Gaza 2027 - Trump's plan worked

It’s the first of Ramadan 1448 AH, February 2027, and the children in the King Hussain Township Phase One are excited—this will be their first Ramadan in their new homes. The local mosque will be full tonight for Tarawih Salah. It’s not a huge mosque, but it will easily accommodate the 500 or so expected for the first night of Ramadan.

As Abu Junaid reflects on the first two months his family has spent in their small home, he has mixed feelings. He never really wanted to leave Gaza—it was his home, a home he had sacrificed so much for. But what could he have done? He had no house, everything was ruined, and he had lost twenty members of his family in the relentless bombing of Gaza. It was only by Allah’s will that he, his wife, and their two young children had somehow survived.

Before the bombing and killing, Abu Junaid was a handyman doing odd jobs to earn a living. In the 18 months that preceded the ceasefire, Abu Junaid had done his best to try and make things as normal as possible, but with life’s essentials in such short supply, it was never easy. Aid trucks could only do so much.

The mood amongst the residents of Gaza had always been defiant. They had suffered so much ever since the Nakba that putting up a fight was in their blood. Trump’s plan to expel the Palestinians from their land was greeted with a resolve to never leave.

Abandoned by the Muslim regimes, barring a few statements and some aid trucks, there was an inevitability to the Palestinians’ fate. The UAE had shown no opposition from the start, and Jordan; where the new township was built eventually accepted Palestinians. Everything in this world has a price.

It is not as if the ceasefire lasted; the Zionists took no time in breaking their promises and starting the sporadic killing again, always blaming the Palestinians. Gaza was no place to raise a family. The children had already seen too much, and reminders of past horrors were around every corner.

When the first offers of relocation were handed out, Abu Junaid, like everyone around him, was not interested. He didn’t want to feel like he had betrayed the Palestinian cause by leaving Gaza. However, the promises were tempting. His family were sleeping in temporary accommodation, no more than a tent and the idea of having a roof over their heads was appealing. Leaving such a blessed land wasn’t easy, but Abu Junaid had convinced himself that, despite what the Americans had said, he would one day return. This was a temporary separation.

Now settled in, he thought that at least this way, he had a job helping to construct more homes, he could send his children to school, and his family could get the basics. If he was honest with himself, this place wasn’t much more than a permanent refugee camp. Some of the facilities were still communal despite being promised otherwise. The people here didn’t really feel part of wider society; it was as if they had just been thrown into a corner of the country and forgotten. He tried not to think about it too much and definitely didn’t mention it to his wife—she had enough to deal with.

The world’s media has been quick to pick up on the symbolism of Ramadan in the township. Every major news channel was beaming images across the globe, doing so with a sense of achievement, as if humanity had done the right thing. It was as though Trump’s plan to buy Gaza and remove all Palestinians had been vindicated

Thousands of miles away, Mohammad sat in London, watching events unfold on the TV, was unable to shake off a sense of guilt. The world hadn’t just let this happen. Surely someone would have stopped it.This couldn’t be happening in the civilised world. When Trump announced his plans, it seemed everyone around Mohammad had their own opinions; write to your MP, boycott certain goods, blame the Muslim rulers, work to have an independent Islamic state.

But Mohammad wasn’t really sure what to do. None of what his friends were saying made real sense. Did the world really care about Palestinians? They had just watched as tens of thousands of children were killed—would they really go against Trump to stop him? After all, history had shown that when it came down to the crunch, no one ever really put their neck on the line for Muslims.

It’s been two years, and despite all the protests and all the condemnations, nothing has changed. The world has been too consumed by the great AI race between the US and China to notice that they were losing their own humanity. Mohammad had this feeling that maybe, all along, everyone had been blaming the wrong people.

The real culprits, the real people to blame, were those in power in the Muslim world who did nothing but offer empty words of condemnation to Trump. This was their plan all along—to see how the world would react. The first of Ramadan is symbolic. A mass deportation of Palestinians was never the intention; the optics would have been too damaging.

Trump’s statement was a testing of the waters—to see how the world, the rulers, and the Muslim Ummah would react. The Arab rulers knew they wouldn’t oppose the plan; they just wanted to be sure they would face no backlash from their people, or at least a backlash they could control. They knew all along that a mass civil uprising against the plan would never let it go through. Protests against them across the world would have weakened their positions, possibly even emboldening those within their own ranks to turn against them and remove them from power. Their hope was that calls to the Arab League and United Nations could be brushed off with the usual “what can we do” excuses. That their statements of condemnation and threats of trade boycotts would be enough to appease the disquiet in their own lands.

The sincere calls for action were quashed by the regimes, backed by their masters. They had come down hard on their own people. The usual arrests and torture, followed by disappearances and long prison sentences, were enough to deter many who would have otherwise joined the calls for Islamic political change.

Abu Junaid realised he was just a pawn in a bigger game to create an acceptance of a new reality—a reality where Palestinians were forcibly removed from their lands while the world framed it as some kind of humanitarian project.

Mohammad wished he had thought about all of this two Ramadans ago. He should have engaged more in the conversations and tried to make this friends see that the there was no point putting their faith in broken global institutions and political systems. He should have studied about Islam and its political solutions more, Allah (swt) didn’t put Muslims on the earth to be cannon fodder for those who wish to use them as such.

He realised now that the only real change that would be a long lasting difference would be a state based on Islam with a single aim of defending the the Muslims and Islam. None of the rulers had done anything to change this, no amount of charity was going to fix the problem for good and mere words of condemnation were useless.