Donald Trump first ran for office in 2016 denouncing the idea of American involvement in nation-building and promising to extract the US from the Middle East. Only months ago, he pledged to end overseas military adventures.
Now the US president says he intends to “take over” Gaza and forcibly displace abroad its entire two million population to rebuild what he calls “the site” as a “Riviera of the Middle East”, a massive beach-front development. It would be an outrageous violation of binding international laws forbidding the annexation of territory and of forcible displacement of populations. Politically, it is an abandonment of the idea of a Palestinian state, seen internationally as the only viable path to lasting peace between Israel and Palestinians.
It is one of the most dramatic U-turns in US policy in history, one that has enraged potential regional and international allies. It will jeopardise talks underway on the renewal of the fragile ceasefire and hostage release programme, while emboldening the far-right in the Israeli cabinet who favour the “clearing out” of Gaza’s population for Israeli settlers to move in.
Some of his supporters describe the Trump demarche as a dramatic negotiating ploy, designed to reshape the debate, with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu careful not to go as far as declaring outright support, praising his “willingness to think outside the box”.
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But if so, the plans appear to have been conjured up without listening to any advice from experts on the region or diplomats, or without any consideration of the likely implications – the staggering cost, the deployment of thousands of US troops, the hostility of “recipient” countries like Egypt and Jordan, and the refusal of Saudi Arabia to contemplate any approach incompatible with Palestinian statehood. Yet, Trump seems to regard an Israeli-Saudi peace deal as the big prize.
And what of the wishes of the Palestinian people who view these plans as “ethnic cleansing”, nothing less than a second Naqba, the mass displacement of Palestinians from Israel in 1948 which defined and traumatised their community ever since? Trump insists he is not planning a temporary takeover of Gaza, but “a long-term ownership position”, and said he had no intention of turning Gaza back over to the Palestinians, but would make it a place “not for a specific group of people but for everybody”.
Trump’s Gaza plan is not a step towards peace, but a recipe for enduring bitterness and strife across the Middle East. It would represent for the US a potentially disastrous and prohibitively costly reinsertion into the cauldron of the region’s conflict. Perhaps Trump is not really serious. Who knows? But whether he is or not, it is an extraordinarily ill-judged intervention which will have unpredictable consequences.
