President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speak during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
TEL AVIV, Israel — President Trump floated two bombshell ideas Tuesday about Gaza that has Palestinians, Israelis and the wider Middle East scrambling.
The first: that the U.S. would take over the territory. “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” Trump said in a White House press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “We’ll own it … We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal … the Riviera of the Middle East.”
The second: that Gaza’s entire population would relocate to other countries. “ We should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this, and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and, frankly, bad luck,” he said.
Trump presented no specifics about how the U.S. would execute his proposals. They have met fierce resistance from Arab and Palestinian leaders, who have long hoped Gaza and the West Bank would form the basis for a future Palestinian state alongside Israel.
Hamas has also rejected the idea, as it prepares this week to negotiate with Israel on the next phase of their tenuous ceasefire agreement in Gaza. The two sides have been exchanging hostages and prisoners after a 15-month war that has traumatized both societies and left much of Gaza a wasteland, and Trump’s statements add more uncertainty to the future of Gaza and the ceasefire.
Here’s how the region is making sense of Trump’s words:
Israeli observers are taking Trump’s words with a “grain of salt”
Former Israeli officials cast doubt on the viability of a U.S. takeover of Gaza and removal of its population.
“On the day that I will see American soldiers coming in great numbers to Gaza, I will then make up my mind how serious it is,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told NPR. “Every party involved except for Israel is completely against it.”
“It is utterly unrealistic, and it reflects a total lack of understanding of the historical process of where these Palestinians come from, what is their collective identity,” former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told NPR. “ It’s somebody that came from the outer space and tries to impose a solution which is, you know, detached from a context.”
Israeli observers have suggested Trump could be using a negotiating tactic known in Israel as “putting in a goat” — laying down a demand for the purpose of removing it later and appearing to have granted a concession.
“This man is an actor in a global theater, and this has been his tactics, playing big, drawing the world’s attention to what he says, getting his rivals out of balance, and eventually something will happen that goes his way,” Ben-Ami said. “Maybe this is a tactical sort of move that tries to say a big thing in order to eventually get a more modest solution.”
A similar scenario played out in Trump’s first term: Netanyahu declared Israel would annex parts of the West Bank under Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, then tabled annexation in exchange for a Trump-brokered deal for diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.
The negotiations Trump oversees now involve the future of Hamas rule in Gaza, and a deal for Saudi Arabia to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
“Trump must be taken with a grain of salt,” Israeli journalist Amir Ettinger wrote Wednesday in the right-leaning Israel Hayom newspaper. “Senior figures in Israel do not rule out that a similar scenario could occur regarding the Gaza migration issue. The plan might be that Gaza is eventually taken off the table in exchange for the return of the hostages, the expulsion of Hamas leaders and many of its operatives, and normalization with Saudi Arabia without demands in exchange for promises regarding a Palestinian state.”
Whether or not it is a viable vision, the once-fringe Israeli idea of “transfer” — expelling or encouraging the emigration of Palestinians to other countries so Israel can take over their land — has quickly moved further into the Israeli mainstream with Trump’s comments in recent weeks about relocating Gazans.
