It was a coincidence that Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy returned from a visit to Gaza in the very week a mountain in New Zealand was granted all the rights and responsibilities of a human being. An unfortunate coincidence, had anyone paid attention to the fact these two events intersected. As things stand, it went unremarked that Mount Taranaki achieved its human rights while arrangements seem to be in train to deprive the Palestinians of Gaza of theirs.

Mount Taranaki, its surrounding peaks and land including “all their physical and metaphysical elements", have gained recognition as "a living and indivisible whole”. Meanwhile, the situation of the people of Gaza was reportedly discussed and, in all likelihood dismissed by Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Witkoff, a former real estate developer, publicly said his visit to Gaza revealed the territory to be "uninhabitable". Demolition and moving of debris alone will take five years, he noted. He added: “This is a 10-to-15-year rebuilding plan. There is nothing left standing. Many unexploded ordnances. It is not safe to walk there. It is very dangerous.”

Quite so, nearly 16 months after sustained and punishing Israeli military operations left at least 47,000 Gazans dead and more than 90% of the coastal territory’s housing flattened. What was missing in the Trump envoy’s assessment, however, was any sense of how the people of Gaza might be brought back to their land, thus completing "a living and indivisible whole”. But then Witkoff’s boss does not seem to be rooting for that. Trump has floated the opposite idea. He has declared that what remains of the Palestinian territory’s pre-conflict population of 2.3 million be moved to neighbouring Egypt and Jordan.

Just like that. No pretence that Palestinians might, like that mountain in New Zealand, be “a living and indivisible whole” together with the land and all its “physical and metaphysical elements”. No acknowledgement that Palestinians too, like Mount Taranaki, are entitled to the rights and responsibilities of a human being. In fact, Trump spoke as if Gaza were a chicken coop due a regulation scrubdown: “You’re talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing and say: ‘You know, it’s over’.”

The mountain stands on higher ground, literally and metaphorically, than Gazans in another way too. It now enjoys legal recognition that it was taken from the Māori indigenous people after New Zealand was colonised by Europeans. But Palestinians’ right to live on their ancestral lands is increasingly being called into question by Trump as well as key people in his orbit. The US president has shrugged off concerns about physical and psychological rupture should Palestinians be forcibly removed from Gaza. It "could be temporary" or "could be long-term", he suggested, seeming not to care that the two options are a lifetime apart.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior foreign policy adviser in the first Trump administration, offered a property dealer’s unemotional appraisal of Gaza one year ago. In conversation with Harvard University professor Tarek Masoud, Kushner said, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable” and Israel should “move the people out and then clean it up”. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Israel, has previously said “there’s plenty of land” for Palestinians in Jordan, Egypt and Syria. Huckabee, who rejects the very idea of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue, has touted the complete linguistic erasure of Palestinian identity along with any claim to their land in Gaza or the West Bank. He has variously declared the following: “There’s really no such thing as a Palestinian”; “there is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria. There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.” Another voice weighing in from Trumpland is Elise Stefanik, Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to the United Nations. In January, she affirmed her belief that Israel has “a biblical right to the entire West Bank”.

Such statements from Washington provide a giant megaphone for the callous case argued with passionate intensity by Israel’s ultra-nationalists. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom recently resigned from senior positions in Netanyahu’s cabinet, have long suggested that the only way forward is for Palestinians to be removed as a presence, even a shadow within the borders of Israel. But within months of the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israeli offensive in Gaza, the idea of Palestinian expulsion—voluntary or involuntary—is heard more often and more boldly stated. They must leave for Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Indonesia, it doesn’t matter. Ben-Gvir has said that Palestinians must be encouraged to “voluntarily” emigrate from Gaza because the land "belongs to us". Just days ago, Smotrich claimed he was working on an “operational plan” to resettle the population of Gaza outside the Strip in order to convert Trump’s concept into concrete policy.

It would be ironic if Trump 2.0 becomes a lamentable hinge moment in Palestinians’ long struggle for self-determination. Trump’s return to the White House was hailed as the trigger for peace to break out in Gaza. Indeed, the current ceasefire deal went into effect hours before the US presidential inauguration on 20 January. The deal, which represents the best hopes of a conclusive end to one of the longest and most brutal Israeli military offensives in the Palestinian Territories, has given harried Gazans a brief respite from the horrors of constant bombardment. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been able to travel back to their native communities in northern Gaza, although far too many no longer had physical homes to which to return. The vital Rafah Crossing to Egypt, closed to civilians for the past nine months, has reopened and some of Gaza’s sick and wounded evacuated. Trump has also cast himself as a “a peacemaker and unifier” in his second presidency, promising that he will measure his success “by the wars that we end, and, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

And yet, he and his cabinet are amplifying a grotesque suggested solution to Israel’s so-called Palestinian problem. Such a plan would not end conflict, it would ignite another one. When the Israeli far right demands the wholesale transfer of Palestinians to some other part of the world, the sense is of conveying inanimate objects to a suitable destination rather than protecting the rights and responsibilities of human beings. That’s something a mountain in New Zealand can now legally claim. Not so, Palestinians.

Rashmee Roshan Lall, PhD, writes on international affairs and is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her Substack This Week, Those Books links the week’s big news story to the world of books. She blogs at www.rashmee.com X: @rashmeerl Bluesky: @rashmee.bsky.social