gotchanewsdaily.com 
CNN
—
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t keep the smirk off his face.
And no wonder.
Netanyahu looked on in the White House on Tuesday as President Donald Trump delivered the most stunning US intervention in the long history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The president repeatedly doubled down on his suggestion that nearly 2 million Palestinians should be relocated from battle-leveled Gaza to new homes elsewhere so that the US could send troops to the Strip, take ownership and build the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
“You build really good quality housing, like a beautiful town, like some place where they can live and not die, because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” Trump told reporters.
In a few words, Trump conjured up a mind-boggling geopolitical transformation of the Middle East and a political lifeline for Netanyahu – showing why the prime minister, despite their past tensions, was rooting for his host’s return to power in the 2024 election.
Netanyahu can now bill himself to right-wing factions in his coalition, which incessantly threaten his grip on power, as the unique and vital conduit to Trump. The American president’s views now parallel Israeli hardliners’ desire to see Palestinians ousted from part of what they view as the sacred land of Israel.
Israel’s far-right former national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who quit Netanyahu’s war cabinet earlier this year to protest the Gaza ceasefire deal, confirmed the synergy between Trump’s thinking and extreme conservatives in Israel.
“Donald, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he wrote in a post on X.
A stunning moment
Trump’s comments – delivered throughout the day, first at an executive action signing ceremony, and later alongside Netanyahu in the Oval Office and at a joint news conference – were a landmark moment in the history of US peacemaking in the Middle East.
To see an American president endorse what would be the forcible expulsion of Palestinians from their home, in an exodus that would subvert decades of US policy, international law and basic humanity, was breathtaking.
Trump followed up with the most imperialist reflex yet of a second term in which he’s already threatened to annex the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada. He envisaged a real estate deal whereby he’d assume responsibility for Gaza and mastermind a job-creating urban regeneration project. He called it an American “ownership position.” A better phrase would be colonialism for the 21st century.
“The US will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too,” Trump said. “We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site, and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area, do a real job, do something different.”
The idea resembles a scheme proposed by Trump’s investor son-in-law Jared Kushner last year to move the Palestinians out of Gaza and to “clean it up” to develop the territory’s “very valuable” Mediterranean waterfront.
But it appears absurd for multiple reasons.
If the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy led such a forced relocation, he’d mirror crimes of past tyrants and create an excuse for every autocrat to launch mass ethnic cleansing programs against vulnerable minorities.
His brainwave, however, is on brand for a second Trump term that has seen the president utterly unconstrained by the law, the Constitution or anyone around him stopping him from doing exactly as he wants.
And in all of Trump’s recent public pronouncements on Gaza, there’s an important missing element — any sense that the Palestinian people would have a choice in their own destiny. Their connection with the desecrated enclave was recently underscored by the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to Northern Gaza. Many made makeshift shelters in the ruins of their homes destroyed in Israeli’s onslaught against Hamas after the October 7, 2023, terror attacks in Israel.
The president’s obliviousness to the aspirations of Palestinians and his assumption that they’d prefer a modern housing development elsewhere showed a stunning naivety about the causes of the conflict. But it was reflected in an interaction in the Oval Office when he asked, “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.” A reporter replied: “But it’s their home, sir. Why would they leave?”
An Arab official told CNN’s Alex Marquardt that Trump’s remarks could jeopardize the fragile ceasefire and hostage release deal in Gaza. “It is essential to recognize the profound implications such proposals have on the lives and dignity of the Palestinian people, as well as the broader Middle East,” the diplomat said.
A regional no-go
There are also practical reasons why this idea is a fantasy. It is vehemently opposed by the Arab states whose money and land would be needed to make it work. Jordan, which is already home to large numbers of Palestinian refugees, fears the Hashemite Kingdom would be fatally destabilized by a new influx. Egypt’s military fears a massive influx of Palestinians that could include Hamas sympathizers of the Sunni Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
Speaking of the two Israeli neighbors, Aaron David Miller, a former US Middle East peace negotiator, said on CNN: “It’s not a real estate deal for them, it’s not even a humanitarian issue for them. It’s an existential issue.”
