gotchanewsdaily.com 
CNN
—
Like most of President Donald Trump’s meetings these days, Tuesday’s talks with Jordan’s King Abdullah II will revolve around making a deal — at least in the president’s mind.
A week after proposing a brazen new plan to seize control of the Gaza Strip and redevelop it into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” Trump appears intent on negotiating his farfetched plan into reality.
“I’m talking about starting to build,” Trump said over the weekend, “and I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt.”
In this case, the deal he’s envisioning would apparently involve Jordan and Egypt accepting millions of new Palestinian refugees — over their consistent objections — so Trump can clear the rubble from the demolished Gaza Strip, construct new glass towers with Mediterranean views and invite “the world’s people” to move in.
As leverage, Trump is wielding the billions of dollars in American assistance provided to Jordan and Egypt every year, without which those countries could face dire financial problems.
“Yeah, maybe, sure why not?” Trump responded in the Oval Office on Monday evening when asked if he would hold back American aid to Jordan and Egypt. “If they don’t, I would conceivably withhold aid, yes.”
Yet Cairo and Amman are not without leverage of their own: Both closely align their security policies with Washington, and both have played a role in protecting Israel in the past — including last year, when Jordan helped shoot down a barrage of Iranian missiles fired toward Israel. Even some US officials worry forcing Egypt and Jordan to accept new Palestinian refugees, if that’s even possible, could seriously destabilize two reliable security partners.
“I do think he’ll take, and I think other countries will take also,” Trump said a day ahead of his meeting with Abdullah. “They have good hearts.”
The question for Abdullah, along with Egyptian officials visiting Washington this week, is whether Trump’s maximalist proposal for the troubled enclave is serious, or whether it is merely a starting point for some alternative plan to bring peace and stability to the area.
Some Trump officials have suggested the latter, even if they are careful to insist the president isn’t bluffing when discussing his audacious idea.
“Come to the table with your plan if you don’t like his plan,” Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz said during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, suggesting the White House has received “all kinds of outreach” since Trump’s comments.
At its root, US officials said, Trump’s suggestion was intended in part to spur action on an issue he has viewed as moribund, with no other nations offering reasonable solutions for how to rebuild an area that has been obliterated by Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.
Still, it is debatable whether, in Trump’s mind, there exists a distinction between serious proposal and negotiating tactic. Nothing he has said about the Gaza plan in the week since he first uttered it aloud, at a news conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, suggests it is anything but an earnest strategy, even if statements by some of his top officials suggested otherwise.
In fact, in the days before Abdullah’s arrival, Trump did nothing to soften what has for many in the region been the most troubling aspect of his proposal: that Palestinians who leave Gaza under his plan would not be permitted to return.
“No, they wouldn’t,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News when asked whether the Palestinians would have a right to return to Gaza. “Because they will have much better housing. Much better – in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them.”
Trump leaning on Jordan and Egypt
So far, Trump seems set on finding that “permanent place” in Jordan and Egypt, even though leaders in both those countries swiftly rejected the plan last week.
Egypt, which is concerned about an influx of Palestinians destabilizing its Sinai region, said on Sunday that it will convene an “emergency” Arab League summit on February 28 in Cairo to discuss “new and dangerous developments” in the Palestinian issue.
In Jordan, where a large proportion of the population is of Palestinian descent, the issue holds particular resonance. The country absorbed successive waves of Palestinian refugees, starting in 1948 during the war that led to Israel’s creation.
In 1970, armed Palestinian factions tried to seize control of the country from King Abdullah’s father Hussein, a brief but violent conflict known as “Black September.” Memories of the incident haven’t faded more than 50 years later, not least from the country’s current king, as the country grapples with a delicate demographic balance between its Palestinian and native Jordanian populations.
At a moment when popular dissatisfaction with the king is growing, the question of how to proceed could become an existential one, both for Abdullah and for his US-focused geopolitics.
A destabilized Jordan would prove deeply problematic both for the United States and Israel. Already, some opposition figures in Jordan have called for the kingdom to turn its attention away from the US and toward China, Russia or wealthy Arab states.
All that complicates Trump’s plan to move more than a million Palestinian refugees there. Yet so far, he hasn’t acknowledged those difficulties, confident instead that he will be able to negotiate some workable solution.
“I have a feeling that despite them saying no, I have a feeling that the king in Jordan and that the general — president — but that the general in Egypt will open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done,” Trump said last week, referring in the latter instance to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former military officer.
Tuesday’s meeting will not be the first conversation between Trump and Abdullah about accepting more Palestinian refugees.
“I said to him, ‘I’d love for you to take on more because I’m looking at the whole Gaza Strip right now, and it’s a mess,’” Trump told reporters after he spoke by phone to the Jordanian leader late last month.
At the time, Trump had not revealed publicly his new plan to take “long-term ownership” of the strip. Trump officials did not circulate his plan with Jordanian or Egyptian officials before the president announced it from the East Room.
And while Trump had been discussing his idea with aides for several days, it was not written down before it appeared in his prepared remarks alongside Netanyahu last Tuesday.
An Arab government official who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the matter told CNN that it’s still unclear if the US has fully worked through the details of Trump’s plan. The official said that Arab officials will discuss the matter with the Trump administration and propose ideas for Gaza’s future that would not involve expelling its Palestinian residents.
How that can be reconciled with Trump’s own idea isn’t clear.
