At first sight, the wave of international reaction, ranging from bewilderment to horror and outrage at Donald Trump’s “vision” for Gaza, suggests it won’t happen. Trump is the most performative of politicians and it’s hard not to believe that this is in any way a worked through plan.
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.
The contradiction, finally, between Trump’s declared expectation that Israel’s neighbours with a “humanitarian heart” will be only too eager to provide a home for stricken Gazans, and the savagery of his own plans to halt immigration at home, seems just too stark to be sustainable.
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.
Centrist Israeli politicians are not of course alone in the world in wanting to ingratiate themselves to the new President. But it was startling to see Benny Gantz, chairman of the opposition National Unity party, describing the Trump plan as proof of the “deep alliance” between the US and Israel, emerging later from a party meeting saying Israel “has only something to gain” from the Trump proposal. And Yair Lapid, the official opposition leader, said the plan needed to be “studied and understood”. Good luck with that.
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.
The word “colonialist” is too often used (and misused) in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it’s hard to think of a better term to describe Trump’s blithe belief that the US “owning” Gaza will somehow magic up peace and stability in the Middle East.
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 MoreFor Trump, the Gaza Strip is merely “a symbol of death and destruction… It’s been an unlucky place for a long time.” Just as there is no mention of the 15-month Israeli onslaught which has reduced Gaza to a “demolition site”, so no mention of the 17-year Israeli and Egyptian blockade which made this once vibrant – and in many ways self sufficient – territory an economic basket case long before this war.
I 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.
Of course an equally long period of Hamas rule culminating in the gruesome atrocities of 7 October form part – a big part – of Gaza’s “bad luck”. But would Hamas have risen in power as it did if the hopes of a lasting peace in two states that the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s vision – so different from Trump’s and Netanyahu’s – generated back in 1993 had been realised?
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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