Much of the international condemnation of President 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, the Nazi leader of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938, 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 Germany lost the Second World War 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 westward 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 Paris fell to the Allies in August 1944, the government was swept aside. Sovereignty was instead given to the Free French, who returned with the Allies. The government of France under Marshal Petain—empowered by the French parliament and widely seen as legitimate, including by the U.S.—was thus overthrown and replaced by the chosen government of the incoming, victorious 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 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.
North Korea may have lost as much as 20 percent of its population in that war. 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 about 2 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 stark contrast, Adolf Hitler killed over 50 percent of all of Europe’s Jews in what was a genuine genocide.
When the Argentine military dictatorship suddenly invaded the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic in April 1982, and were utterly defeated 10 weeks later by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s task force, the entire junta in Buenos Aires lost 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 own people.
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