The idea of forcibly relocating the Palestinians would also be politically impossible for Saudi Arabia, the key piece in Trump’s plan to create an anti-Iran crescent capped by a diplomatic normalization with Israel. The kingdom has made an independent Palestinian state a condition of such a deal.
The total evacuation of Gaza would deal a serious blow to statehood dreams and create a precedent that could also raise doubt about the Palestinian presence in the West Bank – which is considered by the United Nations, like Gaza, as Israeli-occupied territory.
The idea of large numbers of Palestinians agreeing to quit Gaza for a suburban idyll elsewhere also relies on a superficial understanding of a conflict that left them dispossessed. Ever since the founding of Israel in 1948, the hopes of a return for thousands of Palestinians living in poverty in refugee camps, in places like Beirut and Jordan, have proven futile. Thus, Gazans would never leave based on promises that one day they might get back.
The idea that Trump would even broach such a scheme is an indication of how the post-October 7 era has shaken up the strategic picture in the Middle East. But it also displays remarkable hubris since recent attempts by the United States to reshape the geopolitics of the Middle East — from Iraq to Libya — ended disastrously. And across a wider historic span, efforts by European colonial powers like Britain and France to draw borders and impose grand schemes on the Middle East bequeathed generations of bitter conflicts that still rage.
Is Trump for real?
Trump’s comments will unleash yet another round of speculation about whether he’s serious about an outlandish plan, or whether he’s using it to distract from some other even more nefarious scheme — perhaps the broadening effort by his friend Elon Musk to destroy the US government from inside.
But it’s also characteristic of an outsider president who lives to shake things up and who is beloved by his voters for rejecting the orthodoxy of elites and the conventional approaches that have failed.
Establishment and media critics often bristle at his out-of-the-box ideas because they don’t fit their frame of reference. And if only Gaza could somehow be lifted clear of the generations of bloody history, symbolism, loss and wars that have raged over the enclave.
That, of course, is impossible.
So is Trump for real — or is this just another pipe dream of a president who often seems divorced from reality?
Trump’s plan was greeted with huge skepticism by Republican senators. And Democratic Sen. Chris Coons put his face in his hand and rubbed his temples. “I’m speechless. That’s insane,” the man from Delaware said.
In his own way, Trump does seem sincere about improving the lives of Gazans, even if his preferred remedy insults their identity. He said: “The people that have been absolutely destroyed that live there now can live in peace, in a much better situation, because they’re living in hell, and those people will now be able to live in peace. We’ll make sure that it’s done world class.”
He told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the news conference that Palestinians had tried to live in Gaza “for decades and decades and decades. It’s not going to work. It didn’t work. It will never work. And you have to learn from history.” (Most of those decades were spent either under Israeli occupation or blockade, most recently with Gaza run by Hamas, a terror group that disputes Israel’s right to exist).
Trump’s words often need several pinches of salt.
Like a former New York real estate shark, he adopts an outlandish initial position to put interlocutors off balance or as an opening bid that raises the value of a compromise position. He’s always in search of a deal — and sees conflicts like the ones in the Middle East and Ukraine through a developer’s lens.
Beth Sanner, a former senior intelligence official who conducted Trump’s daily intelligence briefing during his first term, said Tuesday’s staggering developments were a reminder that Trump “doesn’t think like a typical foreign policy establishment person.”
That may not be all bad, given the questionable outcomes of US foreign policy in recent times. But Trump is also courting risk. His comments on Tuesday will cause shockwaves throughout the Middle East and make it much harder for Arab governments to work with him to expand the Abraham Accords of his first term.
“It runs counter to the Muslim Street in the region,” Sanner said. “That’s sometimes different to what leaders think. But the leaders in the region are afraid of the Muslim Street.”
The possibility that Trump would send troops to the region also conflicts with the political DNA of a president who partly owes his rise to a political base wearied by sending its sons and daughters to war in the post-9/11 era.
But while his proposal, which would perhaps be the world’s largest ever real estate development deal, is unlikely to ever happen, it’s quintessential Trump.
“You say things others refuse to say,” Netanyahu said. “And after the jaws drop, people scratch their heads and they say, ‘You know, he’s right.’”
The first sentence is undoubtably true. The second one, not so much.
