The forced transfer of most of the territory’s 2.2 million population which he seems to envisage is almost certainly a war crime. Egypt and Jordan, the countries most likely to bear the brunt of such expulsions, remain seriously resistant. As the Saudis have already indicated, it’s hard to imagine the rich Gulf states digging deep to pay for a historically massive reconstruction when what Trump is planning appears to be the very opposite of the two-state solution they say they want.
That said, it would be dangerous to be too sanguine. There are darker omens of Trump’s potential success in using his office to legitimise mass population transfer. The sight of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who since 7 October 2023 repeatedly denied contemplating such an expulsion, sitting smiling beside his new master in Washington as he talked of emptying Gaza of its inhabitants is one thing. But the reaction of several prominent Jewish leaders of the opposition parties in Israel is quite another.
But suppose for the purpose of argument that this is just Trump theatrics. Or really bending over backwards, that he is just trying to keep the extreme racist supremacists in Israel’s ruling coalition, Itamar Ben Gvir (no longer in the government but pledged not to vote against it) and Bezalel Smotrich, happy for long enough to get all the stages of the current hostage and prisoner release deal through without a political earthquake. After all, their dream has long been a virtually Palestinian-free Gaza in which they can restore the Jewish settlements Ariel Sharon abandoned in 2005. The language used by Trump in his stream of consciousness on Tuesday is still wholly suggestive of what kind of President he is.
It’s not just Trump’s ignorance of its history or that he somehow imagines transforming an ancient four millennia old civilisation into a kind of Las Vegas by the sea; it’s also his conviction that Palestinians have nothing themselves to contribute to the mammoth task of rebuilding their own homeland.
Trump will soon discover that there is a country he cannot bully
Read MoreI can remember eight years ago sitting with Basil Eleiwa, the proprietor of a well-run but short lived high-rise restaurant named Level-Up, as he dreamt aloud of how Gaza’s highly professional hospitality industry, given the chance and and end to siege, could turn Gaza’s fine coast into the tourist destination Trump now thinks he alone can achieve.
It is hard to see, even if some of his billionaire developer friends and relatives like Jared Kushner are salivating at the prospect of wholesale redevelopment of a partly flattened Gaza, how the huge costs of Trump’s “vision” of ownership, perhaps enforced by US troops, of the Strip can be squared with putting America first, let alone making it “great again.”
But either way his Western allies, including in Europe, need to join with the Arab world in ensuring that this is a line he – and Israel – will not cross.
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