From Turtle Island to Palestine: On the Forced Transfer of Indigenous People from Their Land

Displaced Palestinians return to their home city of Rafah on the first day of the ceasefire agreement. (Photo: via QNN)

Trump’s proposal to forcibly displace Palestinians from Gaza echoes historical settler-colonial tactics, but Palestinian resistance—like Indigenous struggles worldwide—continues to defy erasure.

On February 1, 2025, President Donald indicated that he had spoken to Jordan’s King Abdullah II about potentially relocating more than 1 million Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries.

“'You’re talking about a million and a half (1.5 million) people, and we just clean out that whole thing,' Trump explained.

He concluded that Palestinians deserved something better than their alleged
'bad luck,' thus sweeping aside the decades-long role of Israel in their plight.”

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Editor’s Note: About 1.5 million people? What happened to the other 700,000 people in Gaza? Where are they? Lost under the rubble? Unaccounted for?

Just wondering!

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Trump couched his plan with humanitarian concerns in line with previous settler-colonial agendas.

“I said to him (King Abdullah) that I’d love you to take on more, because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now and it’s a mess, it’s a real mess,” he told reporters aboard Air Force One.

“You’re talking about a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing,” Trump explained. He concluded that Palestinians deserved something better than their alleged “bad luck,” thus sweeping aside the decades-long role of Israel in their plight.

In response, 72-year-old Fathi Abu al-Saeed looks out at Khan Younis’s al-Katiba neighborhood, now a pile of rubble due to many months of Israeli bombs.

“You see that pile of useless rubble?” he asks. “That’s more precious than the United States and everything in it.”

For Abu al-Saeed, along with many other Palestinians now living in Gaza, displacement was no stranger to his family. “Israeli” militias forced his father out of Jaffa in 1948, while his mother was driven from the nearby village of Sarafand.

His father often told stories of the Nakba in 1948, when the families separated after the 1967 war. In all, there was no right of return, not for his family or others caught up in this “long history of displacement, of families torn apart, of promises broken.”

In the 1970s, families were expelled from the Jabaliya refugee camp after the Israeli military marked the homes of freedom fighters with an x, giving them 48 hours to leave before their homes were destroyed.

“Such policies have long shaped Palestinian awareness,” Abu al-Saeed explained, “reinforcing a collective understanding that displacement is not incidental but deliberate.” For this reason, resistance has always been a collective act, never an individual.

After seeing so much upheaval, Abu al-Saeed refuses to move again.

Citing the connection Palestinians experience with their land, he says, “You know what will never happen again? Us leaving.”

Forcing Palestinians to constantly move elsewhere is not only a means for “Israelis” to gain more land; it is also a tactic used by settler-colonial states to divide people among themselves so that they are more easily controlled.

Beginning with the Indian Removal Act (1830), passed under the administration of Andrew Jackson, Native people on Turtle Island would also be moved time and again to make way for settlers who wanted “free” land, and natural resources, as well as the eradication of tribal people.

Like Mr. Trump, who claims humanitarian motives for his plan to develop Gaza into a coastal resort–“We’ll make sure that it’s done world-class. It’ll be wonderful for the people — Palestinians, Palestinians mostly, we’re talking about”—Jackson said that he wanted to move the tribes to an area where they would be safe from encroaching settlement.

Later, Trump would admit that Palestinians would not be given the right of return under his audacious plan, as Jackson almost two hundred years earlier knew that removing Native people from their homeland was not in their best interest.

Half of the 16,000 Cherokee men, women, and children who were rounded up by force, then marched on foot in the dead of winter, died along the way. Some refused to leave, but eventually lost their land titles, as did Indigenous people in the North (Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, 2014, p. 118).

In an interview shortly after his inauguration in 2009, President Barack Obama repeated a key facet in what Dunbar-Ortiz refers to as America’s “national myth” (p. 116), that of claiming that the US has always been (mostly) a force for good.

At this time, Obama affirmed that the US could well be an “honest broker” in the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”: “We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect,” he said. “But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power” (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 116).

“The affirmation of democracy requires the denial of colonialism,” writes Dunbar-Ortiz, “but denying it does not make it go away” (p. 116). In her assessment, she could have added “Israel” to the mix as it is another settler-colonial state that denies the violence associated with its beginnings.

Indeed, the history of the US is a record of settler colonialism, as is that of Israel, with their ideologies of white supremacy, genocide, and land theft.

Against all odds, however, Indigenous people continue to resist.

In 1956, Congress passed the Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 949) which offered housing, job training and placement for Native people willing to relocate to cities. With its goal of eliminating Indigenous identity through assimilation, “a form of genocide,” according to Dunbar-Ortiz (174), the measure resulted in Native people being cast adrift in major cities along with the already working poor.

Influenced by the emerging civil rights movement, Indigenous youth formed their own version of urban intertribal movements organized around the American Indian Centers they established during that time (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 174).

Concomitantly, urban Indians began to form pan-Indian groups such as the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Assembly of First Nations of Canada. United, multi-tribal groups, these organizations stood behind the fight for civil rights, sovereignty, and they placed political pressure on governments to recognize the devastation that had been wrought over centuries of settler-colonial oppression.

In Gaza, there are also efforts towards unification of the various factions—in Gaza, the West Bank, and the “48” (“Israel” proper, the pre-1948 borders of “Israel”)-that the occupiers have tried to keep divided.

“Parallel to its military assault on Gaza since October 7, 2023, Israel has invested heavily in dividing the Palestinian people and shattering their spirit,” journalist/activist Ramzy Baroud explains. “Against overwhelming odds, Palestinians remained united.”

This unity, Baroud continues, does not depend on working with this or that political faction. It relies on “the millions of Palestinians who have demonstrated against the war, chanted for Gaza, cried for Gaza, and developed a new political discourse around it.”

In a 2016 interview with the International Socialist Review (ISR), Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz expressed a similar sentiment. Looking at the 1917 Green Corn Rebellion in Oklahoma, her native state, she recalls how landless Native, Anglo, and African-American tenant farmers refused conscription into World War I, calling it a “rich man’s war,” and in that she finds “a sense of hope and possibility for solidarity to struggle together in mutual interest.”

Similarly, in Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal (2025), Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd traces how his people have been “brutalized, bereaved, dispossessed, exiled, starved, slaughtered, and imprisoned” throughout their “bloodied history” (p. 211).

But he highlights their struggles, too. “For every massacre and invasion, there have been and there are now men and women who pick up their weapons, makeshift and sophisticated—Molotovs, rifles, slingshots, rockets—to fight. There has always been struggle,” El-Kurd relates, and for this reason, he believes that “liberation is attainable, the future is within (our) reach” (p. 202).

Just as Dunbar-Ortiz finds inspiration in the times when Native people have resisted in solidarity with other groups, so El-Kurd believes that there is at present a “shifting global narrative,” one in which there is a “renaissance of radical movements” that will bring about an end to the Zionist “beast” (p. 2012).

As horrific as the past 14 months have been for Gaza, the Nakba will soon end, El-Kurd concludes, simply because “it must” (p. 213). The age of forced transfer will be over for Palestinians and others around the world, thanks to the resilience and courage of anti-colonial, global resistance.

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.