Much of the international condemnation of Donald Trump’s "Riviera" plan for Gaza rests on the assumption that the Palestinians retain sovereignty over the territory, despite all the events that have taken place since their incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023, and that they also continue to have the right to choose their own government.
In fact, historical precedent suggests that Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel that day, and its condign punishment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), have severe implications for whether the Gazans still have the right to decide their own destiny, and who governs them.
For again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated—as the Gazans have been on any conceivable metric—lose either their government or their sovereignty, or both. It would be strange were Hamas somehow to buck this historical trend.
When the two Boer republics of Southern Africa, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, invaded the British colonies of Natal and Cape Colony in October 1899, a war broke out that two-and-a half-years later they had comprehensively lost. By the peace treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902, both republics were annexed by the British and lost their sovereignty entirely, their government having already fled for Holland.
Konrad Henlein was the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia 1938, who invited Adolf Hitler to invade the Czech state in March 1939. He had much the same kind of willing-acolyte relationship with the Führer that Yahya Sinwar had with Iran. When the Second World War was lost in May 1945, Henlein committed suicide and his people were moved out of the Sudetenland, some 800,000 to the Soviet zone and the rest to West Germany. The Sudetenland was then entirely repopulated with ethnic Czechs.
In all, more than three million Germans were forced to leave their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and other lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, where their ancestors had lived for centuries, indeed for much longer than most Palestinian families have lived in Gaza. They embarked on the 300-mile journey westwards under conditions of extreme deprivation, carrying only what they could carry. Once they reached Germany—whose new borders were drawn by the victorious Allies as they had lost all sovereignty—they settled and made the best of it.
Today, they and their descendants are among some of the most successful people in Germany, and however powerful modern Germany is, she makes no territorial claims on either Poland or the Czech Republic. The Palestinians could learn a great lesson from the catastrophe that overcame the Sudeten Germans almost contemporaneously as the "Nakba" (catastrophe) that overcame them. Yet will they learn from it? Almost certainly not.
The decision of the Vichy government of France to fight against Britain in the Second World War, with bombing raids on Gibraltar and open warfare in Syria, so delegitimized it that when the liberation of France took place on D-Day in June 1944, it was swept aside and sovereignty was instead given to the Free French, who returned with the Allies. The legitimately elected government of France under Marshal Petain was thus overthrown and replaced by the chosen government of the incoming conquering Allies.
Surprise attacks such as the one launched on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 naturally invite tough retribution, and in that particular case led directly to Japan losing her sovereignty under the overlordship of General Douglas MacArthur, whose word was law in Japan until 1952, a full seven years after the end of the war. The authors of the attack, including the Japanese prime minister General Tojo, were hanged. This pattern of the death of the leadership and loss of sovereignty of the country were similarly the fates of both Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, with the Allies having ultimate power over the governance of both.
After North Korea launched its vicious unprovoked attack on South Korea in June 1950 it was punished so severely by the American-led United Nations force that it lost over a million dead. (In those happier days, the United Nations supported countries that were invaded rather than the invaders.) North Korea lost territory in the armistice in 1953 and has been a pariah state ever since.
The percentage of North Koreans who died in that war was 16.5 percent. The Gazan health ministry is an arm of Hamas propaganda and routinely lies about the statistics of killed and wounded there, but even if we take its numbers as accurate, the total number of Gazans killed in this war has been 2.04 percent, which is not a figure that in any way aligns with accusations of genocide. If the IDF had wished to commit genocide, it would have killed far more than 2.04 percent of Gazans. By total contrast, Adolf Hitler killed over 50 percent of all of Europe’s Jews in what was a genuine genocide.
When the Argentinian military dictatorship suddenly invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in April 1982, and were utterly defeated 10 weeks later by Margaret Thatcher’s task force, the entire junta in Buenos Aires was deposed from power—some were jailed—and democracy returned to Argentina. There are thus profound consequences for governments involved in launching unprovoked wars, and they cannot expect to stay in power when they have brought down death, destruction, and defeat upon their people.
Saddam Hussein’s surprise attack on Kuwait was a similar example of when a country invades its neighbor suddenly and without provocation, and after defeat in war loses both its government—Saddam was hanged—and its sovereignty while the U.S.-led coalition attempted to rebuild the country. Such surprise attacks as Saddam’s, or indeed of Hamas’s on Israel on October 7, 2023, which was not intended to seize territory like Saddam but instead to kill and kidnap the largest possible number of Jews, are thus huge rollings of "the iron dice of war," an all-or-nothing endeavor in which Saddam and Hamas cannot complain if they end in disaster.
In the collapsing former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Serb leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic, General Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic took the cold-blooded decision to invade neighboring Bosnia and conduct an appalling program of what came to be known as "ethnic cleansing." Those critics of Donald Trump who tritely refer to the population transfers under his Gaza plan as ethnic cleansing ought to revisit what the phrase actually means in terms of horror, violence, and bloodshed.
Once NATO finally took to the air in Operation Deliberate Force to end the brutality, all three of those Serb leaders were imprisoned and Serbia’s borders were decided by the West rather than by the Serbs themselves. The massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnians at the hands of the Serbs at Srebenica in July 1995 effectively ended Serbia’s right to sovereignty in its aftermath, and at the Dayton peace accords that December they had to accept the formation of two new republics.
The witness of history is therefore fairly uniform: If a government undertakes a vicious and unprovoked attack on a neighboring country, and subsequently loses on the battlefield, it cannot then expect to continue to exercise sovereignty and avoid population transfers. In a similar vein, Arab governments cannot in the same breath argue that Gaza is "a concentration camp," but also that its citizens should not be allowed to leave such a beloved homeland. They can choose one propaganda line or the other, but not simultaneously both.
Mass population transfers have been common after wars. The classic example are those of the late 1940s, when there were no fewer than 20 different groups—including the Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus of the Punjab, the Crimean Tartars, the Japanese and Korean Kuril and Sakhalin Islanders, the Soviet Chechen, Ingush, and Balkars, even the Italians of Istria—who were moved to different regions. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over 800,000 Jews from Arab lands were forced out of lands that they had lived in for centuries.
All of those peoples mentioned chose to try to make the best of their new environs except one, and most eventually succeeded. The sole exception has been the Palestinians, because Hamas and its predecessors have always unquestioningly chosen the destruction of Israel and the opportunity to massacre Jews over the best interests of their own people.
If each of the 22 Arab states undertook to receive 100,000 Gazans, the Strip could be the home to the remaining 100,000, living and working on Trump’s "Riviera." The reason that can never in fact happen is the Arab states’ and the United Nations’ wholly cynical and self-interested policy since 1948 to use Palestinian refugees as a continual destabilizing force against Israel (as well as a well-grounded fear and hatred of easily the most violent population in Arabia).
As the international community yelps with indignation at Donald Trump’s remarks and their implications regarding Gazans’ sovereignty and Hamas’s right to govern there, history is on the president’s side.
Andrew Roberts is the author, most recently, of Churchill Walking with Destiny (Viking).