Trump’s plan for Gaza is a nonstarter, but it reflects a stark reality |
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| President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak at a news conference in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
| Less than a day after the president dropped a bombshell, White House aides were trying to walk it back. President Donald Trump’s unexpected proposal for U.S. “ownership” of the Gaza Strip — and the removal of the war-ravaged territory’s entire Palestinian population — had gone down like a lead balloon among the United States’ European and Arab partners as they woke up to the news Wednesday. But his allies in Washington, some blindsided by Trump’s pitch, tried to make sense of it to reporters. Trump had said the United States could take control of Gaza, clear its tens of millions of tons of debris and make the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Its Palestinian inhabitants, meanwhile, would have to be absorbed into lands elsewhere in the Middle East. But how would they accept such an arrangement? Under what authority would it be carried out? And who would pay for it? Trump’s staffers tried to argue that the president was offering mere concepts of a plan rather than a real one. “It’s been very made very clear to the president, that the United States needs to be involved in this rebuilding effort, to ensure stability in the region for all people,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday. “But that does not mean boots on the ground in Gaza. It does not mean American taxpayers will be funding this effort. It means Donald Trump, who is the best dealmaker on the planet, is going to strike a deal with our partners in a region.”
Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz argued that Trump was putting “some very bold, fresh, new ideas out on the table” to compel governments in the Middle East to “come with their own solutions.” (Never mind long-standing frustration among Arab officials that Israel has blocked the advance of any process toward a viable Palestinian state — which, after it’s established, would lead to many Arab governments normalizing ties with Israel.)
The next day, though, Trump seemed to double down on his Gaza plan. “The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting,” he posted on his Truth Social account, before adding: “The U.S., working with great development teams from all over the World, would slowly and carefully begin the construction of what would become one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth. No soldiers by the U.S. would be needed! Stability for the region would reign!!!” And what of Gaza’s population? Trump said they would be “resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region” where they would “happy, safe, and free.” There was no reference to their return. Furthermore, Trump described Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) as a “Palestinian” — a strange attempt at insult that he had also used on the campaign trail. The devastation of Gaza, the president and his allies seemed to argue, possibly invalidated Palestinian claims to the land, which Trump labeled a “demolition site.” Israeli officials welcomed Trump’s intervention. Defense minister Israel Katz instructed the military to prepare for the “voluntary” migration of the territory’s population. Politicians on Israel’s far right cheered Trump’s proposal as the first move in the final act to bury any hope for a future Palestinian state. “The United States has sided squarely not merely with Israel, but specifically with the most extreme elements in Israeli politics,” Amnon Aran, professor of Middle East politics at City St. George’s, University of London, told me. “In addition, without robust evidence to the contrary, the term ‘resettlement’ should be perceived as a euphemism for forcefully uprooting millions of Palestinians, which may cause serious political and security regional instability.” Aran added that the proposal emerges out of a set of stark realities — “that Gaza is currently uninhabitable” and that attempts to broker a meaningful peace between Israelis and Palestinians, millions of whom live under occupation with their civil rights curtailed, have been marked by “repeated failures.” Enter Trump with his “fresh” ideas for the region. The proposal to takeover Gaza may have come from his son-in-law, the real estate developer (and former Middle East envoy in Trump’s first term) Jared Kushner. Last year, Kushner floated the idea of converting the coastal Gaza Strip into a high-end luxury development, and relocating its Palestinian population to newly-constructed communities elsewhere in the desert. “I would try to move people in there,” he said during an event hosted at Harvard University. “I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.” Kushner was right that it’d be unpopular. Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere have emphatically rejected Trump’s pitch as a prelude to their dispossession. Arab governments, including Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, have all issued their separate warnings against plans that could jeopardize a Palestinian state or encourage further Israeli settlement of Palestine lands. The U.N. Secretary General António Guterres spoke out against “any form of ethnic cleansing” — what Trump’s plans essentially would propel, and what some Israeli politicians explicitly want. Western governments echoed Guterres’s fears. “Expelling the Palestinian civilian population from Gaza would not only be unacceptable and contrary to international law,” German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock wrote in a statement Wednesday, without mentioning Trump by name. “It would also lead to new suffering and new hatred.” The French foreign ministry concurred in its own statement: “Gaza’s future must lie not in the prospect of control by a third State but in the framework of a future Palestinian State.” Netanyahu spent months delaying any discussion of a “day after” scenario in Gaza that would force Israel to reckon with Palestinian political aspirations. Trump’s road map offers yet another path to circumvent them. Rather than listen to the U.S.'s Arab interlocutors — who see Gaza’s reconstruction as part of a broader project to rehabilitate the broken Palestinian national movement and revive the moribund peace process with Israel — Trump is interested in further kicking the can down the road. And he and Kushner seem more animated by the success of a skyscraper-strewn city like Dubai and intrigued by Saudi Arabia’s own megaprojects than the actual work of Israel-Palestinian reconciliation. “The very idea that Gaza can be disposed of in the manner of a real estate deal for redevelopment of derelict wasteland may sit well with a property tycoon like President Trump. Yet it is not clear who would be able to grant to the U.S. the title to the territory,” Marc Weller, a professor of international constitutional studies at Britain’s University of Cambridge, told my colleagues via email. “This is not a lump of naked territory devoid of human habitation.” “This guy says a lot of crazy things, but we never expected this,” Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based political professor and analyst, told my colleagues. “If this was bargaining, it wasn’t intelligent bargaining. This really just shocked everybody. This is not the way to get stability in the region.” | ||||||||||||||||