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At a news conference Tuesday night, President Trump unleashed the craziest remarks about the Middle East that any American president has uttered in history.
He proposed not only that the roughly 2 million Palestinians in Gaza leave their homeland—because, he said, it’s “a hellhole” and always will be—but that the United States take it over, “own it” (he dropped that phrase a few times), and develop it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Yes, he really said that.
Will the Palestinian people, who Trump wants to have evicted from the old Gaza, be allowed to come back and live in this new wonderland he envisions? Well, Trump replied, it will be “an international city,” with people from “all over the world” coming to live there. Maybe some Palestinians, too—but in the meantime, while Americans rebuild the “demolition site” of Gaza, those people will be taken in by Jordan and Egypt.
Yes, he acknowledged, the leaders of Jordan and Egypt insist they want no part of this forced displacement—they certainly don’t want the instability of bringing almost two million Palestinian refugees into their own crowded cities. But Trump said he is confident they will “open their hearts” and make warm peaceful places for them to live out their lives away from the violence that Hamas had forced on them.
Or, Trump mused, maybe the Palestinians can be resettled in “one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12 sites, or one big site”—it doesn’t matter, as long as they “live in comfort and peace. … We’ll make sure something really spectacular can be done.”
These were not careless, spontaneous remarks. Trump repeated the lines several times. He said he’d been thinking about it for a while. He said he’d proposed the idea to leaders in the region who thought it was a “wonderful idea.” (He didn’t identify the people who pulled his chain, if indeed anyone said this at all.)
He made these statements during a news conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after the two held private talks for more than an hour. A reporter asked Netanyahu what he thought about Trump’s idea. He seemed as surprised by it as everyone else, though he tried to be polite.
Israel’s goal, the prime minister noted, is to make sure Gaza never poses a threat to Israel again. “President Trump is taking this to a much higher level,” he said. “He sees a different future for that piece of land. … He has a different idea, and it’s worth paying attention to this. … It’s worthwhile really pursuing this avenue.”
Uh-huh.
Trump was asked if his vision implied that he rejects the idea of a Palestinian state. He said he doesn’t reject any idea—though, of course, the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza does mean precisely that. His assumption (which he probably believes)—that the people there will be happier living in a less violence-laden land—fails to recognize that they view Gaza as their homes. Nor did he spell out just where their new homes will be.
He said that the Saudis definitely want to normalize relations with Israel, though he ignored the fact that they have explicitly said they have no interest in doing so unless Israel accepts at least the goal of a Palestinian state and actively engages in negotiations toward such a state.
But this wasn’t merely a spectacle of a man engaged in otherworldly fantasizing. It could have real-world consequences. Israel and Hamas are in the middle of the first phase of a ceasefire, which is proceeding better than expected. If a second phase gets underway, that could be the beginning of a permanent peace. Some expected Trump would use his meeting to pressure Netanyahu to accept this peace, even if it might mean the end of his ruling coalition with far-right-wing parties.
And yet, here was Trump, putting forth a plan of expelling Palestinians—the place to which they were once expelled from what is now Israel—and turning the Gaza strip, their homeland, into the beachfront property “owned” by American real-estate developers for the global cosmopolitans.
Will Hamas take phase two of the ceasefire seriously if this is what the American president has in mind for phase three? Will Egypt and Qatar, the partners in this negotiation, continue to take the U.S. as a serious mediator? Will Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the necessary participants in any post-war reconstruction, wish to be seen as a facilitator of such a vision? The king of Jordan plans to visit Trump in the White House later this month. He must be revising his itinerary after this. Then there’s Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East emissary, who helped Biden officials nail down the ceasefire in the final days of the previous administration—what must this very practical, pragmatic, quite effective negotiator have been thinking as he sat watching this spectacle among the journalists and a handful of other officials?
Trump’s vision is a caricature of “American-Zionist imperialism” straight out of a Hamas leader’s imagination—only now, it seems, the actual American president has been imagining it all along.
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