President Trump’s plan to take over Gaza, remove its two million Palestinians and turn the coastal desert strip into some sort of Club Med proves only one thing: how short a distance it is between out-of-the-box thinking and out-of-your-mind thinking.
I can say with confidence that Trump’s proposal is the single most idiotic and dangerous Middle East “peace” initiative ever put out by an American president.
Still, I’m not sure what is more frightening: Trump’s Gaza proposal, which seems to change by the day, or the speed with which his aides and cabinet members — almost none of whom were even briefed on it in advance — nodded their approval to the idea like a collection of bobblehead dolls.
Pay attention, ladies and gentlemen: This is not just about the Middle East. This is also a microcosm of the problem we now face as a country. In his first term, President Trump was surrounded by buffers: aides, cabinet secretaries and generals who deflected and restrained his worst impulses many times.
Now Trump is surrounded only by amplifiers: aides, cabinet secretaries, senators and House members who live in fear of his wrath or of being set upon by online mobs unleashed by his enforcer, Elon Musk, should they step out of line.
This combination of Trump unleashed, Musk unrestrained and much of the government and the business establishment living in fear of being tweeted about by either man is a recipe for chaos at home and abroad. Trump is operating more like the Godfather than the president: “Nice little territory you have there (Greenland, Panama, Gaza, Jordan, Egypt) — be a shame if anything bad happened to it ….”
That may work in the movies, but in real life, if the Trump administration actually tries to force Jordan and Egypt or any other Arab state to accept the Palestinians living in Gaza — and have the Israeli Army round them up and deliver them, since Trump has said the transfer would not involve U.S. troops and not cost American taxpayers a dime — it will destabilize the demographic balance in Jordan between East Bankers and Palestinians, destabilize Egypt and destabilize Israel. As much as Israelis hate Hamas, I am confident that many soldiers, outside of those on the far right, will refuse to be part of any operation that could be compared with the rounding up and transferring of Jews from their homes during World War II.
As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper opined: “There are no magical solutions that can simply dissolve the conflict. The audacity of presenting such a solution — one that echoes terms like transfer, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes — is an insult to both Palestinians and Israelis.”
Trump will also create a backlash against American embassies and interests across the Arab Muslim world, with many Muslims taking to the streets in Europe, the Middle East and Asia to resist Palestinians being forced from their land in the name of Trump creating a beach resort in the Gaza Strip that Trump said “I would own” and Palestinians would have no right to return to.
It would be the single greatest gift Trump could give to Iran to make a comeback in the Middle East by embarrassing all the pro-American Sunni regimes. U.S. companies like McDonalds and Starbucks, which have already faced boycotts as a result of America arming Israel in the Gaza war, would get hammered even harder.
Does Trump have any point? Well, yes. He is right that Hamas is a sick, twisted organization, whose slaughter of some 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, and kidnapping of some 250 more triggered the merciless Israeli attack on Hamas, hiding underground in Gaza, without regard to Gazan civilians. Hamas used its Palestinian neighbors as human sacrifices with the goal of delegitimizing Israel across the globe. For many young people who only get their news from TikTok videos, it worked, though it could not have been a more cynical strategy.
Trump is also right that Gaza is now a hellhole as a result. And Trump is right that the Palestinian refugee problem has been kept alive way too long by cynics in the Arab world and Israel and incompetent Palestinian leaders.
Coming back from Oct. 7 to any kind of peace process will not be easy, but the notion that everything has been tried and the only option left is ethnic cleansing is wrong — but that is what the Israeli right and Hamas want everyone to believe.
One of the biggest problems with this Trump team is that its whole view of the Middle East is filtered through the lens of the Israeli far right and evangelical Christians. To the extent that the Trump people know the Arab world, it is through the Persian Gulf investment community. So they are complete and total suckers for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
For instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio keeps telling Arab leaders, “Hamas can never govern Gaza or threaten Israel again.” But Rubio seems to be clueless that it was Netanyahu who arranged for Qatar to give Hamas hundreds of millions of dollars that it diverted to its tunnel-building and arms-manufacturing program so it could rule Gaza forever.
Bibi wanted Hamas to “govern Gaza” and not the West Bank Palestinian Authority so that the Palestinians would always be divided and never able to be a partner for a two-state solution — the goal of every U.S. president since George H.W. Bush.
And the reason Netanyahu has refused to define an alternative leadership for Gaza is because he knows the only credible alternative is a reformed Palestinian Authority, but that the far right in Israel would topple him if he agreed to such a solution.
So please, spare me the idea that everything else but ethnic cleansing has been tried in good faith by both sides.
If Trump really wants to make a radical departure and take advantage of some of the fear he instills in people, it is not with this juvenile Mar-a-Gaza proposal. It would be to publicly call out all the parties and challenge each of them to actually, in good faith, do the hard stuff required to dig out of this hellhole.
It would be to tell the Palestinian Authority that if it wants to govern Gaza it needs to appoint a new, noncorrupt leader and a new, effective prime minister — someone like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad — immediately. This reformed Palestinian Authority then needs to create a technocratic cabinet to invite an Arab peacekeeping force to take over Gaza from Israel, finish the eviction of the Hamas leadership and solicit the international assistance needed to rebuild Gaza. That Arab force would also have to commit to training up a Palestinian Authority security force so that it could eventually govern Gaza on its own, with Arab help.
And it would be to tell Netanyahu that as soon as the Arab peacekeeping force is up and running, Gaza will be divided into Area A and Area B. The Palestinian Authority and the Arab peacekeeping force will govern Area A — all the population centers — and the Israeli Army can stay on the whole perimeter — Area B — for several years. After that, Palestinians will hold elections in the West Bank and Gaza and negotiate a two-state solution with Israel for both territories. Once that process is underway, Saudi Arabia would normalize relations with Israel and the U.S.-Saudi security treaty could go ahead.
Trump can learn this early or he can learn this late: America’s interests and Netanyahu’s interests are not aligned. Bibi’s interest is to use any means to stay in power, no matter if it means delaying hostage releases, fighting a forever war or abandoning the prospect of a historic normalization of relations between the Jewish state and Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu even said the other day that “the Saudis can create a Palestinian state in Saudi Arabia; they have a lot of land over there,” triggering a harsh Saudi response.
Will Trump ever wake up and realize how much Netanyahu and the Jewish supremacists in Israel see him as their chump?
Virtually the entire security establishment in Israel has been up in arms over the fact that Netanyahu has refused to ever identify a plan to translate Israel’s military victory in Gaza to a sustainable political one. So here is what Bibi told the Knesset this week: “Trump’s vision is new, creative, revolutionary and he is determined to implement it. You talked about ‘the day after’ [plan for Gaza] — so you got your ‘day after’! Only it doesn’t match the Oslo vision. Because we will not repeat this mistake again.” Bibi is just using Trump to buy more time on a road to nowhere.
If Bibi gets where he is going, every young Jew today will learn what it is to grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.
President Trump, I repeat: There is a real case for you to make for fresh thinking about this problem. But your plan for Trump Gaza is not fresh thinking. It is fresh riffing. It is loopy concepts of a peace plan tossed out without vetting by aides or allies, the details of which you change every day, forcing your bobblehead aides to nod vigorously — without any regard for long-term U.S. interests or their own credibility. It is a plan that will love Israel to death, revive Iran to life and destabilize every American friend.
