would be no Palestinian state, only a “Palestinian polity” that would join Trump’s Abraham Accords.
