The US president’s imagined entitlement to different folks’s land may be very acquainted to Africans.
The declaration by United States President Donald Trump that he deliberate to expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and switch it into an American-controlled “Riviera of the Center East” has rightly drawn condemnation from throughout the globe, together with, paradoxically, from Western nations that backed Israel’s genocidal bombardment that devastated the territory. Many level out that ethnic cleaning violates worldwide regulation and that the Geneva Conventions explicitly forbid the forcible displacement of civilian populations, for any motive.
That is all true however as an African, I used to be drawn to a barely totally different side of Trump’s declaration: his imagined entitlement to different folks’s land. The claims he’s making to having the correct to take Gaza shouldn’t be remoted from the claims he has made on Greenland and Panamanian territory. All of them spring from the identical root, one which has been nurtured by half a millennium of European colonial aggrandisement.
White fantasies of rights to different peoples’ lands might be traced way back to the 1479 Treaty of Alcacovas, which established the precept that an space exterior of Europe could possibly be claimed by a European nation, and was adopted inside 50 years by the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Treaty of Saragossa with which the Portuguese and the Spanish presupposed to divide the globe between themselves. There’s a clear line from that to the notorious Berlin West Africa Convention 400 years later, attended by the US and all main European powers which established the authorized declare by Europeans that each one of Africa could possibly be occupied by whoever might take it.
It was at Berlin, that the doctrine of “efficient occupation” – basically requiring occupying powers to show that they might implement their rule and defend free commerce as a way to legitimise their claims – was articulated. The precedent of utilizing the safety and improvement of capitalism to justify colonial occupation is in the present day mirrored in Trump’s assertion that he’ll rebuild and internationalise Gaza, creating jobs and prosperity for “everybody”. In essence, Trump is unwittingly trying to base his colonial declare on to Gaza on the doctrine: that he can impose American rule, on this case via expulsion of the natives, and that he’ll allow commerce to flourish.
To be honest, Trump is barely constructing on concepts which have been circulating for months, largely emanating from Israel, that search to justify continued occupation below the rubric of turning Gaza right into a Dubai or Singapore. In Could final 12 months, the workplace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu purportedly unveiled simply such a plan that might retain Israeli management of the territory and justify it via the implementation of a “Marshall Plan” that might flip it into “a major industrial port on the Mediterranean” and make it a part of “a large free commerce zone”.
As Africans can attest, concepts that sacrifice native sovereignty and rights on the altar of worldwide free commerce regimes not often work out effectively for the natives. The constructions meant to allow free commerce laid out by the Berlin Convention 140 years in the past gave start to the horror that was the Congo Free State – a veritable hell that in 23 years claimed the lives of as much as 13 million Congolese. The convention additionally supercharged and militarised what grew to become referred to as the Scramble for Africa, which was accompanied by brutal wars of conquest, illness and campaigns of extermination. Greater than a century later, Africans are nonetheless residing with the impression.
Regardless of this, all over the world, recollections of the Berlin Convention and the devastation it wrought have light. In 2017, addressing the Humanitarian Congress Berlin, then ICRC Operations Coordinator, Mamadou Sow, started his remarks by noting “I’m from Africa. And it’s very fascinating to be in Berlin for a Congress”. The joke fell flat. He would later touch upon X that it was the day he “realised that almost all of educated Europeans know little about their colonial historical past”. Individuals in the present day are liable in charge Africans themselves for its penalties, simply as Palestinians are routinely blamed for the results of the Israeli occupation and blockade. How usually are we handled to the false chorus that Israel left the Gaza Strip in 2005, hoping the newly impartial nation would change into the Singapore of the Center East however that Hamas turned it right into a base of terror?
However the lesson is evident. The recolonisation of Gaza, whether or not by Israel, the US or any coalition of states, is neither viable nor ethical. There is no such thing as a various to native Palestinian sovereignty. It’s incumbent on African nations to attract on the historical past of Berlin and say with one voice: By no means Once more!
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.